Charles P. Pierce: A Few Words on Bernie, and the Democrats, and Figuring This Thing Out

[babylonsister]

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a12235828/sanders-healthcare-reform/


A Few Words on Bernie, and the Democrats, and Figuring This Thing Out

Healthcare is more important than intra-party fighting.

By Charles P. Pierce
Sep 13, 2017


It is altogether remarkable that Bernie Sanders on Wednesday morning introduced a “Medicare For All” healthcare reform plan, and that he did so with the public support of a brigade of prominent Democratic senators from Joe Manchin of West Virginia to Kamala Harris of California, as well as with the public support of every Democratic politician with even an outside chance of running for president in 2020. (Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire signed aboard this week.)

It is altogether to the credit of his presidential campaign that this idea has become the unified mainstream goal of the Democratic Party as quickly as it has. It can be plausibly argued that this is a political mistake, that the big guns of privilege will open up on the proposal and that we’ll find Harry and Louise back with us again, except this time having spent the past eight years on a strict regimen of performance-enhancing drugs. But the people who have signed on with Sanders are neither stupid nor reckless. (Manchin is facing a tough re-election fight.) They see the same opportunity in this political moment that Sanders does, and that seems to have emboldened them against the onslaught of meretricious crapola that is headed their way from the other side of the aisle.

My major concern is not with the oligarchical right’s getting its propaganda freak on again. That’s going to happen automatically no matter what healthcare proposal the Democrats produce. (After all, these are the people who attacked the Affordable Care Act fairly effectively as “socialized medicine,” which it certainly was not. Ask your neighborhood Socialist for details.) Nor am I as concerned as Jonathan Chait is that the people necessarily will rebel in defense of their employer-based plans. First of all, they are paying more for less coverage under those plans, and have been for a while and, second, while they like it now, they all know that leaving their healthcare up to the good graces of their employer is a tenuous deal. That isn’t devotion to the current system. It’s enforced terror. And, while Chait is correct to see the history of this issue as a series of incremental flanking maneuvers around the bigger problem, I don’t think it’s too far off to see the progress from Medicare, through things like SCHIP and the ACA—and the VA, for all that—as a continuum leading toward something like Sanders proposes.

No, my major political concern is over what will happen within the Democratic Party—and, more important, within the progressive movement for which Sanders is the eternal avatar—if the legislative process ends up handing the supporters of this plan half a loaf, or another incremental step of some kind. For his part, laudably, Sanders seems to realize that this is a step taken in anticipation—and in the blind hope—that the Democratic Party one day will be in a position to pass this thing into law. From HuffPost:

Sanders thinks support for the idea is growing, making future enactment possible. “You’re seeing it in polling, you’re seeing it in town meetings, you’re seeing the American people waking up and demanding that we end this dysfunctional system and we join the rest of the industrialized world.”

This is precisely correct. For example, Chris Murphy, Democrat from Connecticut, has a plan that shrewdly moves the country toward Sanders’ goal by degrees. (And there’s nothing senators like more than moving by degrees.) From Politico:

Murphy said he would begin with a resolution designed to build support for expanding the popular program before releasing legislation later this fall. Making Medicare more widely available, as he sees it, would pave the way for an effective “redesign” that prepares it to cover younger beneficiaries as part of a Sanders-style approach. A Medicare buy-in “may not be as big a leap for the health care system as single-payer, but I think it’s a big, easy-to-understand, and super-popular idea,” Murphy said.

This is a reasonable argument coming from one of the people who has fought the hardest to protect the gains in healthcare that have come about due to the Affordable Care Act. This is nothing more than politics the way politics should be practiced. Bernie Sanders has set the marker down for the party in which he ran for president but that he resolutely declines to join. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. But that party still depends on people like Joe Manchin—and, it should be said, like Heidi Heitkamp—who have to get re-elected in tougher places than Vermont. The first time I hear the distant sirens of the Purity Police during this long haul, I’m going to chew nails.

[still_one]

1. The purity police is what happened in 2016, and ironically because of that, instead of

a Democrat in the WH, we have a person in the WH, where this will not even be considered as part of the conversation for at least the next four years, because in case no one has noticed, even if trump didn't serve out his term, the lines of who would succeed him are hard core right wing republicans