A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis, serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. © James Conner.
Yesterday, her campaign’s savage and dishonest attack on his support for single-payer health care continued, joined by Paul Krugman, Harold Pollack, and Ezra Klein. All want to address other issues and stay silent on health care, except for quietly singing the praises of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which Krugman at least admits tries to buy off the private insurance industry.
As Kevin Drum observed yesterday, much of this criticism is way over the top:
Klein is right that the mechanics of the plan are critical, and I probably should have done more than shrug that off as something that we’d get to later. Still, I think his criticism goes way too far. This is a campaign document. It’s obviously aspirational, and asking a presidential candidate to go into deep detail about the drawbacks of his policy is a little much. I can’t recall ever seeing that in my life. In a campaign, you sell the high points and then let critics take their shots.
That’s not to say that Sanders couldn’t have done more than he did. He could have and probably should have. In particular, he should have provided at least an outline of how his plan would work: who it covers, who employs doctors, what drives the cost savings, and so forth.
But my take is that Sanders was trying to accomplish something specific: he wanted to show that universal health care was affordable, and he wanted to stake out a position that Democrats should at least be dedicated to the idea of universal health care. I’d say he accomplished that in credible style. It’s fine to hold Sanders to a high standard, but it’s unfair to hold him to an Olympian standard that no presidential candidate in history has ever met. We health care wonks may be disappointed not to have more to chew on, but that’s life. We’ll get it eventually.
What accounts for these napalm-like attacks on not just Sanders’ health care plan but on the very idea that a single-payer system is the gold standard for health care? One motivator is a panic level fear that Sanders is catching fire with Democrats, that HRC is not; that Sanders, whom the conventional wisdom deems unelectable, could win the nomination, taking the party down to defeat like they believe George McGovern did in 1972.
Indeed, some of HRC’s sycophants also seem to fear that Sanders is the reincarnation of Dr. Francis Townsend, whose Townsend Plan spurred the passage of Social Security, and populist demagogue Huey Long, whose Share Our Wealth Speech scared the bejesus out of the New Dealers. Townsend died at 93 in 1960. Long was assassinated by Dr. Carl Weiss in 1935. He was 42, and had announced he was running for President.
But even if the pro-business, socially liberal, members of the party that HRC represents did not regard Sanders as a crackpot, they would oppose comprehensive single-payer health care because they want to spend the money on other things, principally, I believe, on education, infrastructure, especially in our decaying inner cities that resemble the Third World, and anti-poverty programs. They’ve made their peace with health care, buying off the private health insurance industry, pharmaceutical manufacturers, hospitals, and holding down costs by delivering tin-plated benefits. They may not be wholly comfortable that the ACA leaves 30 million without insurance, or that many of the ACA subsidized policies are next to worthless high deductible scams, but they don’t want to talk about those things — and they don’t want Sanders to talk about them, either. So when he reminds them they diverted the money for single-payer to private profits, they accuse him of being an unelectable crackpot. Hardball? No. Beanball.