Elizabeth Warren has been anointed, by the fall of Biden, as the media-blessed front-runner.

However, Warren has her own baggage, and it’s not just her repeated lies about her family’s “heritage” or her employment history. Remember this little exchange when she went on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, before she was The Special, when she got called out on her ducking and dodging about how she would pay for Medicare For All?

Well, tonight, the senator from Massachussetts tried it again. But this time, despite whining and warnings from the progressive left, Pete Buttigieg saw his opening and took aim.

Warren confronted on not answering question on tax hikes pic.twitter.com/AKfZX2iR8V

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) October 16, 2019

Warren has promised that Medicare for All would raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans and lower costs for middle-class families.”

“Costs will go up for the wealthy, for corporations,” she said at the debate. “But for middle-class families, it will go down.”

A moderator followed up: “You have not specified how you’re going to pay for the most expensive plan, Medicare for All. Will you raise taxes on the middle class to pay for it? Yes or no?”

Warren again avoided a direct answer to that question, prompting a sharp response from South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg.”

“I don’t think the American people are wrong when they say what they want is a choice,” said Buttigieg, who has put forward a plan that retains private insurers, which he labels “Medicare for All who want it.”

Buttigieg added: “I don’t understand why you believe the only way to deliver coverage for everybody is to obliterate private plans.”

Warren, as we all know, can’t answer her question honestly because the answer would HAVE to be “yes,” and only Bernie Sanders is honest enough to admit that taxes would have to go up (pay your share, comrade!). Warren tries to spin it as paid for with her wealth tax, and how costs would go down for the middle class because they would no longer be paying premiums or deductibles or copays.

Let’s leave aside the insanity that is the wealth tax (which would certainly not be constitutional, as she would be taxing savings, not earnings, and people have already paid taxes on what they have saved, so this would be a double taxation) for now. There is no way that Warren can keep her promise of costs going down under Medicare For All. Medicare For All, with all private plans eliminated in order to force full participation into the program to de-incentivize doctors from only taking privately insured patients (another issue for another day, as well), would become a state-run managed care plan. So, let’s think about a family not with healthy children, but with disabled children. Maybe like mine, with a child on the autism spectrum.

Would Medicare For All cover all speech, behavioral, and occupational therapies? The answer is either yes or no.

If yes, taxes would go up in order to cover that level of care. Now, the care would be managed, and I look forward to a government bureaucrat examining my child’s treatment records (goodbye, HIPAA and other privacy protections – the government will know all and see all) and deciding that my child has had “enough” therapy by their measurement. But before the “enough,” lots of money will be spent, primarily in early childhood programs, and then cut off as a child ages. Therapy is not cheap. Taxes will go up.

If no, then thousands of families are faced with paying for all of those additional services out of their own pockets. Therapy is not cheap. The financial burden being carried by the families of the disabled will skyrocket. Somewhere along the line, a politician will use this as a leverage to begin adding those services to Medicare For All. Eventually, something would be either added to the program, or mitigated for these families, as an attempt to drum up political support for even more services. And taxes would go up again.

Either way you slice it, the money comes out of the pockets of the middle class voters that Elizabeth Warren needs. There’s no way she can give an honest answer. And after tonight, it’s clear that her political rivals on stage are no longer willing to give her a pass on this, even if the media does.

Featured image: Elizabeth Warren in 2016, official Congressional photo, cropped, public domain