If Health Care Reform Falls, Progressives Need to Look In The Mirror

[Better Believe It]

If Health Care Reform Falls, Progressives Need to Look In The Mirror
by Karen Dolan
March 30, 2012
.... progressives did fight for the public option. With some notable exceptions, almost exclusively. Instead of being the rallying grassroots campaign and reasonable solution desired by all progressives, universal, single-ayer health care became the pariah of the organized progressives, scoffed at and scorned as unachievable.

(Don't we hear the same sort of crapola today about Medicare for All being a utopian unachievable dream? BBI)

It should have come with no surprise that starting where you want to end in a negotiation is a sure way to not get what you want. Progressives could have not only kept their integrity, but they could have provided a left flank as a foil for the administration. Centrist Dems and less-extreme Repubs could have seen a public option as a place to go. The administration should have allowed it, encouraged it, engaged it, used it. Progressives should have fought like hell for it.

No one can say that the outcome then would have been the public option, or wouldn't have. No one knows what the political climate could have been with a strong, organized fight from progressives for Medicare for all. But without a strategy that included such a fight, it could easily have been predicted that public option would not be the outcome.

If we had ended up with a single-payer system, then of course the "individual mandate problem" is non-existent. Even if we had ended up with a "public option," we would not have had this the question before the Supreme Court this spring. Justice Kennedy himself suggested so in his comments that the Individual Mandate problem could be avoided by a tax funded single payer national health service.

Read the full article at:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/03/30

Some those same self-proclaimed liberals today claim that Medicare for All can't be passed if the individual mandate in the health insurance industry law is overturned by the Supreme Court. Actually just the opposite is true. They are wrong on this just as they were wrong in refusing to campaign for a single payer system before the insurance industry law was passed by Congress. A health insurance industry lock on the health care system will all but make Medicare for All impossible for a generation. BBI

[CAPHAVOC]

1. I think so too.

The self-proclaimed liberals do not advocate for Medicare for all. Why? Dunno. Seems like they give up the ship without firing a shot.

[kenny blankenship]

2. Those who abandoned the public option and single payer

just because their leadership proved to be either bought-off hacks or a bunch of knock kneed geldings, can call themselves neither progressive nor liberal. They're sheep molded from Jello.