Obama did what he thought was best. Progressives must accept no less than Medicare for All--and more

[pdsimdars]

President Obama had a lot of obstacles in his path. As the first black president (and one that America was not ready for) he had to play many games of appeasement. The fallacy is that his biggest obstacles were Republicans.

President Obama's signature project was health care, and he did what it took to get it through. Progressives who have always wanted a single-payer system knew that President Obama said he wanted one, too. We continued to push him lightly, but ultimately continued to move our tolerance in favor of a system continued to be less and less beneficial for people, and more beneficial for corporations. Remember that health insurance stocks soared when Obamacare became the law of the land.

We acquiesced, when single-payer was not even the starting point. We gave in when Democrats dropped the public option. Why? We thought we knew the president's heart. Deep inside, he supported single-payer. Moreover, many of us convinced ourselves that the system would morph into a single-payer system because even without a public option, the law required that insurance companies accept anyone who applied for insurance, irrespective of pre-existing conditions. We assumed that ultimately would see many of them bow out of the system, leading to the migration to single-payer.

My article titled "Yes, the Affordable Care Act Is The Path To Single Payer Universal Healthcare" made a bold assertion.

During the Affordable Care Act debate, there was a public option that would have simulated the latter. Lobbying summarily got it removed because had it made it into the Act, over a short period of time, arithmetic would prevail as the public option would be less expensive for any given plan. It would then turn Obamacare into a single-payer system by attrition.

There are several different pathways to reach the same goal. It is however important that the paths are built. Obamacare is the path built with pebbles and stones. It is better than the mud path of years past. As riders demand a smoother path they won’t yearn for the mud path again but for a paved road. Americans will not go back after tasting healthcare/health insurance as a right with all the benefits mentioned above. Exchanges will become single payer entities as health insurance companies are unable to demand the profits they want. Eventually, exchanges will morph into Medicare for all.

The genius of Obamacare is not that it solved the problem in its entirety. The genius is that it made reverting to an immoral system untenable.

That assertion is now in question, given that Donald Trump and his administration are methodically deconstructing Obamacare while lying to his constituency about providing better and cheaper health insurance. Of course, there is no such plan.

We were wrong in not treating health care as an existential problem that should not be tackled incrementally, because even well-intentioned incremental construction can be easily deconstructed when a regime that disregards the poor and middle class comes into power. And Trump is doing just that.

Democrats get in their own way too often. After all, Obamacare was less than optimal not because of Republicans, but because Democrats continued to carry water for the health insurance companies and the pharmaceutical companies. Many would say compromise with stakeholders is necessary. While that may be true, the health industrial complex is more akin to an extortioner than a stakeholder.

Recently, President Obama had a meeting with a group of freshman members of Congress. Common Dreams reported the meeting as follows:

Former President Barack Obama on Monday night cautioned freshman members of the U.S. House against pushing for broadly popular, sweeping reforms by suggesting that voters will reject progressive policies due to their supposed high costs—despite evidence to the contrary.

At a meeting organized by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Obama told several first-term members both that they should continue to pursue "bold" policy agendas—but also injected the familiar right-wing and centrist canard concerning the cost of such programs.

"He said we [as Democrats] shouldn't be afraid of big, bold ideas—but also need to think in the nitty-gritty about how those big, bold ideas will work and how you pay for them," one attendee told the Washington Post.

The two ideas struck many critics as contradictory. Some slammed the former president for appearing to try to tamp down the ambition, passion, and sense of urgency many freshmen including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) have brought to their work—hoping to combat a climate crisis fueled by corporate greed and politicians' complicity; a for-profit health insurance system which has left tens of millions of Americans without healthcare; and rising economic inequality.

President Obama has not learned the most important lesson of his administration: Democrats playing to the middle and appeasing corporations isn't our game. It shouldn't be, and it will never be the way to win. It cost us in 2000, 2004, 2010, 2014, and 2016. But when people believe we will do something progressively bold, we win.

When Republicans are in power they know not to ask the question, 'How will it be paid for?' They know the answer is the deficit spending they rail against when Democrats are in power. Dick Cheney once pointed out an important fact: deficits don't matter.

Our economy is human-made. We use fiat money and as such, we cannot run out of it. We should make the economy serve us, and not the other way around.

I recently listened to economist Stephanie Kelton, and she expressed the former differently, if not more elegantly. She said we currently define a budget and then decide what we can afford. Why not determine what we need, and then fit our budget to fulfill the need? The money is there because as the owners of a sovereign currency, we determine the supply.

I interviewed Daily Kos’ own Arliss Bunny, an MIT physicist, who further explains Modern Monetary Theory. It isn’t a theory, but rather how we employ monetary policy for ‘those who matter to politicians.’ She provides a detailed explanation that will make it clear that the money can be there for the entire progressive agenda, if we remove the chains our current titans of finance are using to enslave the masses.

Politicians rarely ask how something is going to be paid for when going to war or awarding tax cuts to the rich. Likewise, we should not allow that question to deter the progressive agenda. We have the answer. There is work to be done, and there are problems to solve. An economic model that cannot connect available workers with work to be done is a failure. We must adjust the economic model to solve the problem for all, instead of enrich a few.

Let's stop undermining the intelligence of Americans. Obama did what he thought was right, but incrementalism and timidity just won't do anymore. We now have young leaders who have the freedom to be real and articulate policies, undeterred by corporate media criticism, push polls, or legacy economic fallacies.

They are not owned, and they are not caged by the system they must defeat.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/3/31/1845862/-Obama-did-what-he-thought-was-best-Progressives-must-accept-no-less-than-Medicare-for-All-and-more

[wasupaloopa]

1. It should be Medicare for those who want it. If you go into 2020 and people think they will be

forced off the insurance plans they have from employers or elsewhere, plans they like and want to keep, you risk losing their vote.

We need a public option not medicare for all what ever that means.

The risk the left takes is that people do not understand what they are talking about and the right will stoke their fears.

Better to win the White House and Congress first, then introduce your ideas over time so that they can be understood and excepted.

Many of us grew up during the cold war and to many the word socialism is connected to the anti religion, 5 year plans and shooting people who try to leave Communist way of life.

Millennials do not have any connection to the cold war and duck and cover.

[watoos]

3. I agree with you about the public option.

Medicare is great, I am on it, but Medicare is not free, premiums are deducted from my SS, and there is a small deductible to pay. Also, Medicare only pays about 80% of the bill so people have to buy a supplemental insurance or hope that they don't have a major expense.

I assume that all of the people on Medicaid will get to stay on Medicaid? They have a much better deal than people like me who have Medicare. I'm not complaining, we should certainly take care of the poor and disabled and the children in our country.

The real answer is a single payer plan that covers everyone, good luck getting there. The notion that a new plan is too expensive doesn't compute with me when we already pay more for our health insurance than any other country, and by the way, our life expectancy has fallen 3 years in a row now.

[wasupaloopa]

4. What ever it is, people have to be receptive first

[area51]

15. What's being proposed

is improved Medicare for All.

[wasupaloopa]

16. The fire all part is what people with good insurance

will object to.

[Freddie]

5. Completely agree

Many if not most working adults LIKE their employer plan and would be suspicious of the unknown.
Before I retired my job was covered under the teachers union. For $160 a month I covered my spouse and myself. As long as you stayed in network there was no deductible or co-insurance, just some small co-pays ($10 to $50) for doc visits and prescriptions. I would not be happy at the thought of giving that up for something unknown.
Medicare for Anyone Who Wants It. All or nothing usually gets you nothing.

[uponit7771]

13. +1

[watoos]

2. First of all,

in the Obamacare fight, the public option was included in the bill and ready to be passed. It wasn't Republicans who actually killed it, sure they all voted against all of Obamacare. It was a former Democratic Senator who ran as an Independent and won, who killed the public option, it was Joe Lieberman. Joe Lieberman's vote against the public option killed it.

President Obama was no liberal president. He suggested the Sequester when Republicans were threatening to not raise the debt ceiling because they were so concerned about our national debt back in 2011-2013. President Obama proposed the Sequester, across the board cuts. It was so radical that Congress would have to come up with another way to reduce our deficit. A super-committee was created to avoid the Sequester and find other ways to reduce the debt. There were people like Patty Murray, John Kerry, Chris Van Hollen, and Jim Clyburn on that super-committee. They failed to come up with a solution so the dreaded Sequester was enacted in 2013 and it is effect still today. Want to know one of the items that is cut 2% every year because of the Sequester, reimbursements to Medicare doctors. Obama's strategy in proposing the Sequester is hurting plain old Medicare.

Don't even ask me about president Obama proposing chained CPI which would have given Republicans a foot in the door to dismantle Social Security.

I wonder if any of those freshmen members of Congress asked president Obama about the Sequester? Did they ask him about reimbursements to Medicare doctors? Did they ask him why he offered up chained CPI?
Don't get me wrong, we would be in much, much worse shape were Obama not elected president, many more people would have died early deaths, but, we can do better, Yes We Can.

[theaocp]

6. As always, negotiate from pie in the sky.

STOP negotiating from what you think they other side will tolerate.

[pdsimdars]

7. Amen! Hit the nail on the head.

[zipplewrath]

11. No, no!

We have to reach across the aisle and work with the opposition.
We have to reach out to Trump voters and bring them into our big tent.
We need to go in a Third Way.

[Hortensis]

8. Both the next ACA step and whatever version of MfA was

passed (there are many, widely varying) would be incremental steps either to or toward true universal coverage.

On the table is whether the next increment will be to repeal and start over with a new, more expansive bill or to proceed toward universal coverage as planned through the ACA.

The problem with repeal and replace, easy as the very misleading "MfA" label suggests, is that even Bernie Sanders calls for a 5-year roll-out period. That would begin AFTER we get the power to do it, if we do, AFTER a bill is written, AFTER it's finally passed, and AFTER the usual waiting period before beginning implementation.

Just passing one of the MfA versions, let's say his, would take 3 years minimum from now -- time to get control of both houses of congress so it becomes possible, plus time to write an 8-foot stack of legislation. That last would take several months at least, even assuming cutting and pasting thousands of pages from the ACA. After passing Sanders' version, then would come 5 years of gradual implementation. The ACA's already implemented.

And, the prospect has to be faced, what if we DON'T get the power we need in 2020 and lose the house and any ability to improve and strengthen popular and legal support for the ACA before it's destroyed?

Bernie Sanders just highlighted a huge additional problem on top of all that: Sanders is refusing to support improvements to the ACA, including lowering premiums, for political reasons. FOR HOW MANY YEARS would we halt all improvements? Another 3 until repeal? Will we repeal incrementally, refusing improvements to existing policy, over another 5 years or all at once in the beginning, leaving many people with no or only partial coverage?

Link to tweet

Imo, with other candidates harnessing the MfA-label enthusiasm to their own campaigns, Sanders has ridden this issue about as far as he can. Impeding the ACA won't get him elected, just hurt millions.

And sure, we know both Trump's and Sanders' populist factions are determined to get the Obama and Democratic Party brand off their healthcare program at almost any cost, but everyone else should be very careful about what they support. Examine the product and count the costs before buying.

[Recursion]

9. What if I don't like the idea of a Trump appointee having my medical records

and making decisions about what level of care is and isn't appropriate?

[zipplewrath]

10. You're right

It should be some functionary from a for profit insurance company making those decisions.

[Recursion]

12. That would be better, yes

They at least don't have an active agenda of harming gay people and minorities.

[ismnotwasm]

14. Ugh.

The problem with Medicare for all isn’t money, it is in its implementation. And damning Obama with faint praise is revisionist crap. Democrats have been fighting for years for our platform. Sometimes winning, sometimes not.

As far as the intelligence of Americans, 62 million of us voted for Trump, around half didn’t vote at all. This isn’t an actual reflection on intelligence, granted, but it’s certainly not a sign of giving two shits about the country or the people in it.