‘Medicare for All’: Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg Clash at Debate – The New York Times

Instead, Ms. Warren has tried to reframe the issue around the total costs that families would face under Medicare for all. She has said that costs would go up for the wealthy and for big corporations, but they would go down for middle-class families — an explanation she repeated on the debate stage on Tuesday night.

She has also said “I’m with Bernie” on Medicare for all, referring to Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who has championed single-payer health care.

But unlike Ms. Warren, Mr. Sanders has provided a direct answer to the question of whether taxes on the middle class would rise. “Yes, they will pay more in taxes, but less in health care for what they get,” he said in the first series of primary debates, in June. At the debate on Tuesday, Mr. Sanders offered a similar acknowledgment that taxes would go up.

“For virtually everybody,” he said, “the tax increase they pay will be substantially less — substantially less than what they were paying for premiums and out-of-pocket expenses.”

Mr. Buttigieg found that response to be an improvement over Ms. Warren’s. “Well, at least that’s a straightforward answer,” he said, “but there’s a better way.”