Tuesday’s debate offered Elizabeth Warren the opportunity to feel what it’s like to be the Democratic field’s clear frontrunner, a prospect that recent movement in the polls has brought to the point of likelihood. Throughout the night, her rivals forsook Joe Biden as their main target and instead took pointed jabs at her. Warren fended them off with sturdy aplomb, save for one criticism: how she reckons with middle class taxes in a world with Medicare for All. It’s clear that she has a plan for dealing with these attacks; it’s also clear that her plan is not as effective as she believes it to be. What’s more, she’s missing out on a chance to reframe the terms of the debate in a way that might benefit her candidacy and improve public opinion of Medicare for All.

It’s been a running gag throughout the debate cycle: The moderators enjoin an argument over the candidates’ various health care plans, giving the field’s Medicare for All opponents the opportunity to ask but how will you pay for it. Warren, called to account for how she’ll prevent middle-class taxes from rising, shifts the topic from taxation to health-care costs. Tuesday night, when pressured, she retreated time and again to a simple set of talking points: “Costs will go up for the wealthy. They will go up for big corporations. For middle class families, they will go down. I will not sign a bill into law that does not lower costs for middle class families.”



As rejoinders go, it’s simple enough, but it nevertheless resonates poorly in the room. Her constant repetition of this thesis is one of the few occasions in which she sounds like a conventional politician, enunciating the same sentence in a Marco Rubio-esque ostinato. It’s especially glaring in contrast to Bernie Sanders, the proverbial author of “the damn bill,” who is forthright on this point: Middle class taxes would go up.



It’s not impossible for a reasonable person to grasp what Warren is saying about health-care costs. Medicare for All purports to eliminate a slew of household expenses. Routine health care costs—from premiums and co-pays and deductibles, to pharmaceutical mark-ups and coverage gaps, to the surprise costs that can be incurred from emergency care or out-of-network providers—would either be zeroed out or drastically reduced. When these savings are laid against the increased taxes needed to cover single-payer government health care, middle class Americans come out ahead on their balance sheet.



Or so Warren seems to be implying. The problem that Warren faces—the reason moderators and rivals will keep pressing this question—is that, for whatever reason, she wants to skip over the explanation. This is a puzzlement, given that Warren has an inordinate amount of experience offering sound personal financial advice. There’s not much more to be done once the matter is explained through the lens of a household budget. Maddeningly, in this instance, she wants to attest to solving the Medicare for All equation without showing the work. In so doing, she forces voters to fill in these gaps for themselves.

