I did not watch the debate and I read here that Bernie

[PatrickforO]

2. Sadly, that's true.

But this is because we live in a world of the primacy of the shareholder. Since the MI Supreme Court decided Dodge vs Ford in 1919, the primary fiduciary responsibility of C-suite corporate officers in publicly held companies is to keep shareholder earnings up.

This profit over people mentality is carefully forwarded through a certain level of both passive and active obfuscation.

First the active: My favorite this time around is the gotcha question: Won't MFA make people lose their employer provided insurance?

Now, think about that for a minute. How carefully worded, how legitimate sounding! The desired result, of course, is an internal dialog on the part of the lower information voter that goes something like this: "Well, I work hard and I don't want no gummint takin' away my healthcare!"

The truth? Well that will be decided by compromise. Our founders, clever scamps that they were, decided on a bicameral legislature, and executive branch headed by a president and a judicial branch. As one of the MSNBC pundits said is that what Warren and Sanders clearly don't understand is that whatever they might want, they will, should they be the one elected, have to go and talk to the Senate and the House, which will then draft the legislation, and then reconcile it in joint committee, after which the president will sign it into law. That is how our government actually works. Or would work without the Republican cancer and the giant orange tapeworm that is Donald Trump.

The fourth estate, of course, is supposed to be the media, but that was back in the day when newspaper editors had the guts to publish an unpopular opinion and then hold off the townspeople from burning the presses. Now all our media is owned by publicly held corporations who operate for the sole purpose of making profits for shareholders. That is also the truth. So they are in it to generate controversy by promoting gotchas like the one above. That is their active role.

Another active poke at MFA the media takes is that it will cost $40 trillion in public funds over the next ten years. That might be true. Maybe. But what they oh-so-carefully omit is that we would pay that anyway over the next ten years with that same $40 trillion or more in private funds - in the form of premiums and copays.

Thus we see that their passive role is to simply NOT report things their corporate owners don't want them to. For example, in the old days there would be full-page articles in tiny font in newspapers all across the nation, and these articles would cover the substance of the issue proposals, including how it is paid for.

Medicare for all? Yes, it will take a tax increase. I hated how neither Warren nor Bernie would speak of this. Warren confined herself to partially answering the question as posed by Chris Matthews. She said big corporations would pay a bunch, billionaires would pay a bunch, and the middle class would have lower out of pocket costs.

What would it actually look like if our politicians had the guts to eliminate the profit motive from things like healthcare and prisons? Likely the first step would be a repeal of the giant 2017 tax cut for billionaires and corporations. The second step would have to be a broader tax reform, which would eliminate loopholes like a lower capital gains tax rate (Delaney made a great point here), and raise the inheritance tax. Warren wants a 'wealth' tax. Bernie wants a tax on each trade made on Wall Street by arbitrage 'bots. Both good ideas. Others want a value added tax.

Bottom line? With a MFA system, we all will pay more taxes. What Warren and Sanders want to do but did not sufficiently explain in the debate, maybe because they haven't figured out how to frame it successfully just yet, is to do these substantial tax increases for the wealthy so that middle class people would pay more in taxes, but those taxes would not exceed what they pay now in premiums.

Now that is a tall order, and in reality, we likely will have to reform the ACA, which is popular, and simply add a public option (over the massive and high dollar opposition of big pharma, health insurance companies and for-profit providers - they will fight tooth and nail against any public option because to them profits are far more important than our lives). But that will get our foot in the door for what will likely evolve into a national healthcare service.

Make no mistake - that is why we're even having this debate. We live in a society where the government is heavily beholden to corporate interests, and profit over people is the way we roll.