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Elizabeth Warren has been on the road to Medicare for all for months and yet, unlike some of her competitors for the Democratic presidency of 2020, she has not really stumbled yet. Instead, she seems to have found her balance.
Last week, the Massachusetts senator presented his plan, as it stands, on health care. She has adopted Medicare-to-all as a single payer (no surprise, since she is co-sponsor of Bernie Sanders' bill), calling it "the best way to give every citizen of this country the guarantee of health care." High quality".
But what stood out for a campaign based on her love of plans and details was that her health care program did not have much detail on how she would implement Medicare for all. She did not talk about an implementation schedule (like Kamala Harris) nor explained how to pay (as Sanders tried to do). She supports Medicare for all because she thinks it's the best way to give health care to all Americans. let's talk about the details later.
"In some ways, Senator Warren does not have her own detailed health plan," said Larry Levitt, executive vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a health care research group.
Warren is a Rorschach test for Democrats on health care. Diehard Sanders supporters have long accused him of not having published his own single-payer health plan and to have ducked some of the most difficult questions about setting up such a system. Release his plan last week did not seem to do much at to calm their concerns.
In contrast, left-center leftists were encouraged by his perceived flexibility in the next steps of health reform – Warren had already stated that there were many paths to universal coverage – but they are now dismayed by his unqualified praise for Medicare. for all and the plan of Sanders in particular. Jonathan Chait of New York magazine lamented last week that Warren was "handcuffed to the Sanders plan".
There may be a method to madness. Warren managed to break the difference by adopting the progressive "I'm with Bernie", as she said in a debate – but she did not focus on health care the same way Sanders. She said unequivocally that her anti-corruption plan would be her top priority as president, and she took her time to put in place even a semblance of a health care plan. In doing so, she avoided some of the difficult issues that plagued Kamala Harris throughout her campaign.
One could say that it is a copy, as could most ideologically engaged left. One could say that it is wrong, as the center-left would do.
But Warren found a comfortable space between two poles. The health care debate for the moment is really between Sanders, on the left, and Biden, in the middle. Most of the debate last week was between these two people. Sanders himself does not seem particularly interested in questioning Warren Insurance's commitment to all causes. He did not pursue it last week, now that they finally shared the stage of the debate, focusing instead on Biden and the more progressive proposals of other Democrats.
Warren presented radical proposals for health care, such as a project to have the federal government manufacture (or contract with a private entity for manufacturing) generic drugs in the event of a sharp rise in price. But she seems determined to stay on top of the Medicare-for-all melee that has dominated much of the Democratic primary campaign so far.
And Warren proved that he was able to ward off the lines of debate moderators and moderates. Biden reformed her about Medicare-to-all finance to open the debate last week, but Warren found a way to justify his position without engaging in a prolonged confrontation with Biden.
So let's be clear about health care. And let's start with [the] vice president did. We all have a huge debt to President Obama, who has fundamentally transformed health care in America and committed that country to providing health care for all people. And now the question is: how can we improve the situation? And I think the best way to do that is to make sure that everyone is covered by health care at the lowest possible cost. How do we pay for it? The richest people, the richest and the biggest companies will pay more. And middle-class families will pay less. That's how it will work.
She makes a witty tribute to Obamacare at once, embraces medicare for all after, and then makes it into a mere financial argument: the elite pays more, the middle class pays less. It does not depreciate the moderate position, as Sanders would do a few moments later, but it is preparing a portfolio for an ambitious reform.
If she seems less committed to the cause than Sanders, who "wrote this damn bill", it is not clear that Democratic voters are holding her against her. There are competitive polls on this issue; Some suggest that the voters of the dem. now want health insurance for all, other polls indicate that the party base is acceptable for progressive reforms. I keep coming back to this CNN poll of June in which half of the Iowa Democrats said that supporting Medicare-for-all was essential for their 2020 candidate and about half that was not the case.
Warren has potentially found a way to satisfy these two groups: to adopt Medicare for all, but not to make it the cornerstone of the campaign. It's his plan – to sail in the Democratic primary, anyway.
This story appears in VoxCare, a Vox newsletter on the latest twists in the health care debate in America. Register for receive VoxCare in your inbox with more health statistics and news.
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