Massive Price Tag of Elizabeth Warren's 'Medicare for All' Plan Finally Revealed: $52 Trillion
Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts released the details of her Medicare for All plan on Friday morning, and the price tag is a costly $52 trillion over the next 10 years.
“Health care is a human right, and we need a system that reflects our values,” Warren’s detailed plan read. “That system is Medicare for All.”
On top of the hefty price tag, the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate also promised to return $11 trillion to American families without increasing taxes on the middle class.
Today, I’m releasing my plan to pay for #MedicareForAll. Here’s the headline: My plan won’t raise taxes one penny on middle-class families. In fact, we’ll return about $11 TRILLION to the American people. That’s bigger than the biggest tax cut in our history. Here’s how:
— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) November 1, 2019
According to Warren’s plan, this will be accomplished with new taxes for financial firms, giant corporations and the top 1 percent.
Warren’s campaign asked Mark Zandi, the chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, Betsey Stevenson, the former Chief Economist for the Obama Labor Department, and Simon Johnson, the former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund, to examine her plan and help her come up with her different funding options.
The economists estimated in their letter outlining their findings that the plan will require $20.5 trillion in new federal spending over the next 10 years.
According to Warren, the money for Medicare for All will come from the same places that health care funding comes from today: the federal government, state governments, employers and individuals.
One of Warren’s proposals would be to have employers pay the nearly $9 trillion they would normally contribute for employee health care over the next 10 years to the federal government as an Employer Medicare Contribution.
Fox News reported some of these costs could fall back on middle-class employees, quoting Joe Biden’s deputy campaign manager, Kate Bedingfield, alleging that this plan “would place a new tax of nearly $9 trillion that will fall on American workers.”
Warren’s plan would also get funding from her signature “wealth tax” that has been a part of her campaign.
“We can generate a whole lot of the remaining revenue we need for Medicare for All just by eliminating bad incentives in our current tax system and asking those who have done really well in the last few decades to pay their fair share,” her plan reads.
Her “Ultra-Millionaire Tax” would increase the tax burden on the top 0.1 percent of households so they would “pitch in six cents on each dollar of net worth above $1 billion.”
Warren’s plan has been met with recent criticism. Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh called the plan “a total disaster.”
“There are 52 trillion reasons why this plan is a total disaster,” he told Fox News. “Best of luck to the fact checkers who now have to clean up this mess.”
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