Let’s Be Honest about Warren’s Single Payer Proposal

It’s fair for Scot Lehigh (Elizabeth Warren’s health care pipe dream) and Joan Vennochi (The sad truth in SNL’s Warren skit) to question the candidate’s tactics in sticking with her single payer plan, but some of their criticism is dishonest, disingenuous and destructive. Lehigh describes it as “government run healthcare” and “hugely expensive” when in fact it is neither. It would simply unite payment under a government-run system (in that way, like Medicare), which will make it the only proposal that holds any promise to reduce and control overall healthcare costs. It is, in fact, far less expensive than the current system of multiple payers, each with their own systems for filing claims and approving care, which currently wastes the valuable time of actual providers (none of whom will be government employees) and forces them to hire armies of administrative staff. The expenses of the current system are real, and born by taxpayers. Warren’s proposal would reduce overall costs as it shifts many of them onto wealthier people, eliminating medical bankruptcies and covering everyone.

Lehigh and Vennochi don’t have to like Warren’s plan, but they ought to be honest in their criticisms and let people decide based on facts rather than political sloganeering.

[Submitted as a letter to the editor of The Boston Globe but not selected for publication.]