Elizabeth Warren's Medicare-for-all proposal would cost Jeff Bezos $7 billion
Elizabeth Warren's Medicare-for-all plan is reportedly funded completely by employers. FOX Business' Hillary Vaughn with more.
Elizabeth Warren’s sweeping proposal to overhaul the U.S. health-care system could cost Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos $7 billion.
On Friday, the Democratic presidential candidate unveiled her $52 trillion Medicare-for-all plan, including $20.5 trillion in new funding, which she said could be generated without raising taxes on middle-class Americans (they’d no longer pay health premiums or copays, but would pay taxes on the extra take-home pay they receive under the new system).
Instead, Warren proposed funding it with a slew of new taxes on corporations and the ultra-wealthy, including doubling a 3 percent tax on people with more than $1 billion.
Bezos, the world’s richest man, is worth a staggering $111.5 billion. Under Warren’s plan, that wealth would be taxed at 6 percent, culminating in a whopping $6.7 billion tax bill for the Amazon executive.
ELIZABETH WARREN UNVEILS $52 TRILLION MEDICARE-FOR-ALL PLAN, HERE'S HOW SHE'LL PAY FOR IT
Warren estimates that under the current health-care system, employers will spend nearly $9 trillion over the next decade on health care and related expenses.
“My idea is that instead of these companies sending those payments to private insurance companies, they would send payments to the federal government for Medicare in the form of an Employer Medicare Contribution,” Warren wrote in the plan.
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It’s unclear exactly what the difference would be.
Amazon’s annual financial filing did not specify how much the company pays to offer private health insurance to its employees. According to a 2018 survey by the Washington, D.C-based National Business Group of Health, employers were expected to pay about $15,000 per employee for health care in 2019. Amazon employs more than 275,000 workers in the U.S.
Amazon declined to comment.
Other billionaires in the country who’d see a sizable jump in their tax bill if Warren's bill became law include Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who would pay about $6.4 billion and Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett, who'd pay $5 billion. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, meanwhile, would have to shell out an additional $4.2 billion.