Highlighting the divisions in the Democratic party this election, Colorado's ballot measure for a universal, single-payer healthcare plan is facing unexpected resistance from the very same party that has been calling for such a healthcare plan since the 1990s.

"There is a disconnect between the powers that be and the people," said state senator Irene Aguilar, a former doctor and the chief architect of the statewide 'Medicare-for-all,' called ColoradoCare, in an interview with the Guardian. "The powers that be are incrementalists. There hasn't been a courage of conviction to try and deal with [healthcare coverage]."

If it passes, ColoradoCare would make Colorado the first state in the nation with universal healthcare.

Most Americans support replacing Obamacare with a single-payer system, and Bernie Sanders has made his support for universal healthcare a central pillar of his presidential campaign. His rival Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, continues to support the least popular position of maintaining the Affordable Care Act (ACA) with only incremental and modest changes.
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In January 2015, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) found there were 564,708 homeless people on a given night in the United States. As ThinkProgress has previously reported, one of the best ways to end homelessness is to make more permanent housing available.

Last year, a HUD study found that giving families permanent subsidies, like a housing choice voucher, is more effective in preventing homelessness than other interventions, like short-term rental assistance or temporary housing. It also helps keep families together. A 2014 study from the Central Florida Commission on Homelessness estimated that it cost the state over $31,000 each year for each chronically homeless person, compared to just $10,000 to provide them with permanent housing, job training, and health care.

Using those findings, ending homelessness in the United States would likely require about .01 percent of next year’s likely military expenditures. The government could even purchase a $1 million home for every homeless person in the United States with the budget, and it would still have money leftover.
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@DwayneDavidPaul 18h18 hours ago
Liberal reformist politics in a nutshell. "Black liberation brought to you by orgs that prey upon Black folk."

While serving as secretary of state, she greenlighted enormous weapons deals to US-backed tyrants, dramatically strengthening the military prowess of despots who happened to be some of the Clinton Foundation’s most generous donors.

In a stunning demonstration of her failure to absorb even the most basic lessons of the Iraq war, Clinton spearheaded the Obama administration’s overthrow of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi based on faulty intelligence.

After Gaddafi’s especially gruesome public lynching by US-backed Libyan rebels in 2011, Clinton could barely contain her excitement, gleefully telling CBS News, “We came, we saw, he died.”

Libya predictably descended into a lawless haven for extremist groups from across the region, including the so-called Islamic State, or ISIS.

Obama this week called the failure to prepare for the aftermath of Gaddafi’s overthrow the “worst mistake” of his presidency.

As secretary of state and the leading champion of the intervention, that planning would surely have been Clinton’s primary responsibility.

Libya wasn’t the only country Clinton meddled in.

Following in the footsteps of her mentor, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Clinton supported and legitimized the right-wing Honduran military coup that ousted democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya in 2009, plunging Honduras into record-setting violence that sent thousands of children fleeing for their lives.

Clinton later advocated for the deportation of tens of thousands of unaccompanied Central American refugee children who sought asylum in the US in 2014 to “send a message” to their parents that “just because your child gets across the border, that doesn’t mean the child gets to stay.”

Nearly a third of those children had fled post-coup violence in Honduras.

Clinton reiterated her support for deporting them as recently as August.

Indigenous rights and environmental activist Berta Cáceres criticized Clinton’s role in the coup prior to her murder by a Honduran death squad on 3 March.

The Clinton campaign denied that its candidate bore any responsibility for the violence, casting her role in Honduras as “active diplomacy.” This week, Clinton again defended the overthrow of Zelaya.

Despite the trail of blood she left behind, Clinton remains confident in the righteousness of US-backed regime change.
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To the left she was a traitor, willing to sell out the women and children she professed to care more about.

"There were people in the White House who said, 'just sign anything,' you know," the New York senator said in an interview. "And I thought that was wrong. We wanted to do it in a way that kept faith with our goals: End welfare as we know it, substitute dignity for dependence, but make work pay."

She sits now in the seat filled then by Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y. The famous expert on poverty and welfare famously predicted that there would be deeper impoverishment, and greater suffering, of perhaps a million more children after welfare revision. Moynihan could not have foreseen the outcome: A robust economy that helped the legislation to work, just about the way it was supposed to.

The welfare rolls have been cut in half. Child poverty has dropped.

Poverty overall is down. Work, overall, is up.

"Now that we've said these people are no longer deadbeats -- they're actually out there being productive -- how do we keep them there?" Clinton said.