Yes, Bernie Sanderss plan moves America closer to single-payer

[babylonsister]

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/9/15/16304082/bernie-sanders-single-payer-medicare

Yes, Bernie Sanders’s plan moves America closer to single-payer
How Sanders has changed the health care debate.
Updated by Ezra Klein@ezraklein Sep 15, 2017, 8:30am EDT


snip//

The debate Sanders is engaging lies upstream from arguments about health care policy. He is trying to remake the political framework in which future technocratic health care debates take place. And it is already working. Senate Democrats I speak to are thinking much more now about how to create single-payerish plans that they believe to be more technically and politically sound than the Sanders bill. Some of them are current cosponsors on Sanders bill. Absent Sanders’s advocacy, none of them would be seriously thinking along these lines. The same is true for left-of-center think tanks.

The Democratic half-measures that follow Sanders’s plan will be different from the Democratic half-measures that preceded it. He’s changing the party’s definition of success, and thus changing the future path of health policy.

snip//

Indeed, the most interesting part of Sanders’s bill, for my money, is its transition plan: Over the first four years, before it cancels anyone’s insurance, the plan expands Medicare to cover dental, vision, and hearing aids, makes children up to age 18 eligible, and lets adults over 35 buy in. You could pass that part of Berniecare on its own and have made real progress toward single-payer.

One question you might raise is whether any of this counts as “closer” to single-payer, or whether single-payer is a binary policy that’s either 100 percent enacted or zero percent enacted. I think it’s pretty clearly the former: A world in which anyone can buy into Medicare, and so Medicare slowly takes over insurance markets and expands its bargaining power, is a world in which the system is moving closer to a single-payer-like structure, and where further expansions of Medicare are both easier and more compelling.

Just as important as what counts as progress is what counts as deterioration. If Sanders is successful in redefining the goal of Democratic health policy, other policies Democrats have considered in recent years would now be dead. Raising the Medicare age, which the Obama administration weighed during budget negotiations, is antithetical to moving toward single-payer. Expanding Obamacare’s exchanges so private insurers cover more people and Medicaid covers fewer people is not progress toward single-payer. Adding private insurers into Medicare, as Sen. Ron Wyden has proposed, is not progress toward single-payer. Allowing private insurers to sell skimpier plans in the Obamacare marketplaces, as some Senate Democrats have proposed, is not progress toward single-payer.

By changing the Democratic Party’s health care goal, Sanders is changing the realistic policies that further that goal. In a way that wasn’t true a decade ago, the Democratic Party is becoming a party dedicated to moving the country closer and closer to single-payer. They may not get all the way there — political parties rarely fully achieve their aims — but that’s where they’re going. And it’s Sanders who has put them on that path.

[Sunlei]

1. I appreciate Bernie helping inform Americans about the "health care debate" & gov process. people li

people like undereducated Republicans president, Mr. Trump have A FUCKING LOT to learn.

[Demsrule86]

5. Really, do you now? I don't really think it was a good idea and may cost us the ACA.

[Sunlei]

7. no, letting Republicans keep picking up the same repeal ACA without complaint will cost us ACA

[Demsrule86]

11. All the time wasted on a single payer which can't pass...they could have put forward ideas to save

the ACA. Instead the GOP has been proclaiming that the ACA can't be save with no rebuttal....very foolish. And if we lose the ACA, I doubt I can ever forgive those who played a role in its ' demise. Without the ACA to build on there will be no single payer for a generation.

[Demsrule86]

12. There is no shot of doing anything if the ACA goes down...spitting into the wind.

How many will die?

[Sunlei]

2. allowing 55 age and up on medicare soon is probably something Insurance Corps would go for soon.

Insurance corps don't want to insure over 50 people anyway.

[Voltaire2]

3. Of course they would as that would saddle the taxpayers with high cost older individuals

I used to think that was a good idea. Now I think it is a terrible idea. Medicare for all works best if the entire population, healthy and sick is in the program.

[Sunlei]

6. Bernies 'plan' is start w/ 55plus & over ten yrs add younger & younger. keep ACA & start NOW /w 55+

you're incorrect about "saddle Americans"

Americans would have LOWER taxpayer burdens because we're handing over billions in government money (taxpayer money) as subsidies to "for profit" insurance corporations TODAY. if 55+ move to government insurance (medicare) billions in subsidies is stopped.

government run medicare is run as NON-profit and costs are much more regulated by government 'rules'. IMO "taxpayers" will be very happy in the long run.

[Voltaire2]

8. It is implemented over four years, that is fine.

Just moving everyone between 55 and 64 is not fine. 55 year one 45 year two 35 year 3 all in year 4.

[Demsrule86]

4. No it doesn't. It is a distraction and as the GOP prepares to take down the ACA...

it serves as a distraction. Where is the bill to save the ACA? The GOP have the votes this time supposedly by block grantin medicaid and using blue state Medicaid money for bribes for sitting GOP senators in order to get their votes. The GOP is betting that we won't have a sufficient majority in the coming years to ever get any healthcare passed, and with the gerrymander they are probably right.

[Voltaire2]

9. It is not a distraction.

There is no conflict between voting to prevent repeal of the ACA and voting to replace it with medicare for all. Oddly enough they are separate issues. But you know that.

[freemay20]

10. Is it possible...

that the recent raised profile of single payer/Medicare for All in the national discussion will save ACA as a first step?

Many of us were upset that when Obamacare was being crafted the public option wasn't even on the table. Negotiations started in the middle, not with our ultimate desire included which meant the final product would be far to the right of what we wanted.

Is it possible that this focus on single payer will be the negotiating tool needed to save ACA in the short term, and indeed move us toward single payer as the next step since it will be more familiar (perhaps) to more people?

[treestar]

13. While the Republicans have Congress

No such thing is going to happen. In fact we could lose the ACA. It has to wait for a Democratic Congress in 2018 at the very least. Even then, the Orange Toxin won't sign it.