Joe Biden said that his fast-rising rival Pete Buttigieg “stole” the former vice president’s healthcare policy proposals, Reuters reports.

Said Biden: “He stole it. What would you have done to me? You’d have torn my ears off.”

“Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s two-part plan to pass a public option as a transition into Medicare for All — and then full-blown Medicare for All a few years later — has revealed the difficulty of appealing to both the pragmatic and progressive wings of the party,” Axios reports.

“Two days before Senator Elizabeth Warren rolled out a fundamental reimagining of America’s health care and tax system — a $20.5 trillion package that would dwarf all her previous plans combined — she was working the phones to personally preview her proposal and sell it to a select group of political influencers,” the New York Times reports.

“One was Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist, who had written skeptically days earlier that her plan to pay for ‘Medicare for all’ was a ‘make-or-break moment’ for her, if not the whole 2020 race. Another call was to Representative Pramila Jayapal, the lead sponsor of Medicare for all legislation in the House and a leading liberal as the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.”

Dan Balz: “Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has been mostly sure-footed in her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. One exception is health care. On Friday, she issued another proposal to go along with her support for Medicare-for-all, a step that appeared designed to put her into a safer place politically.”

“Warren’s progression on health care through the course of the campaign has taken her from a position of flexibility to one of seeming inflexibility — at least until Friday. Over a period of months, she walked herself into a place that many Democrats feared could make her chances of winning a general election more, not less, difficult. Whether Friday’s turn alleviates those worries remains to be seen.”

Margot Sanger-Katz: “Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator, has allied herself with the “Medicare for all” wing of the party, saying she would propose a single-payer system. But on Friday, she released a second plan, a sort of steppingstone along the way that would create a more optional government program. Her transition plan is engineered to pass with only a majority of Senate votes, instead of the 60 usually needed to overcome a filibuster.”

“But it also includes a long and detailed list of the things she would do if she couldn’t get Congress on board. That section of the report, which is likely to get less attention and draw less criticism than the rest, actually tells us a lot about what health care policy would probably be like in a Warren administration.”

“Sen. Elizabeth Warren proposed a transition period for moving the nation to a Medicare for All health system and said that if she were elected president, legislation would be passed by the Democrat’s third year in office,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“In her first 100 days, Ms. Warren would push for a separate transition bill that would let people buy or move into a government-provided health plan.”

“The transition plan resembles buy-in proposals backed by other Democratic presidential contenders such as Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg. Like Mr. Biden, Ms. Warren would also focus on shoring up and expanding the Affordable Care Act.”

Alan Abramowitz: “An analysis of the impact of Medicare for All on the 2018 House elections indicates that Democratic challengers and open seat candidates in competitive districts who endorsed a version of Medicare for All similar to that proposed by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren did significantly worse than those who did not. This negative effect, close to five points of margin after controlling for a variety of other factors, was clearly large enough to affect the outcomes of some House contests.”

“It is possible that the estimated effect of Medicare for All was a byproduct of other differences between supporters and non-supporters. For example, supporters might have taken more liberal positions on a variety of other issues as well as Medicare for All. Even if that is the case, however, these findings are not encouraging to supporters of Medicare for All. They indicate that candidates in competitive races who take positions to the left of the median voter could get punished at the polls. Democratic presidential candidates would do well to take heed of these results, particularly as the eventual nominee determines what he or she wishes to emphasize in the general election.”