Single-Payer Guide to the 2016 Presidential Elections

[eridani]

https://www.healthcare-now.org/single-payer-guide-to-the-2016-presidential-elections/

While policy analysts, news anchors, and columnists have been engaged in an intense debate over Sanders’s “Medicare for All” proposal, Clinton’s healthcare platform has escaped almost all scrutiny. If you combine the election-season writings of our most prolific, liberal columnists on healthcare reform – Paul Krugman, Jonathan Cohn, Ezra Klein and friends at Vox, Paul Starr, Kenneth Thorpe, Jonathan Chait, etc. – you’ll find more than twenty-five articles scrutinizing Sanders’s single-payer plan. None of them have mentioned a single Clinton healthcare proposal as a point of comparison. Take for example this U.S. News column titled “Clinton Gets It on Health Care: Her proposals are realistic and politically pragmatic; Bernie Sanders’ aren’t,” which fails to reference even one Clinton proposal, focusing exclusively on Sanders’s single-payer plan.

When Clinton’s plan has been invoked by policy analysts/columnists, the debate hasn’t been between two concrete policies, but between one policy (single payer) and a set of goals (expand access to care, make care more affordable). Even a February 2016 Kaiser opinion poll joined the blackout, asking respondents to choose 1 of 4 possible directions for the future of U.S. healthcare. The survey framed the options as being between “establishing a single government plan” and “improving affordability and access to care” under the current system. The phrasing of the latter fails to mention any incremental policy or package of policies that might raise the additional question of whether they’re politically feasible, or will succeed in improving affordability and access if enacted.

Because of the lopsided attention to Sanders’s plan, most voters are unaware of what Clinton’s policies even are. When the media finally lifts the curtain on her platform, they’re in for a bit of a shock: most of Clinton’s incremental policies follow in the footsteps of Bernie Sanders’s work in the Senate.