Day: November 3, 2019

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Some Questions About the Warren Plan for M4A

  By 2020, Elections, Health Care, Public Policy

This is the second of two post on the Warren plan to finance Medicare for All. The first dealt with why I think the time is ripe for M4A and especially for Warren’s version of it. This second post is about some questions that have been raised about Warren’s plan from the left. The Warren plan calls on businesses that have 50 or more employees and provide health insurance to them to pay a the federal government roughly 98% of what they pay for that insurance. A critique of the plan in Jacobin said that businesses would be able to escape from this requirement by reclassifying employees as independent contractors or by breaking themselves down into units with 49 or fewer employees. The whole question of reclassifying employees as independent contractor is not a new issue. There already are many incentives to do that. There are also business incentives to not… Continue reading

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The Warren Plan and the Prospects for Medicare for All

  By 2020, Elections, Health Care, Public Policy

I’ve been ambivalentabout the politics and policy of single-payer for a long time. That’s for three reasons First, while I by and large don’t think that a more left-wing program will hurt Democrats in the general election—just the opposite is true—there are certain ways it can hurt. The first is if we put forward plans that require tax increases on the working and middle classes. I do think that ultimately some of those tax increases will be necessary and that the benefits received in return for them will be greater than the costs of the tax increases. But it is a fundamental rule of politics that people are more agitated by what they are losing than what they are gaining. And talking about tax increases for future benefits is hard to explain and hard to defend especially because most Americans are not terribly well-informed about politics and public policy and… Continue reading