The editorial board of the Washington Post blasted top left-wing 2020 presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren’s healthcare proposals for lacking “factual plausibility.”
Sanders and Warren, who are both U.S. senators, support a single-payer healthcare system that would undo the private health insurance system. Both of them defended their ideas during Tuesday night’s presidential debate.
The headline of the piece, “Why go to the trouble of running for president to promote ideas that can’t work?” is a play on a line Warren directed to a fellow candidate on the debate stage. Warren told former Rep. John Delaney, she doesn’t “understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for.”
Her zinger was also the first line of the editorial published Friday.
The editorial board also took a shot at Sanders for saying, “I get a little bit tired of Democrats afraid of big ideas.”
“Ambition is essential, in other words, but not sufficient,” they wrote, while going over lofty policy proposals that have gone into effect.
“That means, first, that proposals should meet a baseline degree of factual plausibility — a bar that, for example, the ‘Medicare for all’ plan that Mr. Sanders and Ms. Warren favor does not clear,” it went on and then backed Delaney’s argument against Warren’s plan. He “had pointed out correctly that the numbers behind the proposal simply do not compute,” they wrote.
“The next president should have a vision of progress for the nation that is expansive and inspiring,” the piece concludes. “It also should be grounded in mathematical and political reality.”
