Dreadicare For All Elites Who Don't Want It

Second only to the astroturfed impeachment marches threatening to spread like chemical wildfire in the well-off parts of Blue America is the overwhelming anxiety over ascendant candidate Elizabeth Warren.

Members of the neoliberal pundit class are gnashing their collective teeth about Warren's imminent unveiling of her detailed Medicare For All/Some/Who Knows Plan. Will she or won't she advocate for a true single payer program like the one introduced by Bernie Sanders?

The conventional wisdom among the corporate wing of the Democratic Party is that if she does, she's toast. And if she's toast, then Trump wins another term. So be afraid. Be very afraid, all you One Percenters who know full well that your scare tactics are bullshit, given that most Democratic and independent voters,  and even a sizable percentage of Republicans from Trump's own base, favor Medicare For All. It's only when the pollsters and the gaslighting pundits put the fear of losing their employer-based coverage and the prospect of the Great Unknown into their heads that many respondents will then say "well... maybe on second thought I'm not as gung-ho as I thought I was."

This instillation of fear and doubt is, of course, the gist of the grand plan to kill M4A before it ever gets a fact-based hearing. Tax-averse multimillionaire moderators of the so-called Democratic debates always preface their questions with the specter of middle class tax increases, giving left-leaning candidates thirty seconds to respond before the buzzer goes off and the moderators invite a low-ranking corporate centrist to chime in with the industry-approved rebuttal.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, a big fan of Warren's based upon their mutual exalted wonkishness, is very worried that she won't be able to keep up her evasive bullshit on M4A very much longer.

Like many policy wonks, I’ll be waiting with bated breath; this could be a make or break moment for her campaign, and possibly for the 2020 election.

Phony talking point #1: all this reckless M4A rhetoric will hand the election right to Trump. 

Single payer has a lot to recommend it.... but we're not starting from scratch... More than half of Americans are covered by private health insurance, mainly through employers.

Industry-approved talking point #2: In theory and on paper, we love, love, love Single Payer. But the people we really need to care about right now are the vulnerable well-paid professionals in our base, whom for propaganda purposes only, we shall now squeamishly dump in with the teeming masses of low-paid workers forced to fork over a chunk of their paychecks for the company insurance plan, which is usually inefficient and limited at best, and pure exploitative junk at worst.

 Most people probably would end up better off under single-payer, but convincing them of that would be a hard sell; polls show much less support for Medicare for all than for a “public option” plan in which people could retain private insurance if they chose to.

Misleading Talking Point #3: It's not that we wonks are against single payer in principal. It's that the Deplorables are so gosh-darn stupid. And we wonks simply don't have either the time or the inclination to try to educate these rubes on all the money they'd save under M4A. Besides, our target audience is restricted to our fellow wonks and to the already well-insured upper middle class readership who can afford a subscription to the New York Times. 

Which brings me to the third point: In reality, single-payer won’t happen any time soon. Even if Democrats win in a landslide in 2020, taking control of the Senate as well as the White House, it’s very unlikely that they will have the votes to eliminate private insurance.Warren, who has made policy seriousness a key part of her political persona — “Warren has a plan for that” — surely knows all of this. And early this year she seemed to recognize the problems with a purist single-payer approach, saying that she was open to different paths toward universal coverage.
Since then, however, she seems to have gone all in for the elimination of private insurance.

Annoying Talking Point #4: People who want to have a healthy life and not die or go bankrupt if they get sick are "purists" who belong to some weird kind of Bernie Bro Cult. They're making impossible, annoying demands on the Elite Class... which has no such worries, thank you veddy much. Now get lost, you bunch of sickos! Because "our side" winning back power is more important than you are.

The plan in the works will presumably try to dispel that fog, but doing so will be tricky. An independent estimate from the Urban Institute (which is, for what it’s worth, left-leaning) suggests that a highly comprehensive Medicare-for-all plan, similar to what Sanders is proposing, would substantially increase overall health spending, although a more modest plan wouldn’t.

Krugman creates some fog of his own by failing to mention that the Urban Institute is funded by such M4A-averse corporations as private health insurer CIGNA and pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. So you should probably take their scary cost estimates with a huge hunk of LSD-laced salt.

Chairing the Urban Institute's Board of plutocrats is Jamie Gorelick, who is also kept busy acting as Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump's personal lawyer. She defended them, among other grifty things, against nepotism accusations when they first joined the Trump administration. Jared's brother also has a vested interest in killing M4A because he happens to own his own multibillion-dollar health insurance company founded right after the passage of the Affordable Care Act.

 Other directors of the Urban Institute are N. Gregory Mankiw, who led George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers and who infamously advocated privatizing Social Security and cutting benefits; former Obama "Catfood" Commissioner and billionaire austerian Erskine Bowles; Diana Farrell, CEO of the JP Morgan Chase Institute; and Facebook executive Marne L. Levine.

So if Krugman is actually calling the Urban Institute "left-leaning" with a crew like that calling the shots, then the Democratic Party has moved even farther right than I thought.

No wonder he's rhetorically wringing his hands over "capitalist to my bones" Elizabeth Warren's mild threat to the ruling class. If she doesn't watch out and mind her wonkish Ps and Qs and "escape the Medicare trap," she might very well turn into Susan Sarandon or heaven forbid, even a dreaded "unwitting Russian asset."

My published New York Times response:

The real question is whether the estimated 87 million people who are uninsured or underinsured can escape premature death, life-long disability through negligence of their medical conditions, or bankruptcy - with the subsequent inability to get a job, rent an apartment or take out a car loan.

 Elizabeth Warren will do what she has to do. So will the congress critters in thrall to the insurance and hospital and pharmaceutical lobbies. So along with taking to the streets to demand the impeachment of Donald Trump, we're also going to need to take to the streets to demand what in every other advanced country on earth is a basic human right. Sure, M4A would cost a bundle and it has to be paid for. But it would cost a heckuva lot less than what we're currently paying to predatory insurance companies, for criminally overpriced drugs, and for obscenely padded hospital bills.

 If people are anxious about losing their employment-based coverage, it's largely because both politicians and pundits don't hammer home the essential fact that any increases in taxes will be at most half of what they now pay for premiums, co-pays and deductibles. Furthermore, employment based coverage is getting more precarious, with employers reducing or discontinuing coverage due to higher costs. Think of the bargaining power that workers will get if their bosses no longer can claim that their health benefits are a huge chunk of their salaries. Sounds like a plan to me. It also sounds extremely humane.

***************************************

Thanks to all the readers who donated so generously to my fall fund drive. If you didn't get a chance to contribute yet, my PayPal door (upper right corner) is always open. Or, you can contact me at kmgarcia2000@yahoo.com. If you like reading my stuff but can't afford to donate, please don't worry about it and please keep reading! Times are tough for most people.