Kamala Harris recently said she would not raise middle class taxes to pay for Medicare For All. The Sanders campaign (and others) criticized her saying that's not possible. The Sanders position is yes there will be new middle class taxes but people will get a lot of new benefits and come out ahead.
At first, I thought the Sanders campaign was right. We do have to fund health care and I’m not sure it’s possible to fund a program as big as Medicare For All without any middle class tax increase. Yes people would get new benefits and yes a lot of people would come out ahead.
But Stephanie Kelton puts a new spin on this. She believes Kamala Harris’s critics are setting a trap for her she shouldn’t fall for. Medicare For All wouldn’t be all new spending. A lot of it would be a transfer of spending from the private sector to the public sector. If that total transfer was less- which it might be - and people had money left over, it would work just like a middle class tax cut. Medicare For All would also be more secure. People would not have to worry about losing their health care if they lost their job.
I’m torn about Medicare For All. I feel Biden’s health care plan is politically safer. This is more true because even in a Democratic Senate, I doubt we would have the votes for anything much beyond Biden’s plan. Then why take the risk? After all, I have seen a lot of polls showing support for Medicare For All drops when people discover they would lose their employer provided health insurance.
Yes, the insurance industry was so successful in defeating Medicare For All all these decades that people may be accepting the industry’s framing without even being conscious of it. Would 95% of us be better off under Medicare For All? Can we undo all the insurance industry framing in one election cycle? I don’t know.