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Former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris inadvertently highlighted one of the key virtues of Medicare for All with their jumbled, vague, and at times dishonest healthcare discussion during Wednesday night’s Democratic presidential primary debate.
That was a major takeaway of progressives and health policy experts, who said Harris and Biden’s difficulty in explaining the details and benefits their respective proposals showed by comparison the simplicity—and, single-payer proponents argued, the superiority—of Medicare for All in both messaging and policy.
“Without Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren there to make a real case for Medicare for All, the debate meanders.”
—Libby Watson, Splinter
“This flailing discussion is a good demonstration of why Medicare for All makes for great messaging,” tweeted The Week‘s Ryan Cooper. “All these complicated-ass half-measures are impossible to explain.”
Biden and Harris released their healthcare proposals in the days leading up to the second Democratic presidential debate, and both were criticized as inadequate to the task of overhauling America’s deadly, profit-driven status quo.
The former vice president’s plan would create a public option and expand Affordable Care Act subsidies. Harris’s proposal, which she misleadingly described as “Medicare for All,” would expand Medicare and preserve a major role for private insurance.
Analysts said the inadequacies of both plans were on display on the debate stage Wednesday night, just 24 hours after Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) forcefully defended Medicare for All from attacks by right-wing Democratic candidates.
“For all its other pros and cons, single-payer’s not-so-secret weapon is its simplicity,” tweeted the Washington Post‘s Jeff Stein. “So clear and easy to explain: Everybody in; nobody out; no healthcare costs.”
By contrast, Stein pointed to Biden’s explanation of his plan, which—by his campaign’s own admission—would leave millions of Americans uninsured.
“They can buy into this plan,” Biden said of Americans who currently have employer-sponsored insurance. “And they can buy into it with a $1,000 deductible and never have to pay more than 8.5 percent of their income when they do it.”
Biden went on to bash Medicare for All in a way that showed, as Splinter‘s Libby Watson put it, he “does not have a good grip on how healthcare works.”
“The fact of the matter is that there will be a deductible,” Biden said of Medicare for All, which would in fact eliminate premiums, co-pays, and deductibles. “It will be a deductible on their paycheck. Bernie acknowledges it. Bernie acknowledges it. Thirty trillion dollars has to ultimately be paid… I tell ya, that’s a lot of money, and there will be a deductible. The deductible will be out of your paycheck, because that’s what will be required.”
As Watson noted, “Biden seemed very confused about basic questions of health insurance.”
“He initially claimed his plan would limit co-pays to $1,000, then corrected himself later to say there would be $1,000 deductibles—but then said that Sanders’ plan has ‘a deductible in the paycheck.’ This, for a start, is not a thing—a deductible is the amount of money you have to spend on healthcare before the insurance company will chip in, not something that comes out of your paycheck.
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