Intro by Dr.Kotch:
| As Margaret Flowers made her way across Central and Western NC two weeks ago, there was a feeling that single payer is no longer an expletive to be deleted. More and more people are talking about it, thanks in part to Bernie Sanders and people like Margaret (and you, dear reader!) who have been advocating for single payer for years without shame or embarrassment. It has helped that the language has shifted. Single payer has multiple meanings (including the derogatory “socialized medicine”), but Medicare for All has real salience for just about everyone. Now it looks like the leadership in the Democratic Party has itself been led to single payer by the people, who are demanding a real change, not the flawed solution that the ACA provided. A majority of House Democrats have signed on to John Conyers’ HR 676, “Expanded and Improved Medicare for All.” The New York State House of Representatives and the California State Senate each have passed single payer legislation. We need to re-invigorate our own efforts at the state and national levels. |
For years, Republicans savaged Democrats for supporting the Affordable Care Act, branding the law — with some rhetorical license — as a government takeover of health care.
Now, cast out of power in Washington and most state capitals, Democrats and activist leaders seeking political redemption have embraced an unlikely-seeming cause: an actual government takeover of health care.
At rallies and in town hall meetings, and in a collection of blue-state legislatures, liberal Democrats have pressed lawmakers, with growing impatience, to support the creation of a single-payer system, in which the state or federal government would supplant private health insurance with a program of public coverage. And in California on Thursday, the Democrat-controlled State Senate approved a preliminary plan for enacting single-payer system, the first serious attempt to do so there since then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, vetoed legislation in 2006 and 2008.
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