At this point in the shutdown, Democrats need to loudly call for Medicare for All.

[lostincalifornia]

38. Thank-you. From some of the posts it is pretty clear that some people don't realize that original Medicare isn't free,

and that doesn't even include the supplemental or Medi-gap part which can be quite significant, and if you don't have it, that can break the bank for some also.

I think it would be instructive if some folks spent some time understanding what they pay into with their social security and Medicare taxes, and what it covers and what ISN'T included.

Maybe the confusion among some is they may not understand the difference between Medicare and Medicaid?

If they actually did Medicare for all, it would mean people would no longer need to wait until 65 to start receiving benefits. The assumption would be that there would be more healthy people in the pool than those that are not healthy, and it would be those healthy people who effectively would subsidize it for those at a higher risk, that is the older Americans for the most part.

It would be an entire paradigm shift from how Medicare was initially setup, and it is highly unlikely that would pass Congress.

I don't think many realize we barely got the affordable care act passed as it was, and it wasn't just because of the republicans.

The U.S. House of Representatives was safely Democratic as a result of the Nov. 4, 2008, elections by a margin of 257 – 199; the Democrats had gained 21 seats from the 2006-07 Congress, but it was the Senate where things became difficult.

Going into the 2008 elections, the Senate consisted of 49 Democrats, 49 Republicans, and two Independents (Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Bernie Sanders of Vermont) who caucused with the Democrats. When the smoke cleared from those elections, the Democrats picked up eight seats to increase their majority to 57-41. With the two Independents, the Democrats were one vote shy of the supermajority the magic number of 60 they needed to ward off any filibuster attempts and move forward with broad healthcare reform legislation.

In April 2009, the dynamics changed when Republican Arlen Spector changed parties, giving Senate Democrats that coveted 60th vote.
Now the Democrats had a safe majority in the House and a filibuster-proof supermajority of 60 in the Senate, but that lasted only four months before Ted Kennedy died in August of 2009, leaving the Democrats, once again, with 59 seats (counting the two Independents). One month later, Democrat Paul Kirk was appointed interim senator from Massachusetts to serve until the special election set for January 19, 2010 – once again giving the Democrats that 60th vote. but things didn't quite work out the way we thought it would.

There didn’t seem to be an urgent need for Democrats to reconcile both bills immediately, because people thought that Marth Coakley was a shoe in for Kennedy's seat in the special election. Of course we all know what happened there, Scott Brown won the special election, and we didn't have the super majority anymore.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Obama needed to figure out a way to get it passed. It was assumed that the House bill would be tweaked enough to even offer a public option, but that wouldn't work now because the Democrats no longer had the 60th vote in the Senate to end debate. They decided to have the House take up the identical bill that the Senate passed on Christmas Eve. It passed in 2010 by a 219 – 212 vote. NO Republicans came on board, and 34 DEMOCRATS voted against. President Obama signed the ACA legislation two days later on March 23.

In addition, not all Senate Democrats were on board with the public option, yet alone Medicare for all. Blanch Lincoln, Nelson in Nebraska, Nelson in Florida, Lieberman, Birch Bayh, and Mark Pryor in Arkansas in the Senate refused to go along with a public option or Medicare for all.