Watch: Elizabeth Warren Casually Admits Medicare For All Will Kill 2 Million Jobs
Massachusetts Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren agreed that her “Medicare for All” plan would result in about 2 million lost jobs, calling it “part of the cost issue,” and stating “should be part of a cost plan.”
Warren appeared at a wide-ranging New Hampshire Public Radio forum this week, and was asked about an estimate that a Medicare for all plan could kill about 2 million jobs in the health industry.
“An economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst told Kaiser Health News earlier this year that that could result in about 2 million jobs lost,” NHPR’s Casey McDermott said, adding “He said those would be mostly administrative positions and insurers, doctor’s offices, and he said the politicians who want to move toward that system, Medicare for All, have to think about what a quote ‘just transition, a fair transition’ would look like.”
“What would that look like for you?” McDermott asked.
“So I agree,” Warren said, and added I think this is part of the cost issue. And should be part of a cost plan.”
“Although do recognize on this what we were talking about, and that is, in effect, how much of our healthcare dollars have not gone to healthcare,” Senator Warren continued. “How many of those dollars have been pulled out in other directions.”
She went on to describe for-profit insurance as driven by denying care in order to earn profits, and said “That’s just not a sustainable healthcare system.”
On Friday morning, Warren released her cost plan for Medicare for All, and it did not include any proposal for mitigating these job losses. It did include a promise to put forth another plan to deal with the transition to Medicare for All, but that promise of a plan also did not address the job losses. There was one vague reference to the “concerns” of “people who work for private health insurers.”
The report to which McDermott and Warren were referring, however, did suggest proposals to mitigate the job losses, such as “up to three years of salary and help in retraining for another profession” for those displaced.
Watch the full forum above, via New Hampshire Public Radio.
