Liberal media outlets predictably tried to put lipstick on a bloated pig in touting Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) estimated $52 trillion Medicare-for-All plan.
Multiple left-wing outlets, including The Intercept, Time magazine, and Salon, attempted to explain away the math in Warren’s monumentally expensive plan released Nov. 1, 2019. The Intercept, in particular, published a piece that reeked of socialist propaganda. “Warren did what she does best: her fucking homework,” wrote The Intercept’s Ady Barkan. “She consulted the experts, she double-checked the numbers, and she dropped a codex of wisdom right in the middle of the teacher’s desk. And the political reverberations may be felt for decades.”
That “codex of wisdom” comment amusingly ignores the deleterious effects of government-run, single-payer health care, or Medicare-for-All.
The Intercept, founded by liberal billionaire mega-donor Pierre Omidyar, also salivated that “[t]he plan that Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren just released is another enormous win for us.” The author Ady Barkan continued, “It will help persuade our friends and families and neighbors to support Medicare for All, and in the not-too-distant future, to convince Congress too.”
Other outlets followed The Intercept’s lead.
Time published a fluff piece on Nov. 1 in an attempt to separate the “pragmatist” Warren from her self-proclaimed democratic-socialist rival Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT). The piece stated, “The plan says it would cost $20.5 trillion in new government spending over a decade, a price tag that Warren says she would pay for with new taxes on corporations and the wealthy, but not the middle class.”
To put that into context, the United States’ national debt, which the U.S. Treasury defines as the “direct liabilities of the United States Government,” including “at various times” public debt, debt held by the public and gross federal debt,” is currently over $23 trillion and rising, meaning that her proposed plan would spend over the next 10 years approximately 90 percent of the current national debt.
Time said her plan “describes in relatively minute detail, complete with links, how the federal government would curb the cost of health care by reducing administrative costs and reforming payment, and increasing competition among hospitals.”
Left-wing outlet Salon published a puff-piece of its own on Nov. 3 produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute, headlined “How health insurance industry allies are going to lie and attack Warren’s Medicare for All plan.” In the piece, Salon proceeded to suggest that these “allies” are now “scrambling” because Warren stated definitively that her plan would not raise taxes on the middle class. “Warren found that upon a closer look, there is enough money concentrated in the hands of the rich and corporations to finance a large chunk of Medicare for All,” explained Salon.
Interesting enough, The Intercept, Time Magazine, and Salon, ignored mentioning the originally estimated $52 trillion figure that America is expected to spend on Warren’s plan over the next 10 years.
The Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Board reported Nov. 4, in a piece headlined “Warren Has a (Fantasy) Plan,” that Warren “concede[d] that her plan will cost only ‘slightly’ less than the $52 trillion that the U.S. is expected to spend on health care in the next 10 years.” The Journal continued, “She deducts from that what the feds now spend on Medicare and Medicaid, plus $6 trillion that the states contribute to Medicaid, the state-federal children’s health program and government worker benefits,” which still leaves $30 million to finance, according to The Journal. But Warren claims to have somehow still managed to reduce the cost further to $20.5 trillion.
In other words, she “wave[d] her wand” and arrived at her “$20.5 trillion” figure. Warren made the rest of the costs vanish by “positing magical savings from things like ‘comprehensive payment reform’” and using “‘bundled payments,’ which have failed to reduce costs as promised by Obama Care.”’
Warren’s plan, noted The Journal, would cause businesses to pay $8.8 trillion to the U.S. government over ten years based on what they pay now in healthcare costs, instead of paying employer-health care premiums.
The Journal further stated,
“She [Warren] says per-employee health costs for every employer would remain about the same, but payroll costs of this sort are essentially middle-class taxes on employees. Fixing per-employee business costs at some future date would also be an incentive for companies to reduce their coverage now to reduce future costs,” meaning that employees would get worse coverage than they have now.
Warren’s plan also included raising the corporate tax rate back up to 35 percent from 21 percent, noted The Journal, and it would “extend it to income earned worldwide with no deferrals for foreign taxes,” which, Warren "claims...would generate $1.75 trillion over 10 years, which is fanciful since it would be an immediate incentive for companies to relocate overseas.”
