Warren said she'd take executive action on healthcare in her first 100 days in office, including lowering the cost of critical drugs such as insulin and EpiPens and “crack[ing] down on corruption to rein in health insurers and drug companies.”
She'd also “bypass the filibuster and create a true Medicare for All option” in the first 100 days in office to start “the transition to Medicare for All,” she said.
That option would be open to everyone and be free for nearly 50 percent of people in the country, including everyone under 18 and anyone with income at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty level. Meanwhile, anyone over 50 would be allowed to join the existing Medicare program.
By the end of 2024, she said, the full Medicare for All program would be in place.
It wasn’t clear whether Warren had the transition plan before the criticism of her initial plan. There was no transition mentioned in the plan she unveiled two weeks ago.
A number of other Democratic presidential contenders have criticized Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) for their Medicare for All plans. Before releasing her own plan, Warren had endorsed Sanders’s proposal.
“The difference between a plan and a pipe dream is something we can actually get done,” Klobuchar told Warren during the last debate.
Other contenders have put forth different proposals, such as South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who calls his plan “Medicare for All Who Want It,” leaving private insurance in the marketplace.
Buttigieg’s campaign released a statement after Warren’s Friday announcement, saying, “Senator Warren’s new health care ‘plan’ is a transparently political attempt to paper over a very serious policy problem, which is that she wants to force 150 million people off their private insurance—whether they like it or not. Despite adopting Pete’s language of ‘choice,’ her plan is still a ’my way or the highway' approach that would eradicate choice for millions of Americans.”
