Long but devastating rebuttal of the "No, We Can't" establishment critics of Sanders' single payer

[mhatrw]

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/01/vox-bernie-sanders-single-payer-ezra-klein-matt-yglesias/

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This, obviously, is the age-old litany of the Important Beltway Pundit, a rarified station that Klein has attained at a precocious stage of his career. Yet before he became a Sunday morning-level pundit, Klein was actually known as a bright young health reform expert, writing detailed analyses and explainers on the finer points of policy. In 2007, he published a broad-ranging and widely praised survey of the world’s health care systems in the American Prospect (Paul Krugman even put it on his class syllabus at Princeton) that did much to establish his early reputation as a policy analyst. And back then, health reform didn’t seem quite so hard or so tough to Klein. Instead, that piece offered a far sunnier perspective. To see just how sunny, it’s worth quoting it at length:

Medicine may be hard, but health insurance is simple. The rest of the world’s industrialized nations have already figured it out, and done so without leaving 45 million of their countrymen uninsured and 16 million or so underinsured, and without letting costs spiral into the stratosphere and severely threaten their national economies.

Even better, these successes are not secret, and the mechanisms not unknown. Ask health researchers what should be done, and they will sigh and suggest something akin to what France or Germany does. Ask them what they think can be done, and their desperation to evade the opposition of the insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry and conservatives and manufacturers and all the rest will leave them stammering out buzzwords. . . .

So let us, in these pages, shut out the political world for a moment . . . and ask, simply: What should be done? To help answer that question, we will examine the best health-care systems in the world: those of Canada, France, Great Britain, Germany, and the U.S. Veterans Health Administration (VHA).

How could Klein have felt such warmth back then for the single-payer systems of Canada or France (let alone Britain, with its socialized NHS!), while being so hostile to Bernie Sanders’s plan now, when the latter claims to draw its inspiration specifically from the former?

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[Mbrow]

1. k&R

[in_cog_ni_to]

2. Whew...LONG was an understatement. :) But worth the read just to see Ezra Klein have

his ass handed to him...little hypocrite.

Last four paragraphs hit the ball out of the park:

<snip>

Obama, in turn, claimed that his plan, too, could lead to single-payer — that, in fact, he had always believed in single-payer in principle. When the details of Obama’s plan were finally released, Klein (then a single-payer fan) actually cited the absence of “a public insurance option capable of serving as the seed of single-payer” as one of its major shortcomings.

All this tantalizing rhetoric about single-payer was certainly helpful in motivating the base to turn out that November. And then, when the congressional sausage machine got going, it was invaluable in getting the base to swallow a series of increasingly unpalatable compromises — until finally the bait itself was tossed away and the public option declared dead.

The predicament the party finds itself in now, judging by the new poll numbers out of Iowa, is that it faces a base that took it at its word. And now sites like Vox — key actors in what might be called the party’s “base management system” — are forced to spring into action to patch things up. But it’s not easy to hold up both halves of that maxim, enunciated by famous liberal Immanuel Kant, regarding the proper attitude of a subject toward his sovereign: criticize, but obey.

Right now, the system may look a little unsteady. And maybe it is, we’ll see. Still, if I were the base — the liberal base, the progressive base, the radical base — I wouldn’t get too complacent.


PEACE
LOVE
BERNIE