‘Medicare for All’: Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg Clash at Debate

Pete Buttigieg directly criticized Elizabeth Warren over health care at Tuesday night’s debate, saying that she had not been forthcoming about whether she would raise taxes on the middle class to help finance “Medicare for all.”

Ms. Warren, the Massachusetts senator, was asked if she would raise taxes on the middle class, and she responded by focusing on the costs that middle-class families would face. “I will not sign a bill into law that does not lower costs for middle-class families,” she said.

Mr. Buttigieg, who last month called Ms. Warren “extremely evasive” on the issue, criticized Ms. Warren for not directly answering the question.

“We heard it tonight,” Mr. Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., said. “A yes-or-no question that didn’t get a yes-or-no answer. Look, this is why people here in the Midwest are so frustrated with Washington in general and Capitol Hill in particular. Your signature, senator, is to have a plan for everything — except this.”

The two candidates went on to argue over the merits of their preferred approaches on health care.

Mr. Buttigieg favors what he calls “Medicare for all who want it,” and Ms. Warren took issue with that concept. “Understand what that really means: It’s ‘Medicare for all who can afford it,’” she said.

Ms. Warren favors abolishing private health insurance, and Mr. Buttigieg questioned why she wanted to “obliterate” private health plans. “Why unnecessarily divide this country over health care when there’s a better way to deliver coverage for all?” he asked.

Mr. Buttigieg’s campaign continued pressing the issue after the exchange onstage, sending an email to reporters with the subject line: “FACT CHECK: Elizabeth Warren Just Dodged Questions on Middle Class Taxes Again.”

Ms. Warren has repeatedly faced questions about how she would pay for Medicare for all. In particular, she has consistently declined to specify whether she would raise taxes on the middle class to help finance such a system.

Instead, Ms. Warren has tried to reframe the issue around the total costs that families would face under Medicare for all. She has said that costs would go up for the wealthy and for big corporations, but they would go down for middle-class families — an explanation she repeated on the debate stage on Tuesday night.

She has also said “I’m with Bernie” on Medicare for all, referring to Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who has championed single-payer health care.

But unlike Ms. Warren, Mr. Sanders has provided a direct answer to the question of whether taxes on the middle class would rise. “Yes, they will pay more in taxes, but less in health care for what they get,” he said in the first series of primary debates, in June. At the debate on Tuesday, Mr. Sanders offered a similar acknowledgment that taxes would go up.

“For virtually everybody,” he said, “the tax increase they pay will be substantially less — substantially less than what they were paying for premiums and out-of-pocket expenses.”

Mr. Buttigieg found that response to be an improvement over Ms. Warren’s. “Well, at least that’s a straightforward answer,” he said, “but there’s a better way.”

Source link