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.
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