Warren has boldly pushed back on the critics who went after her for not having a plan to pay for Medicare for all. First she came out with a detailed plan for how to pay for it, then she produced another detailed plan for the three-year roll out process, and then we got the plans for measures Warren can take by executive order in the first 100 days. You gotta admire this strategy: Mayor Pete and others taunt her for not having a plan, and she shoots back with a dump truck full of detailed proposals.
I personally wouldn’t have had a problem if she just did a graceful flip flop and backed off on ending private coverage. Why not say “Let’s stop fighting over this,” set a town hall meeting, and use that to hash out a consensus plan accepted by all the candidates. But that’s not the way the world works. And Warren, much to her credit, is too much of a fighter to waver on her basic intention.
There’s even a few things in the various nw Warren plans that can win the wholehearted support of LSFW. Here they are:
- Warren ties the effort to reduce health costs and reform health care to the bigger fight against corruption. “If the next president has any intention of winning any health care fight, they must start by reforming Washington,” Liz says. Then the plan looks at many of the specific instances of shady health care corporate capture via the revolving door, lobbying and election spending,
- Warren rightly targets patent abuse as a key underlying factor inflating drug prices. She discussed various governmental authorities that would allow the feds to bypass patents. Some of this sounds like totalitarian eminent domain type stuff — stay tuned for more analysis!
- The plan also calls for the government to manufacture certain generic drugs. Again, this sounds a bit scary. Further analysis needed.
- Antitrust enforcement. The plan calls for across the board actions, touching on such areas as non-compete and no-poach agreements, eliminating a law the protects health care companies from antitrust enforcement, and antitrust scrutiny of health mergers.