Richard Rubin posited, in his Wall Street Journal article, some hypotheticals for how Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) might pay for her Medicare-for-All plan. He suggested that one of the ways toward this goal of Medicare-for-All that all the Progressive-Democrats running for President need to do was to

find[] ways to reduce health-care costs

Were Progressive-Democrat candidates serious about this, though, they’d stop conflating health care costs with health care coverage costs, get government out of the way of both industries, and put them both (back) into competitive, free market environments.

Rubin also asked whether

(I) would…support Senator Elizabeth Warren’s Medicare-for-All plan if she presented a fiscally sound option to fund it[.]

The question as phrased is a bit of a non sequitur since it’s virtually impossible for such a thing to be funded in anything remotely approaching a fiscally sound manner.  Leaving that aside, though, no, I would not support her or her “fiscally sound” plan.

Warren’s plan, as with her other plans, are fundamentally socialist. There might—might—be a way to make such a thing fiscally sound, but socialism can never be economically or morally sound.

Socialism can never be economically sound because it caps the performance of the most successful, reducing the incentive to work to one’s potential, and so leads to erosion of output, both individually and in the aggregate across a national economy. Beyond that, socialism puts government in control of production, sales, and purchasing decisions, and government can never be as efficient or as prompt in responding to changing conditions as the totality (or subsets of the total) of private citizens acting on their own needs and wants.

Nor can socialism ever be morally sound. By transferring the responsibility for those production, sales, and purchasing decisions to government and away from the individuals who otherwise would make them, socialism eliminates personal initiative and personal responsibility, indeed, the very concepts of personal initiative and personal responsibility.  Instead of letting men be moral actors in their own right, socialism simply reduces them to wards of the socialist state—which is to say to subjects of the men who populate the socialist state from time to time.