Factcheck.org responds to accusations in a tweetstorm from Senator Sanders re: Mercatus study

[ehrnst]

261. Now do you understand that the ACA is indeed the furthest along the road to UHC that we

have ever gotten?

But why drag our feet and demand only incremental changes when we could use the fact that the American people by and large, and this includes a majority of republicans, want Medicare-for-All?

You still don't get why incremental change is the only way to do this.....

If you are going to pave all the roads in a city, do you do it all at once? Yeah, we would get the new roads sooner, but it would be way more expensive, and way more disruptive than "dragging our feet" and doing it a few at a time.

Again.... If you had any knowledge of the countries who have UHC, you know that they didn't do it all at once. Most started 70 years ago. And they started from scratch, they weren't upending a system that was already baked in... if you actually read my posts before firing off an angry reply, you would not be asking me this. Social Security didn't start out covering what it does now.

Again.... Massachusetts has achieved 97% coverage - that is closer to Universal Health Coverage than any other state. They do it through a combination of payers and providers. Again....... if you paid attention to my other posts, you would know that Canada didn't go federally single payer until the individual provinces did so independently - which took nearly 20 years. Then a very liberal federal administration came in an added a federal layer over that - they were STILL tweaking it in the 1990s. No one 'demanded" incremental change - that's just the way it has to happen. There is a saying in project management - Cheap, fast or good, pick two. Promising affordable, fast and good is an empty promise, no matter how well intentioned and sincere. M4A promises all this in eight years. Not gonna happen. Health care delivery would be disrupted - horribly. You can't turn a battleship on a dime without capsizing it.

And what people think M4A is, and what it actually is, are two different things, so before you go claiming that "the American people, by and large" want it, you should confirm that's true:

A recent poll from Kaiser Family Foundation illustrates the point. It showed that 59 percent of Americans support “a national health-care plan, or Medicare-for-all, in which all Americans would get their insurance from a single government plan.” Sounds pretty strong, until you see that 75 percent support a “national Medicare-for-all plan open to anyone who wants it but people who currently have other coverage could keep what they have.” The first proposal is single-payer if you understand it. The second very clearly isn’t single-payer.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/05/voters-who-like-medicare-for-all-may-not-like-single-payer.html

So, a much bigger percentage of people want something more like what the ACA is on target to be than single payer.

And in case you ignored this in my posts - I had single payer in the UK. I loved it. I came back to the states, and I wound up in the hospital with two bleeding ulcers, uninsured. I WISH we could have it here. I was without health insurance for years - my only care provider was Planned Parenthood, which some people are clueless enough dismiss as "an establishment group," and others demonize as "as the abortion industry."

You are laboring under the delusion that I just hate the idea of single payer. AGAIN... I have more of a background in health policy than most people, so I don't have the luxury of ignorance on the topic. I understand the obstacles - moral or immoral/right or wrong/establishment or progressive/capitalist or socialist - but very real obstacles that are not being addressed in M4A.

I want whatever gets the most people covered in the quickest amount of time - I don't adhere to any dogma about how we get there. You know what dogma does for religion? Well, it does that for politics as well. I never have been one for tribal thinking, and therefore am not limited by it.

That's what hobbles people who think that getting rid of Planned Parenthood is the only way to reduce or eliminate abortion. And it's hobbling those who think that M4A is the only way to get UHC.

I've been called "baby hater!" for escorting outside women's clinics. Calling me a Koch Bros agent or "health care hater" won't faze me. I'll listen to what health policy experts say before politicians or angry people who cling to dogma. I will not change my mind on human fueled climate change until such time as the scientific consensus changes, no matter who is "for or against" it, no matter what industries "wind, fuel cell, solar) benefit. I changed my mind on the efficacy of certain supplements when studies didn't support their claims - despite my mother insisting that "big pharma" was behind those studies.

You are talking to someone who is used to challenging their own assumptions when new data comes in.