Which do you Favor and Why: Medicare for All or ACA expansion?

[Midnightwalk]

54. It's not completely a binary choice

What is best is immaterial. How you deliver a new product, idea, program is often as important as the content.

We have to win the presidency and the senate to get anything.

Then figure it’ll take close to two years to get a bill fully written, debated and enacted. That’s just un time for midterms in 2022. If we don’t keep the house and senate making any tweaks we need as we move to implement the new law won’t be possible.

I’ll guess it will take another 2 years before some of the benefits show up. There are always glitches in big roll outs. That puts us up to the next presidential election in 2024. If we don’t win that the new law will be sabotaged or may be revoked if we lose congress.

That’s true for either approach.

I think medicare for all is the best plan when fully implemented and people would eventually recognize the benefits.

At the same time I think “democrats want to throw 130 million people off their insurance plans” is a devastating attack. As a country we have been conned into believing that government is horrible and never works as good as the private sector. I don’t believe that myself, but I think too many do.

The ACA was villainized after it passed and I think it was a factor in our big losses in 2010. It was clearer by 2012 that it wasn’t as horrible as republicans made it out to be and we didn’t lose the presidency. By 2018, people finally recognized the benefits and we got the house back.

Many other factors were at play but healthcare was a big factor in those elections.

I think it is much easier to win the arguments and elections by adding a benefit than by being seen taking away an employee benefit.

For that reason I think it is better to take a longer path through a public option and grow that as much as we can into a form of medicare for all.

I hate that people will suffer and die unnecessarily until we have a system that covers everyone affordably. I don’t dispute that adding a public option does not do enough, just whether we can win elections when people are told that they will lose their employers insurance and we answer “yes you will and here’s why that’s good”. Not enough will listen to and believe the explanation.

In the meantime I wish we would raise a bigger stink about prescription price gouging. That is more easily framed as Americans are being cheated by pharmaceutical companies. We ought to be able to cut a lot of cost out of the system and win elections on that issue.