Elizabeth Warren's Medicare for All Plan

I think Warren’s plan gives us something to mull over and it provides a baseline that I think was sorely needed.

That being said, there is one part of it that I’ve rejected before and I’m going to reject again and that’s the wealth tax.

It’s not that I have any issue with taxing the extremely wealthy it’s just that I’m not sure how practical this tax is going to be.

First of all calculating net worth as a basis to levy the tax upon strikes me as fraught with all sorts of potential problems when wealth is not held in liquid assets. Even if we could come up with a reasonable way of calculating wealth in that case do we really want to demand that people sell stocks, bonds, real estate or other non-liquid assets in order to pay a wealth tax?

Second is that its constitutionality is questionable especially with the current SCOTUS. Even if it SHOULD be considered constitutional I don’t feel confident that this SCOTUS will find it so.

I would much prefer adding two or three higher marginal tax brackets and adding a bracket or two to long term capital gains. This is simple and we know with absolute certainty that it’s constitutional.

The polls seem to indicate that a majority of people support Medicare for All But there is a difference between supporting something in principal and supporting a specific approach for implementation.

The big issue is that people tend to be suspicious of change. People who have access to reasonable health care are going to be concerned that any big change is going to screw things up. I suspect a lot of current Medicare subscribers are going to be concerned that opening up Medicare to everyone is going to negatively impact them in some way manner shape or form with the most likely being that it will be harder to get appointments or treatment.

And they may be right. But we won't really know until Medicare for All is implemented.