>> Elizabeth Warren has been facing a lot of questions over the past few week.
Since the Democratic debate at the very least, about how she plans to pay for her Medicare
for All plan and what exactly it will look like.
And that is because Medicare for All is a benefit that you would get, and so you need
to explain how it's paid for.
If it's bombs, it's free.
You don't have talk about it.
But if it's Medicare, we really need to know.
And so now her plan is available, or at least a proposal about her plan.
It's not the actual legislation, but she does have a post that's like 20 pages long about
a lot of the details in terms of the financing and everything.
So, there is a good amount of good here, there's also some bad, we're gonna cover both.
First of all, in terms of substantively, how much Medicare for All is it?
Well she says, under my plan, Medicare for All will cover the full list of benefits outlined
in the Medicare for All Act, including long-term care, audio, vision, and dental benefits.
That obviously is intended to match the version that Bernie has put out.
Then his substantive Medicare for All that actually not only gives you everything that
Medicare currently provides but actually would expand the coverage the things like a vision,
dental, those sorts of things.
So, overall it is, before we get to the financing and everything it is substantive healthcare
>> Yes, all right.
First thoughts on it, the most important, it's real Medicare for All.
Phew, like super worried that she was gonna listen to advisers going, gotta get closer
to the Democratic Party and everything is just unrealistic.
And let's do, like, Medicare for All but for some, and for others not so much.
And let's find some compromise on top of compromise, and I'm positive that she was it had at least
some voices counseling her in that direction.
She didn't do that, this is actually Medicare for All.
It ends private insurance, period.
And it brings us to a system where we would all get guaranteed health care, we would get
all the benefits that John talked about, and we would save money.
Now, when it comes to how she's financing it-
>> I'm gonna have all the details on it.
No, I know.
My overall analysis is, I think it's borderline brilliant.
And so, John mentioned some downsides, I'm not even sure I see the downsides.
And so, we'll talk her through, we'll have a conversation about it.
But, she did it.
It's a real Medicare for All, and she clearly pays for it.
>> Yeah, yeah.
This was so smart, because now in the debates what she can do, and I agree, this is Medicare
for All.
But she can say when she's being pressed on, where are we gonna get the money from and
I know we're gonna talk about that in a second.
And, what does it mean?
What are the parameters of this Medicare for All that you're proposing, she can say, read
the plan.
I put it out there.
And if you didn't do your job journalists to read the plan, then I'm not the one who
should be responsible for the fact that you're not doing your work.
And it's out here for everybody in the public to see into comb through it.
Which she starts with is such a great story about her father and his heart attack and
how that led them not only to go to the brink emotionally, but also financially and how
this is such a common story for Americans.
But that set the stage for her to really be committed to interrogate, what is happening
in this industry and how can we radically change it?
And the reason why I'm not necessarily surprised of how this turned out is that, Elizabeth
Warren, I've known some of the work that she's done especially in her interest around economic
policy for all middle class folks.
She's worked closely with the Roosevelt Institute, which is a think tank that writes about the
rules of the economy and wants to shift them dramatically in the favor of average Americans.
And so, I expected something like this to emerge, but I didn't expect how detailed and
how she was gonna answer her critics in a powerful succinct way.
>> Yeah, and I will say on top of that, the political framing throughout is excellent.
>> Phenomenal.
>> Makes it nearly impossible to argue with from a conservative perspective.
Okay, John?
>> Yeah, so I'm gonna jump into how she's gonna pay for.
I will say, because many people are gonna be still suspicious and I get that.
No matter who becomes president, even if it's Bernie Sanders, passing Medicare for All is
gonna be a monumental struggle.
And so, who it is that is pushing for is gonna be really important, perhaps most important
to some people.
And if you were predisposed to believe that she just can't be trusted on it, then there's
nothing that can be written in this document that's gonna change your mind at that point.
And, I understand, if it comes down to it, I have much more faith in Bernie Sanders to
have the organizing ability and the stick-to-it-iveness to push difficult legislation through.
But we are analyzing this on the substance of what's included there.
And if you're knee-jerk reaction is to say, well it's really easy to write anything in
a proposal, I will counter by saying, I've looked at a lot of people in the democratic
primary and apparently it isn't that easy because they can't put together a proposal
like this.
>> Now, let's get into the actual financing.
So, she talks about different ways that healthcare could be paid for.
The first option is the current system, which costs $52 trillion over this certain amount
of time, and leaves tens of millions of people without health insurance.
Option 2 is switching to Medicare for All, which will cost just about the same money,
a little bit less perhaps, for a number of reasons we'll get into.
She goes on to say, the $11 trillion in household insurance and out-of-pocket expenses projected
under our current system goes right back into the pockets of America's working people under
this system.
And we make up the difference with targeted spending cuts and new taxes on giant corporations
and the richest 1% of Americans, and by cracking down on tax evasion and fraud.
Not one penny in middle-class tax increases.
Now if you think that that is gonna stop the questions of the debates in terms of, are
we gonna raise taxes on middle class people?
Of course it's not, Jake Tapper get rid of that question many times.
But anyway, what is that actually mean?
She made references to tax increases on some people.
Well, she proposes a financial transactions tax of 0.1% of the value of every stock, bond,
or derivatives transactions to raise $800 billion.
Then she adds a systemic risk fee on financial institutions with more than $50 billion in
assets that will raise 100 billion more.
She adds another 2.9 trillion in corporate taxes by ending accelerated costs recovery
and imposing a 35 percent minimum tax on foreign earnings.
Her wealth tax now changes as a part of this plan, it now goes up to 6%, which will raise
another $1 trillion.
Warren also proposes taxing capital gains for the top 1% at the same rate as normal
income.
And doing so on an annual basis rather than just when a sale is made to raise $2 trillion.
Warren proposes a massive increase in IRS enforcement aimed at reducing the tax avoidance
rate from 15% down to 10% which would raise $2.3 trillion.
There's a little bit more which we will get into.
But what I like about the financing is, it shows that you can pay for this, which we
shouldn't need to be shown because we know that many countries around the world already
do.
But, also accomplishes a number of different important goals to finance it like lowering
tax avoidance by incredibly wealthy people.
Is it objective good by itself?
Not to mention that the change to foreign earnings, the systemic risk fee, the wealth
tax.
I mean, these are good things in terms of income inequality and other things, even absent
their ability to pay for something like Medicare for All.
>> Okay, so let me break down a bunch of things that I was looking for and what did I find.
So, first of all, in terms of how to pay for it, she was super realistic.
And, so for example, the taxable instead of people are doing in increasing IRS enforcement
to raise more money.
What I was looking for is, is she going to say that we can make up all the money that
people normally cheat on their taxes on?
Cuz if she said that, I would've thought that's unrealistic.
So she's stretching things to try to get it done.
She didn't, she was very conservative on that.
She just said, we can raise enough money from that to make up a third of the money that
people are cheating on by not paying their taxes, only a third.
And we would've only gotten to a point where we would be half as good as the United Kingdom
in catching tax cheats.
And she put down specific numbers, which are absolutely true, that for every dollar you
put into the IRS, the government spends on IRS, we get back 6 dollars.
Now the reason we don't do that is because Republicans and corporate Democrats don't
wanna catch tax cheats cuz those are their donors.
>> And themselves.
>> And then in some cases, that as well.
So, through every step of this, it was not only very realistic, showed you the exact
numbers on how you pay for it.
And then also, she framed it well in terms of, how about you, guys, what do you get out
of it?
So she points out that the average American family of four pays $12,378 every year in
healthcare cross.
That's co-pays, premiums, deductibles and what you pay into your own insurance through
an employer, right?
So everybody that works at a company, your employer pays part of the cost, you pay part
of the cost.
When you put all that in, it's over $12,000, that's gone, that's gone under this plan.
Okay, so, everybody just say $12,000.
Now the second part of it is, the insurance part that you're chipping in through your
employer, that then becomes a raise that you get from your employer.
That's a double raise and then so you say, well okay, how do you pay for it and then
she explains exactly how you do it.
So one of the things she talks about is, the bureaucracy costs and private insurance is
about 12% of the cost of the system.
And Medicare that already exists is 2.3%.
So the difference is trillions of dollars.
So when you go to Medicare for All and you lower those, well you just saved trillions
of dollars.
And she goes through trillions by trillions by trillions showing you exactly how she's
paying for it.
The only part of the paying for it that I balked at a little bit, and now I'm more concerned
than Warren is in this regard is paying for capital gains yearly as opposed to when you
sell something.
I know that there's a good progressive argument for that.
I think that enforcement's a little hard to do.
I'm not perfectly sold on that.
But my God, we're talking about around the edges here, right?
So, she nailed most of it.
And when they go, I kept thinking as I'm reading this whole thing.
When Buttigieg or Biden or Trump goes to argue against this, their gonna get slaughtered.
Because she's gonna say, so you want the average American to pay that $12,000?
Because that's the current statement.
Just say it, it's okay, no problem, that's your choice.
You're saying the average American should pay the $12,000, so why is it really Medicare
for All?
So Buttigieg says, I'm doing Medicare for blah, blah, blah, right?
And what does that mean?
He says, no, no, I still want you to pay, the co-pays and deductibles to premiums.
But I'm gonna have you pay the government and have that be a public option.
Or you could pay all that stuff to private insurers and it keeps a private insurance
system intact.
That's useless, okay?
>> Yeah.
>> In this case, she says, no, you don't have to pay for any of that, right?
We're gonna raise the money through other means and she explains meticulously how.
So it's a real Medicare for All.
And when Buttigieg says, no, I wanna defend the current system where 87 million people
are either uninsured or under insured.
37 million people don't buy prescription drugs they need cuz they can't afford it.
36 million people don't get treatment that they know they need, that doctors told them
they need, cuz they can't afford it.
Let alone all the bankruptcies.
When the Buttigiegs and the Bidens of the world try to defend that, they're gonna get
politically hammered.
And so, I think that with this proposal, I know it's a bold thing to say, but she's cut
off the conservative flank of the Democratic party, they're done for.
So I think it's Warren versus Bernie going forward, cuz they both believe in Medicare
for All.
Fighting against this from a conservative perspective is gonna be a fools errand.
>> Right, and I'm just gonna bring up a stat and then give another sort of framing on the
finances.
So, the other part of the numbers that you mentioned, it's there on her fact sheet.
40 million people don't go see the doctor because they can't afford to per year when
they need to, to get the tests that they need.
So also imagine the amount of health cost savings that we have when we have a healthy
public.
And that's the other thing that the expenses are going towards is emergency procedures,
overcrowded ERs, and these are things that this could solve for.
The other thing that I love that she does, we always talk about how people don't ask
where the money's gonna come from corporate welfare.
Nobody really cared or asked about Obama and Bush bailing out the banks, and where that
came from, our tax dollars.
But she also held the military industrial complex accountable in this.
So part of what she is going to reign spending on is the defense industry.
And so she said, since the 9/11 attacks, the United States has appropriated $2 trillion
to fund combat and counter-terrorism operations around the world via the Overseas Contingency
Operations Fund.
And so that amount is $116 billion per year, she's proposing to cut that.
Imagine how much we would save when we also pull from these industries that aren't doing
anything for us.
And they are taking our tax dollars.
We don't ask how we are funding the military or how we are funding corporate greed.
We just always ask about the things that actually is the most imperative in our lives.
And it's funny that you bring Buttigieg because, I don't know folks no but Buttigieg's father
is a pre-eminent scholar on Gramsci.
He translates Gramsci.
And Gramsci's like a godfather in communist socialist stud, so he clearly made calculations
because he was exposed to Gramsci's thinking via his father.
And, I hope that that does wash away that tide of the Democratic Party and especially
young folks who think that they could masquerade as Democrat wall as opposing espousing conservative
values.
>> Yeah, all right, last thing, guys.
One other part of the proposals that I loved, it shows that she's a true progressive.
Now you could, by the way, if you say, no, I think Bernie can get it done better.
He has a higher likelihood of passing it with putting grassroots pressure, etc.
That is a perfectly fair thing to think.
So, and Bernie is the one who wrote the damn bill in the first place.
He's the one- >> He's the one that we're talking about.
>> He's exactly, he's been pushing it forward for 40 years and you wanna vote for Bernie
based on that, that makes perfect sense.
Okay, but the thing you cannot say is that Warren is not a real progressive.
This is massively progressive.
And on top of the cutting the defense spending and charging more for the banks and etc.,
is she brings corporate tax rates back up.
Now, you'll know a fake progressive when they say, yes, these corporate tax cuts were terrible,
we need to bring them back up to 25%.
You're like, wait a minute, they weren't 25%, they were 35%.
And Warren says, yeah, we're gonna bring them back up to 35%.
Not only that, we're gonna go all across the world and say, hey, you wanna hide your money
in the Cayman Islands, Ireland, Netherlands, wherever you wanna hide it?
No, you're gonna pay 35% no ands, ifs or buts.
Wall Street would read this and they will be furious because it has a financial transaction
tax.
It holds corporations accountable and wipes out the healthcare industry that's been bilking
us for trillions of dollars, sucking off of us, the American people for trillions upon
trillions of dollars and putting it into their pockets.
She talks about how the the top 62 CEOs got $1.1 billion in pay last year.
Okay, that's all coming out of our pocket for no damn reason.
Wall Street will hate this.
The American people will love it, and it proves beyond of the shadow of a doubt, that she
was a true progressive