PERSPECTIVE FROM THE 19^TH HOLE: This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf. Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon, as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist. This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.

I asked myself a probing question this past weekend in between watching golf and football.

If the 2020 presidential contest came down to Donald Trump vs. Elizabeth Warren, for whom would I vote? The context is that support for Warren appears to be on the rise while support for Joe Biden appears to be waning.

I thought of this in relation to a comment from a friend of mine a couple weeks ago – a stalwart Republican, by the way – who said he was so sick of Trump’s excesses that he would vote for “anybody but Trump.”

In the spirit of full disclosure about a year away from the presidential vote, I find myself in a similar camp, though I have not yet decided if I could vote for a currently-running Democrat, including Warren, because they are so far left as to be out of sight.

For me, that might mean casting my vote for a third-party candidate who would display the types of credentials I think we need in the leader of the free world.

Regarding Warren, I would have to think long and hard about her vision for America, which, put simply, is to create more and more government. The result would intrude into all of our lives, often with a demand that we pay for the privilege of having government control us.

My mixed emotions about Warren arise from various sources, including her recent proposal to outline how she would pay for her government-run Medicare for All plan.

On one hand, she deserves credit for stepping up to the plate to outline an approach on health care rather than continuing to dodge the funding question.

But would her plan work?

I say no.

To arrive at this position, I rely on three perspectives – my own background for 25 years as health care lobbyist in Oregon, a column by the Washington Post’s Megan McArdle, and a Wall Street Journal editorial.

McArdle writes that the “math for Warren’s health care plan adds up if you accept its ludicrous premise.”

“After months of pressure,” McArdle wrote, “Warren finally released her comprehensive Medicare-for-all plan, which promises lower costs for everyone, paid for by taxes on corporations and the rich.

“The good news is, the math adds up, as long as you buy her assumptions. The bad news is that Warren’s assumptions are crazier than keeping a pet rhinoceros, after which, who cares that her calculator works? This is to actual policymaking as the plastic noodles in a ramen-bar window is to lunch.”

And this from Wall Street Journal editorial writers:

“Now we know why Elizabeth Warren took so long to release the financing details of her Medicare-for-All plan. The 20 pages of explanation she released Friday reveal that she is counting on ideas for cost-savings and new revenue that are a fiscal and health-care fantasy.”

Key criticisms revolve around her reductions in what almost every analyst believes is a cost in the range of $30+ trillion – yes, trillion – plus the effect of huge taxes on business, which would reduce the tax payments from business which could re-locate operations, again, overseas to escape the punitive Warren taxes.

In this blog, I don’t intend to summarize all of the deficits in the Warren plan, which will come under the glare of analysis in the next days leading up to the next Democrat presidential debate, if not in the debate itself, not to mention the first vote in the Iowa caucuses.

Rather, I will make two concluding points.

1. Warren’s funding plan creates a new federal entitlement with no way to pay for it – at least no legal way, short of displaying the excellent quote, “it is easy to spend other people’s money” – which Warren does in spades.
2. It is time, as I have posited previously, for public officials on both sides of the aisle, also armed with private sector health policy expertise, to get into a room – yes, there will have to be a round table inside that room – to devise a plan from the center.

No Democrat big government proposal. No Republican “just say no” approach.

I have seen this work in Oregon over the years and it is time for it to be tried again as an illustration that America can still solve pressing public policy problems, such as health care.

So, for whom will I vote in 2020?  Don’t know yet.