CommentsTRUMP WATCH--No less than authority than Senator Lindsey Graham himself has told us that America is on a "march to single payer." He said over and over this last week that if his scam of a bill did not pass, which it will not thanks to your voices speaking out, that single payer was inevitable.
True enough. But the difference between inevitable sooner, and inevitable later, is what YOU do now to support it.
We will be eternally grateful to Bernie Sanders for getting us this far, by putting a path to single payer on the table in the Senate, and finding 16 co-sponsors already. Without him we would not even have that.
Bernie Forever caps here.
But without YOU, and what you will do now, we can go no further.
Don't you find it odd that at the same time Lindsey Graham is in fact affirming that the single payer will happen, that establishment Democratic so-called leaders are telling us it's still not time to talk about it?
Make no mistake about this; we are making progress even there. During the campaign Hillary Clinton stated quite forcefully that single payer would never, ever happen. Now she is saying it's an "aspirational" goal. So at least she's stopped smearing the initiative outright.
But listen carefully to this, she nonetheless argued to Joy Reid, political analyst" on MSNBC, over the weekend that we can't talk about anything better until AFTER we defeat Graham-Cassidy, that it would be a distraction. And then of course there will always be some subsequent excuse about why we can't talk about something better in the form of single payer Medicare For All.
Because then immediately, IMMEDIATELY, Clinton pivoted to talking about something "better" in the form of the Murray/Alexander compromise, where Murray has already surrendered on the issue of state "flexibility," which is essentially the same flexibility as in Graham-Cassidy,
for states to arbitrarily deny coverage if they feel like it. So it's OK to talk about something "better" even now, and it's not a distraction, according to Clinton, as long as it isn't actually better.
Ya wanna know WHEN else it was not yet time to talk about single payer Medicare for All? - WHEN the single payer activists who were trying to get it into the debate were being dragged out of hearing rooms in 2009, under orders from the Democratic majority committee chairmen, mind you, for even trying to speak out about it.
The American people were sold a defective product in the form of the so-called Affordable Care Act. And now they want to sell us a warrantee at extra cost.
The Democrats passed a bad Republican idea (remember it was based on Republican Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts model – with mandate).
The good for nothing Republicans are just trying to replace it with an even worse idea. Which is why the public, and the CBO, has hated every doomed replacement bill the Republican splintered majority has proposed so far. It's up to us as progressive activists to push for something truly better and to do it now. NOW, now.
Can't wait for the Bernie vs. the health care barbarian’s debate on Monday night on CNN? Yeah, we're going to talk about it now. You betcha.
Too late to get you any of our new "Lock Him Up/Impeach Trump" popcorn boxes in time for watching this Monday's show with. But request a couple now and you'll be all set for the next must watch policy debate, or the next congressional hearing on the constitutional crimes of the Trump gang.
Lock Him Up/Impeach Trump popcorn boxes.
And if you want to do more, get a Economical and Efficient Single Payer cap too, in money saving green.
(Michael N. Cohen is a former board member of the Reseda Neighborhood Council, founding member of the LADWP Neighborhood Council Oversight Committee, founding member of LA Clean Sweep and a contributor to CityWatch.)
-cw
