In an op-ed at The Daily Caller, Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel lay out the case against Elizabeth Warren’s Medicare for All program. So what is the program? They write:
You should know. It’s not a tweak to some regulation. It’s not even Obamacare, which, once upon a time, Republicans denounced as “socialism.” Medicare for All is actual socialism. Health care spending amounts to about a fifth of the entire U.S. economy. Warren is demanding total control of all of it immediately. If Medicare for All became law, it would amount to the biggest expansion of government since World War II, by far. So, it’s worth asking how exactly this would work and who would pay for it. Warren has been asked that question repeatedly. Each time, she has refused to answer.
No matter how hard she’s been pressed — and even some fairly strident Democratic partisans have asked her — Warren has refused to explain what it would cost or who would pay for it. We now have a credible estimate. According to a study by the Urban Institute, in just its first 10 years, Warren’s Medicare for All plan would cost an additional $34 trillion. Keep in mind that the Congressional Budget Office anticipates that the United States will collect just $46 trillion in taxes over the same period. In other words, Warren’s health care plan alone will consume the overwhelming majority of all tax dollars in the United States. That’s before we spend a single dollar on Social Security, education, national defense and everything else.
The Urban Institute has no motive to attack Warren. It’s a progressive think tank. They likely didn’t even account for the cost of Warren’s pledge to give free health care to every illegal alien who sneaks into the country. Who’s going to pay for all this? Divide $3.4 trillion a year by 320 million Americans and you get more than $10,000 per person. Not per taxpayer. Per person. That includes every child, every retiree, every prison inmate. That would be the largest tax ever assessed in American history, by far. It would change everything. An awful lot of people would just leave the country.
How do you pay for Medicare for All? That’s not a minor detail that can be settled later. It’s the single most important question. Under pressure from the other Democrats in the field, Warren has now promised an answer: “I plan over the next few weeks to put out a plan that talks about, specifically, the cost of ‘Medicare for all’ and, specifically, how we pay for it,” she said last week at a town hall event.
If a candidate can’t explain to you how they plan to pay for a program that will take over a fifth of the entire U.S. economy, that candidate certainly does not deserve your vote. Warren has already admitted she’s coming after the wealthiest, most productive Americans to pay for a number of her plans, but she’ll undoubtedly need to tap into the Middle Class to pay for something as big as Medicare for All, if it can even be paid for. Everyone knows this, but Warren just can’t seem to admit it.
Here are four times Elizabeth Warren has dodged a direct question about whether or not she would raise taxes on the Middle Class to fund her Medicare for All program. If she can’t answer that question, either through cowardice or ignorance, does she deserve to be America’s next president?
