"Here comes the Berniebro"

[Armstead]

3. I'm disappointed in you.

Thought you were above this dismissive kind of crap.

THIS 63 year old "Berniebro" has a very simple answer to why "the Democratic Party, which has spent six years explaining how its market-based health-care policies aren’t socialist.." refues to accept any real reform, regardless of whethr the person representing it happens to call himself a social democrat.

healthcare is a complicated subject. But there is a basic premise. It is a basic necessity, and should be a basic right for everyone. A lack of money should not kill people.

But the Centrist Democratic Party undercut itself when it trotted out a bunch of convoluted nonsense that is the worst combination of bureaucratic socialism and crony capitalism imaginable INSTEAD of offering and aggressively selling a very simple compromise alternative like a public option. But the Democratic "Centrists" chose to kill off the idea of true "social insuranc" due to the combination of fear of the GOP and their own corrupt ties to Big Insurance and Big Pharma.

There was a very simple way to counter the right-wing corporate insurance propaganda.

"We going to offer you an affordable choice for basic health insurance that's not tied to your employer. We're going to open up Medicare to more people as a basic affordable health plan that's available to everyone who wants it. You can choose to sign up, and pay based on a percentage of income that's guaranteed to be affordable, and will be lower than what you have to pay for private insurance. But IF you prefer private coverage, you can still get private coverage. This gives you a choice."

If the Democrats had bothered to use a simple sales pitch, a lot of people would have responded "That sounds like a good deal to me." They could have countered the right-wing corporate propaganda. After all, people like choice, and they also seem to support Social Security and Medicare, those otehr two "socialist" bedrocks.

Instead the Dems brought out this awful hybrid nightmare that forces peope to buy an overpriced product, without the protections a truly public system would provide against gouging.

So yeah, people are going to be angry abut that "socialist" intrusion for a relatively modest benefit.

This "Berniebro" meme is another example of distorting things that should be straightforward, and once used to be the idea of liberalism and the social safety net and reasonable regulation and all the rest.