Nearly a full year into the Democratic presidential primary, Elizabeth Warren faced her first fact-checking on her numerous lies about “Medicare For all,” not from members of the media, but from the Midwesterners still duking it out in the race.
South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who openly concedes that his effective public option proposal could give way to a nationalized healthcare industry over time, deconstructed Warren’s fragile facade of a defense with the precision of a surgeon. Rather than harp on her platitudes or her so-called plans as a whole, Buttigieg noted the two most salient concerns of the public: cost and choice.
But most important was Buttigieg’s comeback. He pointed out Warren’s equivocation on the cost question. It was “a yes-or-no question that didn’t get a yes-or-no answer.”
“Your signature is to have a plan for everything, except this,” Buttigieg said to the apparent front-runner. Buttigieg argued that he supported “Medicare for all who want it” because it gives the country a “choice.”
Buttigieg is right, both as a question of populism and logic. For starters, polls show that the public overwhelmingly supports expanding public funding. But abolishing private health insurance — as the “Medicare For all” bill sponsored by Warren certainly does — finds the favor of fewer than two in five Americans.
Implicit in Buttigieg’s reference to a “hole,” isn’t just the bureaucratic question of nationalizing healthcare but also that of funding the backbone of global health: medical research and development in the United States.
Despite being just 4.4% of the world’s economy, we supply 44% of the world’s medical R&D and a majority of its patents. If we killed our profit-motivated system, we’d hinder healthcare both in the States and across the globe.
Amy Klobuchar brought the comb — er, the knife — down on Warren even worse.
“There’s a difference between a plan and a pipe dream,.” Klobuchar gloated, as she plotted trading Warren in for a chilled bottle of water. “We need to focus on what we can get done.”
The Minnesota senator rightly noted that nationalizing one-fifth of the economy with “Medicare For all” would require increasing taxation, a reality that Warren — with the complicity of a sycophantic media — has repeatedly denied.
“At least Bernie’s being honest here,” Klobuchar said.
Enabled by a media happy to ignore a question of dollars and cents, and the lives dependent on American medical research, Warren has been allowed to lie without refute for this entire primary. Strangely enough, it took a sitting senator struggling in national polling and a small town mayor challenging her to cut through the lie of her veneer.
