Saturday, December 7, 2019
Riding the Fence on Medicare for All Isn’t Smart Politics
With Kamala Harris out of the race and Elizabeth Warren’s numbers dropping, recent weeks haven’t been kind to candidates who have equivocated on Medicare for All. Bernie Sanders is the only candidate whose support for M4A is solid and unchanging — a stance that’s not only morally correct but politically smart.
MEAGAN DAY
MICAH UETRICHT
https://jacobinmag.com/2019/12/medicare-for-all-elizabeth-warren-kamala-harris-bernie-sanders?utm_source=Jacobin&utm
It’s been a tough few weeks for Democratic presidential candidates who’ve equivocated on Medicare for All.
Most strikingly, earlier this week, Sen. Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign died on the vine. The major obstacle preventing Harris’s campaign from ever achieving liftoff was that she built her career from prosecutor to city district attorney to state attorney general as a tough-on-crime Democrat in California. In the post–Black Lives Matter era (and one in which leftist Twitter users were constantly calling her a cop, which apparently bothered campaign staffers), the image Harris had cultivated became a political liability.
But the public’s trust in Harris was shaken for another reason: her flip-flopping on Medicare for All.
Harris announced her candidacy on a Friday in January 2019. On the next Monday, she suggested at a CNN town hall event that she agreed with Sen. Bernie Sanders — whose 2017 Medicare for All bill she co-sponsored — that all private health insurance should be eliminated and replaced with a universal public program.
“I believe the solution, and I actually feel very strongly about this, is that we need to have Medicare for all. That’s just the bottom line,” she said. Referring to the private health industry, she added, “Let’s eliminate all of that. Let’s move on.”
Strong stuff. But facing intense criticism for these remarks from billionaires like Howard Schultz and Michael Bloomberg, Harris’s campaign immediately recanted. By the end of Tuesday, her campaign press secretary and a top adviser had both assured the media that Harris was open to keeping private insurance.
Her campaign had been in swing for only five days, and she already blatantly backtracked on Medicare for All. It wouldn’t be the last time.
In June, Harris told the New York Times that she did support scrapping private health insurance. On the debate stage later that week, she raised her hand alongside Sanders to affirm that position. Then, less than twenty-four hours after the debate, Harris walked it back again, insisting that she misunderstood the question as being about which option she would select personally, not her plan for the entire country.
By July, she had released a health-care plan of her own, disingenuously called Medicare for All, that retained a role for private insurance — a complete reversal of her previous stated commitments.
At that debate in June, Harris workshopped a new tagline. She would pursue what she called a “3 a.m. agenda,” a raft of “tangible solutions to the issues that wake us up in the middle of the night.” But the real Kamala Harris 3 a.m. agenda, it appeared, was fielding phone calls from incensed deep-pocketed supporters in the wee hours and issuing an embarrassing retraction at daybreak.
Harris’s prosecutorial background no doubt limited her appeal from the outset. But her poll numbers didn’t actually begin to plunge with the circulation of Kamala-the-cop memes in the spring; they dropped precipitously in the summer, following her second public reversal on Medicare for All.
Future historians won’t be able to tell the story of Kamala Harris’s ill-fated presidential campaign without accounting for her wild vacillations on the election’s highest-profile political issue, based on her campaign’s (ultimately incorrect) read of what was politically advantageous rather than morally right.
Warren’s Fancy M4A Footwork
Grabbing fewer headlines this week was Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s recent dip in the polls. In September, Warren was hailed as the race’s new front-runner after a surge in support that month. But any front-runner has a target on their back, and her opponents quickly found her weak spot.
While Warren had avowed support for Sanders’s Medicare for All plan since her campaign launch, she tended to elide details, either referring people to Sanders’s plan without getting into the weeds herself or reducing Medicare for All to a “framework” that lacked specifics. And there was one detail in particular that she was clearly uncomfortable embracing: the inevitability of a middle-class tax hike.
Sanders has been consistent on this point, clearly explaining that a few people’s taxes will go up, but overall costs will go down, while claims denials and medical debt will become a thing of the past. But for her part, when asked if she would raise taxes, Warren assiduously avoided this direct explanation.
On the debate stage in October, Pete Buttigieg, whose “Medicare for All Who Want It” plan amounts to a public option with a continued role for private insurance, accused Warren of evasiveness on the tax question. Warren responded that under her plan, taxes “will not go up for middle-class families. And I will not sign a bill into law that raises their costs.”
Without attacking Warren, Sanders then responded by separating taxes and costs: even if taxes go up, costs will go down. “The tax increase they pay will be substantially less — substantially less than what they were paying for premiums and out-of-pocket expansions,” he said.
A moderator asked Warren, “Will you acknowledge what the senator just said about taxes going up?” She would not.
Sensing an opening, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who herself opposes Medicare for All, went for the jugular. “At least Bernie’s being honest here and saying how he’s going to pay for this and that taxes are going to go up,” Klobuchar said. “And I’m sorry, Elizabeth, but you have not said that, and I think we owe it to the American people to tell them where we’re going to send the invoice.”
To many viewers, on both sides of the Medicare for All debate, it appeared that Warren had something to hide.
Her campaign quickly realized the error and announced that they would be releasing their own financing plan, one that would corroborate Warren’s claims that Medicare for All could be achieved without a middle-class tax hike. Unfortunately, the plan they released only made matters worse.
Clearly Warren’s campaign had hoped that the media would declare her victorious in solving the puzzle. At first a few did. But as the details were fully debated, many onlookers — again, on both sides of the Medicare for All debate — were left puzzled.
To avoid looking like she was raising taxes on the middle class, Warren proposed a regressive head tax on employers. An employer-side head tax is a tax, just a badly designed one that ends up shifting the cost burden to workers. Warren appeared to be seeking to obfuscate elements of Medicare for All that she considered a political liability in order to protect her own campaign from criticism, refusing to call a spade a spade.
One week later, Warren announced that she would not be fighting for Medicare for All at the beginning of her first term in office. Instead, she would pursue a public option — in other words, “Medicare for All Who Want It.” Once that was won, she insisted, people would realize that they did in fact want it, and this would make it easier to fight for Medicare for All. It’s the same logic Buttigieg uses when he talks about the public option as a “glide path” to single-payer health care.
Both proponents and opponents of Medicare for All interpreted Warren’s two-step strategy as a pre-compromise. And in the middle were plenty of voters unsure what to think about Medicare for All, but who came away with the perception that Warren, though less clumsy and obvious than Harris, was likewise grasping for the most politically expedient position.
And, as with Harris, the triangulation that was intended to avoid scaring off key constituencies ended up depressing enthusiasm overall, because it undermined the notion that she was engaged in a forthright, honest effort to win a health-care reform in which she truly believed. Any explanation of Warren’s recent waning support that fails to account for the damage this did to her campaign is incomplete.
Give It to Me Straight
If the health and lives of millions of Americans weren’t at stake, you’d have to feel sorry for these candidates. Most of the Democratic presidential field — with one rumpled, finger-wagging, politically and morally unshakable exception — are caught in a bind when it comes to public health insurance.
On the one hand, Medicare for All is popular, particularly among Democratic voters. On the other, the health insurance companies, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, billionaires, and the entire Republican Party are waging all-out war on the prospect. That’s a tricky spot to be in, unless you’ve held the conviction for over four decades that corporations should not under any circumstances be allowed to continue raking in billions in annual profit by denying people care, overcharging for medicine, and maintaining health care as a lucrative commodity rather than a basic right for all people.
American voters aren’t stupid. They can tell the difference between candidates who are ironclad supporters of a policy because they believe it’s the right thing to do, and candidates who are calibrating their message to avoid criticism and please as many people as possible.
The public’s attraction to political conviction runs the other way, too. Pete Buttigieg is rising in the polls, and Joe Biden maintains his lead. One thing these centrists have in common: they both oppose Medicare for All and aren’t coy about it. In the end, this helps them in a way that’s similar to how a commitment to Medicare for All helps Sanders. A lot of voters who are attracted to Medicare for All are unsure what to think about its feasibility. But they’re still planning to vote, and they’re more inclined to throw their support behind a candidate who appears to give it to them straight.
Electorally, it’s unwise to equivocate on the biggest issue of the cycle. Morally, it’s indefensible to support the continued existence of the private health insurance system, which exists to deny people coverage while extracting as much profit from them as possible in their time of need. There’s only one candidate who’s both consistent and correct on this question. That’s Bernie Sanders.
Harris is out. But even though her front-runner title has currently been revoked, Warren remains very much in the game. She’ll likely continue to straddle the divide between a public option and a single-payer Medicare for All program for the time being — but don’t expect that to work in her favor.
While the American public has yet to be fully convinced that Medicare for All is an achievable fix to our health-care system, it knows the system needs fixing. And, one direction or the other, it’s most likely to follow a candidate who knows where they’re headed.
After the Berlin Wall... Capitalism and Enjoyment Thrive
Alan Rowan
On November 9th the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall was celebrated at the once divided city’s iconic Brandenburg Gate in remembrance of a truly momentous occasion, one that, at the time, was watched on TV with amazement around the world. The collapse of the wall led to the unification of Germany and the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel on the occasion of this anniversary spoke in rather sobering tone of how “The values that Europe is based on, such as freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and safeguarding human rights, are anything but self-evident”, adding, “They have to be lived and defended again and again. This is more important today … than ever before”. Given the rise of populism and the growing disenchantment with politics across many so-called developed nations perhaps few would disagree.
And yet, at the same time there is a dimension, beyond the appeal to “democratic values” that is not mentioned. For example, and in retrospect, one can say that the “fall of the wall” actually symbolised a much wider change - both in Europe and beyond - in that it marked the end of an east/west divide, the demise of state communism, the moment when the whole world embraced capitalism (e.g. today China has 4.5 million millionaires).
As an economic system capitalism, allied with science, has brought us a world abundant with objects, many so useful as is my mobile phone, as well as levels of comfort-in-living unimaginable to even our grandparents. However, if we enjoy such benefits, it can also be said that we are enjoyed by capitalism, our sense of identity, value and self-esteem being deeply tied to what as individuals we can consume, buy or rent – something that in turn is dependent on our labour, reduced to a commodity, a skill-set, something that capital or the market can make use of, meaning make a profit from. As the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (2004) has pointed out the production-consumption cycle of our contemporary world produces a lot of material waste, a growing global and ecological problem, but even more dramatically, he argues, it also produces “human waste”. Waste humans are the superfluous, redundant, unemployed or immigrant others, the ones that no longer fit in society, the functionless, placeless others who must be confined, kept at a distance, especially as they arouse our anxiety, the fear that we too could become socially redundant. Thus we like to think of them as responsible for their own misery rather than as a structural effect of contemporary capitalism, a system that weakens the social bond with others, even as we sit at the edge of a new wave of automation that is going to make a lot more of human labour redundant and un-saleable. If things are bad and likely to get worse, it seems important to ask what so effectively hooks us to capitalism beyond its machine-like profit-seeking described so-well by Marx.
Here Lacan, who famously said that, the superego today does not prohibit, but rather - insistently - says “Enjoy!”, has something to say. To understand how, metaphorically speaking, drinking a glass of water can make us thirstier, is to engage with the human being as an “enjoying substance”, that, in enjoying, goes beyond the satisfaction of need, giving indeed to every need a signifying value. In other words, all human need is taken up and into, subjected to, the autonomy of signifying effects. Here we must, with Lacan, recognise that the human or “speaking-being” is, at his or her very core defined by a lack, a want-of-being whereby our objects of satisfaction, including most poignantly our sexual object is open to variation, contingently chosen, and not “natural”, as in biologically programmed. What capitalism targets so effectively is this lack, proposing to us the fantasy that by means of consumption we can do away with it, a fantasy that at the extreme would have us enjoy alone. For example, in front of our screens, isolated and without the need for others, bypassing as Lacan states all questions of love, which implies that today the sexual relation, and with it the couple, is becoming more difficult to sustain. To put it rather starkly, we can say that capitalism demands that we enjoy our exploitation, our more or less addictive attachment to industrial objects and gadgets that embody an always at hand jouissance, on condition that we ignore something vital to our subjectivity. Namely, that what is specific to human desire is that it is founded on non-saturated lack.
Uprising in Lebanon. Episode 6 of Radio Free Humanity: the Marxist-Humanist Podcast
https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2019/12/06/uprising-in-lebanon-episode-6-of-radio-free-humanity-the-marxist-humanist-podcast/
Episode 6: The Uprising in Lebanon
The co-hosts interview Jade Saab, a Lebanese-Canadian Ph.D. student and author of “Uprising in Lebanon Aims to Replace Entire Political System,” published last month in With Sober Senses. Saab provides us with an update on the state of revolt since his article was published and engages in additional reflections on the uprising and its trajectory.
Some of the issues discussed in the interview are: the roots and causes of the continuing uprising in Lebanon; the movement’s demands; the social composition of and differences within the movement; and the directions in which Lebanon might go if the revolt succeeds in overturning Lebanon’s current political system, based on power-sharing among religious sects. Is an emancipatory direction possible?
In the current-events segment, the co-hosts discuss Sacha Baron Cohen’s forceful and viral critique of the “ideological imperialism” practiced by Mark Zuckerberg and the other “high-tech robber barons” who control social media.
To follow events in Lebanon, Jade Saab recommends the following English-language electronic sources:
The Daily Star (daily newspaper);
Al-Nahar (daily newspaper with an English-language site);
Executive-magazine (focuses on economic and business issues);
English-language Instagram page of Megaphone (independent news outlet; provides daily updates on the uprising);
The Lebanese Politics Podcast (a weekly podcast).
Radio Free Humanity is a podcast covering news, politics and philosophy from a Marxist-Humanist perspective. It is co-hosted by Brendan Cooney and Andrew Kliman. We intend to release new episodes every two weeks. Radio Free Humanity is sponsored by MHI, but the views expressed by the co-hosts and guests of Radio Free Humanity are their own. They do not necessarily reflect the views and positions of MHI.
We welcome and encourage listeners’ comments, posted on this episode’s page.
Please visit MHI’s online print publication, With Sober Senses, for further news, commentary, and analysis.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)