Democratic Primaries
In reply to the discussion: U.S. Voters Back Medicare Expansion but Not Eliminating Private Insurance [View all]ehrnst
(32,640 posts)Progress is better than no progress.
Teddy Kennedy said that one of the biggest regrets of his career was walking away from negotiations with Nixon for health care reform, because Democrats told him Single Payer or nothing.
Nixon proposed a health care reform plan that was to the left of the ACA. Kennedy walked away from the table.
So we got nothing. Kennedy said that if he had decided to move forward with negotiations and compromised, and then continued to implement it with Congress after Nixon resigned, we'd have something much closer to what Canada has today.
Instead it took nearly 40 more years to actually get something passed into law that worked, that got people with pre-existing conditions access to health care plans, that got Medicaid expanded to non-disabled low income adults, that put caps on what people would pay out of pocket for expensive/long term treatments for serious illness like cancer, that forced the insurance companies to spend .85 of every dollar of premiums on health care, that allowed states to take money to experiment with different types of reform - like starting M4A in their own state, like Green Mountain Care attempted to do.
Or Maryland who regulates rates for medical procedures, and creates incentives for hospitals to reduce readmissions, bringing down premiums all across the board,
The ACA acheived more progress than anything since Medicare/Medicaid - and it has survived, damaged, but intact, despite all of the GOP attempts to destroy it, and return us to what we had before the ACA.
And tell me, if the SCOTUS of 2010 ruled that states didn't have to expand Medicaid - that there would be no consequence for them if they refused - what do you think that the SCOTUS of 2020 will rule when states refuse to participate in M4A? There isn't going to be any way that M4A can avoid state participation in terms of administration. Medicaid is completely administered at the state level, much like National Health Care in Canada is administered. Like Canada, the US population and sheer land mass is too large, and the health care system for it too large for it to be run out of DC.
The reason that Medicare can be run that way is that it serves a limited segment of the population, and is financed primarily by the much larger population that pays in, but does not use it.
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden