Donald Trump is making the single-payer push inevitable
- 7 years ago
Donald Trump is making the single-payer push inevitable,donald trump
If you want to know why Democratic senators with national ambitions are suddenly falling over each other to endorse a Medicare-for-all bill, of course Bernie Sanders has something to do with it. So do the activists who’ve been fighting for this for years, and so does the National Nurses Union.
But single-payer activists have been out there for a long time. So has Sanders. And Sanders didn’t win the 2016 primary, and it’s not like his national political organization, Our Revolution, has been knocking off Clinton-endorsing incumbents.
The critical difference is Donald Trump and, to an extent, the broader Republican Party. Their relentless efforts to undermine the Affordable Care Act are undermining the “pragmatic” rationale Democratic leaders offered in 2009 for pursuing universal coverage through a system reliant on private insurance.
The hope was that by aligning with key industry priorities, they could not only minimize short-term disruption but earn Republican Party buy-in and stabilize the system. It hasn’t worked. And the extent to which Trump is doing everything in his power to undermine the ACA’s marketplaces underscores that it won’t.
It’s still difficult to see exactly how we get from Sanders’s squad of high-profile co-sponsors to workable legislation that can command congressional majorities. Sanders, speaking to Vox’s Jeff Stein, called on the United States to “join the rest of the industrialized world” in recognizing health care as a right, but in practice his bill promises a more generous (and thus expensive) benefits package than any foreign country.
But it’s easy to see that Republicans aren’t interested in letting Barack Obama’s signature legislation serve as a stable answer to the question of how American health care is supposed to work. Even with legislative repeal evidently failed, the Trump administration is using its powers to sabotage the functioning of ACA marketplaces, crippling outreach and sign-up efforts while doing nothing to encourage insurers to participate.
So unless Republicans have a sudden change of heart and get Trump to try to make the ACA marketplaces work, Democrats are going to have to keep fighting back. And if Republican administrations are going to actively undermine public-private marketplaces, they have nowhere to go but left — pushing for a larger role for government-provided insurance that can’t be undermined as easily.
If you want to know why Democratic senators with national ambitions are suddenly falling over each other to endorse a Medicare-for-all bill, of course Bernie Sanders has something to do with it. So do the activists who’ve been fighting for this for years, and so does the National Nurses Union.
But single-payer activists have been out there for a long time. So has Sanders. And Sanders didn’t win the 2016 primary, and it’s not like his national political organization, Our Revolution, has been knocking off Clinton-endorsing incumbents.
The critical difference is Donald Trump and, to an extent, the broader Republican Party. Their relentless efforts to undermine the Affordable Care Act are undermining the “pragmatic” rationale Democratic leaders offered in 2009 for pursuing universal coverage through a system reliant on private insurance.
The hope was that by aligning with key industry priorities, they could not only minimize short-term disruption but earn Republican Party buy-in and stabilize the system. It hasn’t worked. And the extent to which Trump is doing everything in his power to undermine the ACA’s marketplaces underscores that it won’t.
It’s still difficult to see exactly how we get from Sanders’s squad of high-profile co-sponsors to workable legislation that can command congressional majorities. Sanders, speaking to Vox’s Jeff Stein, called on the United States to “join the rest of the industrialized world” in recognizing health care as a right, but in practice his bill promises a more generous (and thus expensive) benefits package than any foreign country.
But it’s easy to see that Republicans aren’t interested in letting Barack Obama’s signature legislation serve as a stable answer to the question of how American health care is supposed to work. Even with legislative repeal evidently failed, the Trump administration is using its powers to sabotage the functioning of ACA marketplaces, crippling outreach and sign-up efforts while doing nothing to encourage insurers to participate.
So unless Republicans have a sudden change of heart and get Trump to try to make the ACA marketplaces work, Democrats are going to have to keep fighting back. And if Republican administrations are going to actively undermine public-private marketplaces, they have nowhere to go but left — pushing for a larger role for government-provided insurance that can’t be undermined as easily.