Elizabeth Warren Is Missing a Plan

By Kimberley A. Strassel

According to presidential aspirant Elizabeth Warren and her supporters, the Massachusetts Democrat “has a plan” for everything. Student-loan forgiveness, immigration reform, criminal-justice overhaul—check, check, check. The senator even has strategies for paving dirt roads in Indian country and for providing “fresh, affordable, local food.”

It is the presence of so many plans that make notable the one policy area for which Ms. Warren doesn’t have a clear strategy: health care. That missing agenda item speaks volumes about the shrewdness—or deception—of her campaign.

To be sure, Ms. Warren suggests she has a health-care plan. In the first Democratic debate, she stated she was “with” Bernie Sanders on Medicare for All. She appeared to double down on this commitment in the second debate, joining Mr. Sanders to rough up his detractors, and promising to “fight for” single payer.In reality, she’s been far less clear about what she will do and when. Wade through Ms. Warren’s detailed website, and you’ll find no health-care section. She avoids specifics on the campaign trail, avoids the whole topic when she can. She has refused to answer yes-or-no candidate questions on health topics. Read the second debate transcript closely, and you’ll notice she spends most of her time arguing that insurance companies bring in too much and pay out too little.

When the New York Times asked this spring about her health-care plan, she listed her top priorities: protecting ObamaCare, reducing drug costs, and getting “a consumers’ bill of rights for private insurance so that people don’t get ripped off.” Beyond that, she said she’d “keep moving us to a place where everybody is covered at the lowest possible cost.” She has repeatedly noted that there are many different (incremental) “paths” to Medicare for All—such as lowering the age of eligibility, or letting employers buy into the program.

This isn’t a plan; it’s a hedge. It’s notable because it comes as most of the Democratic field has quietly acknowledged that killing private insurance is a surefire political loser. Five of the seven U.S. senators running for the presidency are officially sponsors of Mr. Sanders’s Medicare for All bill. Yet in recent weeks, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand have all backed away from the provision that would prohibit private insurance. Most now instead support giving Americans a public “option” alongside private insurance—joining the likes of Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar and Beto O’Rourke. Ms. Warren’s vagueness exposes the limits of her liberal “populism.” She calls herself a progressive, but her campaign has focused on capturing “forgotten” voters by uniting them against “corrupt” Washington, “corrupt” Wall Street, “corrupt” “Big Ag.” Her playbook is relentlessly monotone: Highlight an unpleasant necessity of life (student debt, child-care bills), blame it on the rich and powerful, propose government as the solution.

Her pickle with health care is that more than 100 million Americans still prefer their private insurance to a government replacement. That’s the “popular” will. Medicare for All would also require Ms. Warren to go beyond her wealth tax on millionaires and billionaires, the revenue from which she has earmarked for other programs—free tuition, student-debt forgiveness, child-care subsidies. Medicare for All, as Mr. Sanders has acknowledged, would require her to tax the middle class—which also isn’t very populist.

Ms. Warren faces Democratic primary concerns that she is unelectable—too extreme to win nationwide in November. Her campaign understands that a clear, committed plan for Medicare for All would add to that liability.

She initially seemed set to get around all this by constraining herself to more insurance regulation. But Mr. Sanders and his voters are turning Medicare for All into a progressive litmus test. The Vermont independent is increasingly highlighting his rivals’ failure to embrace his plan as evidence of their phoniness. Ms. Warren wants and needs those voters, especially should Mr. Sanders leave the race. A more modest health-care plan would alienate them. How to straddle this? She can’t. Which is why the woman who has a detailed plan for everything, has no official plan for an issue that Gallup reports 80% of voters said was “extremely” or “very” important to their 2018 vote. So far, it’s worked for her. Progressive activists read from her second debate performance that she is fully committed to Medicare for All. Middle-of-the-road Democrats read from her other comments, and her omissions, that she may settle on an insurance-regulation plan, accompanied by a proposal to expand Medicare incrementally, or over time.

The question is how long she gets away with it. If this election is as mind-bendingly consequential as Democrats claim, surely the public deserves to know Ms. Warren’s plan for the U.S. health-care system. Maybe some intrepid debate moderator might even ask in September: “Ms. Warren, why don’t you have a plan for that?”