DES MOINES, Iowa — Elizabeth Warren claims only billionaires will be slugged with higher taxes to pay for her version of Medicare for All rather than middle-class Americans, a key criticism leveled by 2020 Democratic rivals.
"It doesn't raise taxes on anybody but billionaires. And you know what? The billionaires can afford it, and I don't call them middle class," the Massachusetts senator said Saturday after a town hall in Dubuque, Iowa.
NEWS: @ewarren told me her Medicare for All proposal won't raise taxes for anyone with under $1 billion after I asked who's in the "middle class" she promises not to raise taxes for pic.twitter.com/9u1e6ApGMi
— Zak Hudak (@cbszak) November 3, 2019
The comments by Warren, 70, drew ire from the campaign of former Vice President Joe Biden. President Barack Obama's understudy from 2009-2017 wants to instead build on the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, the 2010 law that is his former boss's signature domestic achievement, which would offer a government-financed "public option" but leave private insurance in place.
"The American people have to be able to trust whoever our party nominates to take on Donald Trump to be straight with them about health care. Senator Warren said tonight that her single payer plan won’t raise taxes on anyone but billionaires, but that’s simply not true," Biden spokeswoman Kate Bedingfield said in a statement. "Senator Warren has spent months dodging questions about how she'd need to raise taxes on the American middle class in order to pay for her single payer health care plan, and on Friday she confirmed why: because her plan would."
The Warren campaign estimates the cost of Medicare for All to the federal government would be $20 trillion over 10 years, $14 trillion less than an estimate left-of-center Urban Institute released in October. Under pressure to specify how she would cover the funding gap without a middle-class tax increase, the senator floated raising $20 trillion in taxes on employers, financial firms, giant corporations, and the top 1% of earners, including raising $2.3 trillion by cracking down on tax evasion. Critics, however, note employer-based taxes tend to be passed on to workers in the form of lower wages. New financial transactions and capital gains taxes would also affect people other than billionaires.
Biden and his campaign, as well as a slew of other Democratic presidential candidates, have bashed Warren for supporting Medicare for All and her proposal to pay for it.
On Saturday morning, Biden himself urged Warren to "just get real with numbers."
"I just think getting that plan through, even a Democratic Congress, would be difficult, and we could get it done immediately by building on Obamacare," Biden, 76, said in Des Moines, Iowa, following a field office opening.
In response to the Biden camp last week calling her funding mechanism "mathematical gymnastics," Warren pushed back by asserting many of the figures were calculated by Obama administration alumni.
"If Joe Biden doesn't like that, I'm just not sure where he's going," she said Friday in Des Moines prior to the Iowa Democratic Party's Liberty and Justice Celebration, adding people who work in the private health insurance industry won't get "left behind" with her proposed transition into a single-payer system.
Warren is due to publish her Medicare for All transition plan in the coming weeks.
