If ACA mandates are upheld, we won't get Medicare-for-All and better health care for a generation.

[jeff47]

58. A mandate, either through the ACA or a single-payer system, is necessary

The way both insurance and single-payer work is healthy people pay for care for the ill. If healthy people don't pay, there's no cost-sharing. Which means the sick can't afford health care.

Before the ACA, the concept of pre-existing conditions caused healthy people to pay.

The ACA eliminates pre-existing conditions. So now you need to pay taxes into a single-payer system or you need a mandate to buy insurance.

A single-payer system by itself will not pass Congress. It will not pass Congress for at least a generation. Yes, it would be much better. But it's still not going to happen.

As Bernie Sanders said, there was only 8-10 votes for single-payer in the Senate. You're 50 short. You aren't going to get 50 more votes any time soon. Heck, it's mathematically impossible to get more than 34 new senators every 2 years. And unless you're gonna claim states like SC are going to elect single-payer supporters, you will get nowhere near 34.

What, exactly, do you propose? You claim the insurance lobby is so massively powerful that it produced the ACA, so there's no way in hell they'd allow single-payer to go through. So either they're massively powerful and can get whatever legislation they want, or it's possible to pass single-payer. Let me know when you've decided which it is.

We are left with two choices:
1) Let people die under the old system.
2) Abuse the mandate to produce a single-payer system.

Obama chose #2. Yet you claim he should have chosen #1 because the ideal system is not possible.