Just before Sunday's Democratic primary debate in South Carolina, Bernie Sanders released the details of his Medicare-for-All universal healthcare proposal, saying it is "time for our country to join every other major industrialized nation on Earth and guarantee health care to all citizens as a right, not a privilege."
The argument being put forth by the 3rd Way Clintonites is with a GOP Congress Sanders would never even get this plan into committee let alone out of it. Maybe so, but that begs the question of what would Hillary do? She’s already told us NOTHING that she’s fine with Obamacare thinks it’s just grand and why not it takes ROYAL care of her clients BIG Healthcare/BIG AMA /BIG PHARMA et al. Better to have Sanders fighting for it among other Progressive policies day and night then Hillary just gathering more cash from her Corp. backers for the next four yrs. She has already told us if we elect her we get four more years of OBAMA. If your for that then vote for HRC, no thanks I’ll vote for Bernie.
Not to mention that Bernie’s Medicare for all plan would cost around $16 trillion for the first decade, $10 trillion less than the $26 trillion of taxpayers money that Congress has committed to the various bailout schemes for Wall Street.
Any reduction in the $26 trillion bailout might reduce some of the cash flow Wall Street channels to the Clintons and their foundation.
And what does the Clinton clan have to worry about when it comes to health care coverage? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. So, HC, take all that dark money from Big Pharma…perhaps you can burn it to keep warm when you are out in the cold after you don’t get the nod.
Go Bernie, GO!
The Establishment doesn’t want citizens to know that single payer would actually work and be cheaper. As long as Big Insurance is an enormously profitable industry in the US, just like Defense is, there is no real motivation by the powers-that-be to get rid of the health care system we have now. After all, the ACA wasn’t permitted approval until the insurance moguls got their piece of the pie. And Ms. Clinton has a practical and emotional investment in keeping the ACA.
The real obstacle to single-payer in this country is what to do with all the people who work in the insurance industry if it pretty much gets eliminated. And there will be elitist hangers-on who want a “higher” level of care by paying private medicine for their services. I live in a Midwestern city that sustains itself partly from insurance employers. It’s not going to be easy to change that, and it will be divisive.
But fact is, we cannot go on this way, subsidizing the insurance industry with artificially inflated medical costs that are devastating for the economically compromised (a class growing as we speak). Paying decent salaries to workers transferring from the insurance industry to federal (and state?) employment is essential. There will be others in the insurance industry who would be unnecessary in a single payer system and will have to find new jobs. And quite a battle with the top echelon making obscene profits currently.
That should not stop us. We must attack this problem or insurance will only become more bloated and unworkable with time, and we will continue to be slaves to an unbalanced system of feral capitalism that eventually will lead us into feudalism.
