Warren Tries to Make Medicare for All as Painless as Possible

At last month's Democratic presidential primary debate, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren took some heat for refusing to say whether taxes on the middle class would go up under her Medicare for All single-payer health-insurance plan. Instead, she simply repeated the promise that total health-care costs for the middle class would go down. The answer seemed squishy, especially because Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders — who wrote the original “M4A” plan — seemed to provide the true answer, stating explicitly that middle-class taxes would go up but premiums and deductibles would be eliminated.

Sanders’ answer was a good one. The whole idea of a national health-insurance system is to take a service that used to be provided by the private sector and have the government provide it instead. Advocates of a national health-insurance system argue — with considerable justification — that the government would be able to do the job more cheaply, without sacrificing quality. After all, Medicare already does a better job of restraining costs than the private sector: