"The Question Warren Won't Answer," David Leonhardt, The New York Times

           

                               The Question Warren Won't Answer

By David Leonhardt Opinion Columnist,

Eventually, Elizabeth Warren is going to need to find a different way to answer the Medicare question.

A central part of last night’s debate was the criticism she received from rivals over her unwillingness to talk about whether middle-class taxes will rise under her plan. Warren refused to answer the question, implicitly arguing that it’s irrelevant.

Her position is: Americans don’t care how much they pay in health care taxes; they care how much they pay for health care overall, combining taxes, premiums, deductibles and so on. So why get bogged down in the hoary old tax question?

On the narrow substance of the issue, she’s right. Focusing only on taxes is pointless. But in a larger way, she’s wrong.

The No. 1 reason to question her version of Medicare for All — in which private health insurance would be eliminated — is its political viability. It would be an enormous disruption to the health care system, and history shows that health care disruptions are very hard to pass and usually unpopular at first. Polls show that her plan is already unpopular, and it would be a bigger disruption than Obamacare or Bill Clinton’s failed plan.

Given all that, she needs to engage with the political realities — with how she would overcome people’s resistance to giving up their health insurance for a larger new program that, yes, would require a tax increase.

I think Warren has run an excellent campaign on the whole, and I think she has the most thoughtful agenda for addressing the stagnating living standards of most Americans. I’m surprised that she has chosen to focus so much of her candidacy on the most aggressive version of Medicare for All. But she has. Now it’s time for her to tell voters how she will deal with the politics of passing it.

In my view, her best answer involves finding a way to signal her openness to a transition, in which people who want to keep their private insurance can do so (and taxes don’t yet need to rise) while Medicare initially expands voluntarily. That idea is hugely popular.

I hope her vagueness is a first step toward that position. But it isn’t very satisfying in the moment.

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Lee Drutman, political scientist, in FiveThirtyEight: “At the end of the night, it’s still basically a two-person race. Warren and Biden gave performances consistent with previous debate performances, so there’s nothing to suggest that tonight will have much impact on the race by itself.”

Matt Ford, The New Republic: “None of the candidates’ spats and skirmishes are nearly as interesting as the unspoken truce between Sanders and Warren.”

Perry Bacon Jr., FiveThirtyEight: “Buttigieg was very aggressive tonight, particularly in taking on Warren. It was an important night for him. Klobuchar also took on Warren, and was also effective. The problem is those two are competing for the same centrist voters, so they can’t both benefit.”

Karen Tumulty, The Washington Post: Joe Biden’s answer on his son Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings “represents only the beginning of what has to happen if Joe Biden is to halt the corrosive effect of a continuing barrage of unsubstantiated allegations and wild conspiracy theories that Trump and his fellow Republicans have spread.”

Matt Yglesias, Vox: “Any night in which Biden, the front-runner, is not the target of sustained criticism is in some sense fundamentally a good night for Biden.”

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