By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, November 19, 2019
The clear loser of the Democratic primary is “Medicare
for All.”
First, it demonstrated the unreliability of Kamala Harris
out of the gate, when she endorsed it before quickly backing off. Now, it has
blunted the momentum of Elizabeth Warren, made a mockery of her claim to be an
uber-wonk and shredded her implicit appeal to Bernie Sanders supporters as an
equally committed left-winger without the baggage.
Under pressure for weeks to cough up details related to
her version of the proposal, Warren has now backed all the way down to
promising to pass Medicare for All by the end of the third year of her
presidency.
This is an implicit concession that she won’t do it at
all. No presidential candidate ever pledges to do something important in Year
3. That’s when, if history is any guide, a president has suffered a midterm
drubbing and lost all legislative momentum. Warren wants us to believe that
this would be the opportune time for her to pass perhaps the most sweepingly
intrusive government measure in American history.
Besides, how does Warren expect this midterm to go if
it’s fought, as it inevitably would be, on a proposal so far-reaching and
radioactive that she didn’t dare offer it in the initial phase of her
presidency?
Warren’s fundamental mistake was to believe, like almost
all the Democrats early in the race, that she had to chase Bernie Sanders
around the track, which inevitably involved backing his signature health-care
proposal. But it became immediately evident that it’s one thing to promise to
eliminate all private health insurance if you are a self-declared socialist;
it’s quite another if you imagine yourself anything short of that.
As soon as another erstwhile Bernie band-wagoner, Kamala
Harris, uttered out loud that she’d end private health insurance, it created a
controversy that made her clearly uncomfortable. To wiggle out of it, she came
up with her own plan.
Warren lasted longer. Her undoing was that her resolute
unwillingness to say that she’d raise middle-class taxes to pay for the program
undermined her self-image as a woman with a “plan for that.” She had to
jerry-rig a financing program built on such outlandishly rosy assumptions about
costs and revenues that even her journalistic cheerleaders have been skeptical.
As she continued to take fire, Warren announced her “transition” plan,
effectively saying the program is not a first-term priority.
With this step, she has managed to bring on herself the
worst of both worlds. Democratic purists will be disappointed in her, and
Sanders voters feel confirmed in any doubts they already had about her
commitment. Meanwhile, she still formally favors a plan to eliminate every
private health-insurance plan in America, opening her up to justifiably savage
Republican attacks should she win the Democratic nomination.
She should have foreseen that proposing a ruinously
expensive, enormously coercive health program would present political problems.
Even Democratic-primary voters aren’t fully sold on a Medicare for All plan
that eliminates all private insurance. Besides, it rejects the approach that
has worked for the party for decades, which is rejecting politically perilous
wholesale changes to health care in favor of salami-slice increases in
government involvement.
Sanders has gotten away with it because socialism is his
brand and conviction. He hand-waves away questions on the specifics — what do
they matter, when the revolution will make all things possible?
In contrast, Warren let the critics get into her head,
just as she did over her purported Native American heritage, and stumbled into
a messy, self-destructive response, just as she did with her DNA test last
year. Democrats have to be wondering, over and above her struggles with
Medicare for All, if this is really who they want to send up next year against
the endlessly combative and needling Donald Trump.
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