Leaked footage from a meeting between Sen. Elizabeth Warren and union leaders showed the Democrat doesn’t have a step-by-step plan for “Medicare for all.”
Warren, 70, has prided her campaign on having a plan for every issue she hopes to target as president. Lately, her 2020 opponents have questioned her plan for “Medicare for all” because she has refused to say if she will raise middle-class taxes, unlike Bernie Sanders, 78, who plans to raise taxes to cover the program.
Video obtained by Mediaite revealed Warren’s plan is still in flux.
In the Aug. 23 meeting, Warren noted that “Medicare for all” is a top priority of her campaign, saying, “We’ve got to find a way to get people into ‘Medicare for all’ as quickly as we can.”
The senator wanted to move quickly on “Medicare for all,” though she confessed that she does not have a step-by-step plan for the proposal. She claimed she wants to get the policy “to a table” to discuss it further.
“So, it’s not that I have a plan that says we’re going to do this part and then we’re going to do this part and then we’re going to do this part,” Warren said. “No, instead my plan is we’re going to get to a table like this. We’re going to make sure that everybody gets represented.”
In her meeting with union leaders, she acknowledged that some members are concerned about losing health care benefits after years of negotiations.
“I know not all of the unions are on the same place because they have members that have — they’re in different places on healthcare,” she said.
Warren seemed to break from the version of Medicare for All being touted by Sanders, though she recently told CNN that her plan was the same as his.
Sanders’ plan follows the legislation he wrote in the Senate, which would ban private insurance and raise taxes to provide universal Medicare coverage to Americans.
The leaked footage is from a meeting in August, meaning Warren could have refined her plan since this conversation took place. The senator vowed to release her full “Medicare for all” plan in the coming weeks.
