ELIZABETH WARREN HAS A FAKE PLAN TO PAY FOR MEDICARE FOR ALL.

• Author: Suderman, Peter

IN RELEASING A proposal to pay for single-payer--the fully government-financed health care system she calls Medicare for All--Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) faced two challenges. The first was to produce a plan that did not raise taxes on the middle class. The second was to produce a plan that was simple to understand and easy to explain. As one anonymous outside adviser told The Washington Post, her campaign "want[ed] to figure out--with one go--how to stop the 'How are you going to pay for it?' question."

As it turned out, she failed on both counts.

Warren's plan, released at the beginning of November, starts with the fact that employers spend about $9 trillion a decade on health insurance for their workers. She aims to move the private spending onto the federal budget, transforming it into government spending. Under her proposal, large employers who currently pay for health coverage would be required to pay a comparable amount, equivalent to 98 percent of what they now spend, adjusted for the number of workers they employ, in order to help finance Medicare for All.

Warren claims "we don't need to raise taxes on the middle class by one penny to finance Medicare for All." Instead, she refers to this as an "employer Medicare contribution" under which companies "would send payments to the federal government for Medicare."

But there is a commonly accepted term for requiring companies to send payments to the federal government in order to finance government programs. That word is tax. Her plan is thus a nearly $9 trillion tax on employers, charged on a per-worker basis, with exceptions for small businesses. That would inevitably end up affecting employees' compensation. It is hard to see this as anything other than a massive middle-class tax hike.

Warren has argued that total costs for middle-class families would go down under her plan, but there are reasons to doubt this, including an analysis from Emory University health care economist Kenneth Thorpe finding that under Medicare for All, more than 70 percent of people who currently have private insurance would see costs increase. A separate analysis from the liberal Urban Institute projects that single-payer plans would raise national health care spending by $7 trillion over a decade, contrary to Warren's estimates.

Other outside experts, meanwhile, have suggested that Warren's plan will cost more than she anticipates and raise less revenue. In an analysis of the fiscal effects of Warren's...