Elizabeth Warren Still Isn’t Getting Specific on Medicare for All
Elizabeth Warren’s stance on health care reform has been murky throughout her campaign, so her health care plank announced last week was welcome. Unfortunately, that plank still doesn’t answer some fundamental questions about where exactly she stands on Medicare for All.

2020 Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren speaks during a rally in Washington Square Park on September 16, 2019 in New York City.Drew Angerer / Getty
Elizabeth Warren, whose presidential campaign has been plagued from the start by ambiguity on the subject of health care, finally added a health care plank to her website last week. Unfortunately, it tells us nothing new about where she stands.
The webpage — which reiterates Warren’s support for Medicare for All without referencing a specific bill — is frustratingly sparse on detail. There’s nothing about eliminating premiums, co-pays, and deductibles. Nothing about expanding Medicare to cover dental, vision, hearing, and mental care. Nothing about prohibiting private insurers from competing with the public Medicare for All program — and indeed, no reference to “single payer” health care at all.
Instead, Warren’s platform focuses mostly on incremental reforms like lowering prescription drug costs, expanding access to care in rural areas, investing in communities hit by the opioid addiction crisis, and regulating private insurers to make sure they’re adequately covering mental health services — all desperately needed reforms, of course, whose significance shouldn’t be downplayed. But those reforms don’t add up to a wholesale transformation of the American health care system. Without such a transformation, our system will continue to enrich health care executives while failing millions.