You all know that Medicare is not free health care right?

OK, now I'm pissed off

I have studiously avoided any sort of attack on Hillary Clinton in discussing why I support Bernie Sanders. We don’t know yet who our nominee will be and I’d prefer whoever it is to be as strong as possible for the general. But now I’m going to break that rule. Here’s a Politico story in which the Clinton campaign attacks Bernie for proposing Medicare for all and — the part that pisses me off — does it in terms that could easily have come from Fox News or the Wall Street Journal — with scare tactics about tax increases on the Middle Class and totally refusing to acknowledge the huge savings and efficiencies inherent in a single-payer system. I can live with Democrats disagreeing over single-payer, but when they adopt the framing of the far-right to do so, that’s one step too far for me. An excerpt:

“Bernie Sanders has called for a roughly 9-percent tax hike on middle-class families just to cover his health-care plan,” said Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon, referring to legislation Sanders introduced in 2013, “and simple math dictates he'll need to tax workers even more to pay for the rest of his at least $18-20 trillion agenda. If you are truly concerned about raising incomes for middle-class families, the last thing you should do is cut their take-home pay right off the bat by raising their taxes.”

As any honest and reasonably intelligent (Non-Republican) person knows, the American worker is already paying the full cost of single-payer — and more — in the form of higher prices, lower wages, premiums, co-pays, deductibles, high drug prices and stagnant economic activity, among others. To speak only of increased taxes without acknowledging the reality of those myriad savings is simply to lie. It’s a lie we’ve grown used to from Republicans. I’m not willing to accept it from a Democrat.

DailyKos