"Fight for single-payer
or get kicked out of Washington trying."
While not a 2020 presidential
candidate yet, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) broke from the pack of announced and
expected Democrats on Friday by coming out against Medicare for
All—characterizing a system that would cover everybody and leave nobody as not "practical"—and
was greeted by
a widespread reaction of "Thank
you, Next" and "Adios"
from progressives no longer willing to entertain half-measures when it comes to
solving the nation's healthcare crisis or bolstering the private insurance
industry.
"I know most of the
Democratic primary candidates are all talking about Medicare for all. I think
instead we should do Medicare at 55," Brown said during a question and
answer session at the Chamber of Commerce in Clear Lake, Iowa. Brown said that
reducing the age or letting people over 55 buy into the existing Medicare
system early would have a better chance of getting through Congress.
"I'm not going to come
and make a lot of promises like President Trump did ... I'm going to talk about
what's practical and what we can make happen. And if that makes me different
from the other candidates so be it," Brown said.
Progressive critics like Splinter's
Libby Watson, however, took issue.
"You know what isn't
practical?" she added. "Spending twice as much as other rich nations
for worse outcomes."
"It's always 'practical'
to leave people behind, and maintain corporate power," tweeted Michael
Lighty, a healthcare policy expert and founding fellow at the left-leaning
Sanders Institute. But with the right kind of "leadership," he noted:
"We can make the necessary possible."
Ahead of Brown's comments,
Watson on Friday wrote a
long and detailed column explaining why the kind of "Medicare at
55" or "Medicare buy-in" plan the senator is proposing—basically
a public option, but available only to certain segments of the population—is
not just bad policy, but bad politics.
It's not necessarily that what
Brown is calling for would "make things worse," she argued,
"it's that things are already catastrophically bad, and anything that just
tinkers around the edges keeps us in dire straits." And by not taking the
fight over healthcare to the next level by demanding a policy that would
actually solve the problem, Brown is exemplifying the worst tendencies of the
Democratic Party's old guard:
Democrats frequently admit
defeat before they've even got their trousers on. This is one of the major
differences between establishment Democrats and the newly popular leftist
politicians, like Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: They understand that
you don't turn up to a knife fight with a banana and a shirt that says I Am So
Frightened on the front. But prominent Senate Democrats and at least one
presidential candidate have already shown that they're willing to compromise on
single-payer. That is not how you win a fight.
As The Hill notes,
"Brown has increasingly been seen as a presidential candidate since his
reelection victory in November, when he easily won another term in a state that
voted for President Trump in the 2016 election." The senator, the outlet
added, "has been cast as a Democrat who could win states in the industrial
heartland that the party lost to Trump in 2016, such as Michigan, Wisconsin and
Pennsylvania."
But Brown's comments on Friday
appear very out of touch with national voter sentiment—whether in the mid-west
or elsewhere—by calling a solution that garners
massive (and growing)
public support, and which
studies show would be less expensive and more cost-efficient than the
current profit-driven system, not politically realistic:
For Watson, however, not even
the strong polling numbers tell the whole story. "Single-payer supporters
don't say we should have the policy because people support it,"
she wrote. "We believe it's good, just, and more humane than our current
nightmare, and that the conventional wisdom that it would be deeply unpopular is
wrong."
While all the Democratic 2020
candidates will ultimately be pressed on their solution to the nation's ongoing
healthcare crisis, Dr. Carol Paris, former president of Physicians for a
National Health Program, which advocates for a single-payer system like
Medicare for All, told Think
Progress this week that anyone who runs must demonstrate they understand
that only Medicare for All—a system with "No co-pays, no deductibles, no
need for supplemental policies, no private insurance"—has the ability to
confront the current system's inherent failure.
"I want to know that
candidates," she said, "are using that term to mean improving
traditional Medicare and expanding it to everyone from birth to death residing
in the United States."
Because they've taken great
pains to lay it out clearly and succinctly, other Medicare for All proponents
like the Democratic Socialists of America have said the American people should
"accept nothing less."
In the closing argument of her
column, Watson put it this way:
The American healthcare system
is fundamentally broken. We spend twice what other rich nations do for much worse
outcomes, with the highest infant mortality and the lowest life expectancy.
Like the Affordable Care Act before it, the public option would preserve the rotten
system that leads to this. It is motivated by a cowardly, straight-up wrong
idea of pragmatism, the kind of half-hearted idea that Democrats—willingly
bullied for 30 years by Reaganite, anti-government, Chamber of Commerce-funded
slimeballs—think is all we can possibly achieve.
"Fuck that," she
concluded. "Fight for single-payer or get kicked out of Washington
trying."
Updated: Sen. Brown spars with
Iowa Democratic voter over his refusal to embrace Medicare for All.
On Friday night at meet and
greet event at the home of a local Democratic leader in Black Hawk County,
Iowa, Sen. Brown was pressed on his Medicare for All stance by Ruth Walker, a
78-year-old retiree from Cedar Falls. The following transcript of the
"lively exchange" was posted Saturday morning in a
news story by Cleveland.com reporter Seth A. Richardson:
Walker: “It isn’t like it
won’t work. I think advocating part way measures is not going to work. We tried
part-way messages and it doesn’t work.”
Brown: “I want to get there,
but I want to help people’s lives.”
Walker: “But we’ve been doing
this forever. We need to get there.”
Brown: “I understand that. I
understand that. We missed by one vote getting Medicare-at-55 because of one
guy.”
Walker: “I mean
Medicare-for-all. That’s the problem, though.”
Brown: “I know you did. I know
you did. I understand that, but we are no closer to Medicare-for-all today than
we were 15 years ago.”
Walker: “We haven’t been
advocating very long.”
Brown: “OK, well, I want to
improve people’s lives today. I know Congress won’t pass Medicare-for-all.”
Walker: “They will if they
found out the people are brought – educate the people.”
Brown: "Well I try to
educate the people. But I want to help people make their lives better right
now. If we can pass Medicare-at-55 tomorrow, two things would happen: a whole
lot of people’s lives would improve and a whole lot of voters would think that
the next step is to do more.
"My ideology says
universal coverage today, just like yours. But I want to see people’s lives
better. We’ll keep having this debate and people will say, ‘Medicare-for-all.
Medicare-for-all,’ and nothing will change. I think if we can make that change
of Medicare-at-55 or Medicare-at-50, it will make all the difference in the
world and then we get to the next step. Otherwise it’s this sort of tilting at
windmills where everybody feels good saying, ‘I’m for Medicare for all. I’m for
Medicare-for-all,’ but nothing changes.
“And I want to educate people
too, but I want to change people’s lives and help people now. We have a
different disagreement there. We want to end up in the same place, but we’ve
got to get Congress to act as quickly as we can when we were so close before.”
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