General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Meet Bernie Sanders' 2018 challenger [View all]JCanete
(5,272 posts)We got politically screwed for Obamacare anyway, so whatever calculations were being done, you have to admit, they did us no favors...we could have done something that no middle class people got screwed by. We could have made it nearly unassailable. Sure, the Repubs would have tried to assail it, and the money would have gone hard(er) at our politicians, but the benefits would have been universal. Nobody, or very few people, would have been hurt by this. Even if Obamacare curbed insurance inflation, people still saw their bill going up to the point of hardship. Not capping prices was shooting off our own foot.
When we as a party say something is impractical, we make it so. We set limits on the possible. We know that singlepayer isn't impossible, but we are playing in current political realities, rather than shaping them. Trump shaped political reality. He said..."we're building a stupid pointless wall..." We say, "political reality is what the money and republicans say it is." That has got to stop.
We ARE cutting our nose off to spite our face, and others are interpreting that rightly or wrongly as our politicians doing no such thing. They are interpreting it as business as usual...as part of the big charade. I can't fault them for coming to that conclusion, even if I myself remain slightly more hopeful and hold out a little more faith in our leadership.