He believes that once the option is on the exchange people will choose it eventually. It undercuts a RW talking point.

The same holds true with the for profit "health" insurance industry.

As an option, sicker and older people will naturally be drawn to the option because private insurance is much more expensive and difficult to navigate and get appropriate care. That makes the cost share too heavily weighted to people taking out of the program much more than they are putting in.

In addition, it keeps the present system we have now where taxpayers are paying for ACA subsidies and it’s unconscionable that our taxes are going to super profitable insurance companies who are making billions.

Insurance works when the pool is large enough for the cost share to be sensible.

We must start with the single payer system. All in and all receiving same high quality care. Then insurance companies offer adjunct policies - the rich will always be happy to pay for something extra — let them. But for heathCARE to work it must be a system where the profit incentive is gone from regular healthcare services.

I am willing to wait for a more detailed proposal from Pete and his team on this and not dismiss it out of hand. He's just outlined the basics at this point on this as one idea. He's willing to listen to all credible ideas before making proposals.

or the poor and sick IMO.

It's obscene that these health care insurance CEO are making tens of millions of dollars off the misery of the sick.

It its totally out of hand and unsustainable!

People Are Raising $650 Million On GoFundMe Each Year To Attack Rising Healthcare Costs

https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolynmcclanahan/2018/08/13/using-gofundme-to-attack-health-care-costs/#315ac30e2859


Health insurance CEOs earned $342.6M in 2017

https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/payer/ceo-pay-2017-342-million-unitedhealth-molina-cigna-aetna

Democrats took huge losses because people perceived the ACA to have a negative impact on their private, employer subsidized health insurance. Many regular Americans have employer subsidized health insurance plans that are simply better than Medicare. I did back before I retired. Bernie's proposals, I wouldn't go so far as to call M4A a plan, are his usual utopian nonsense.

We just need to figure out how to stop the dying part.

Bernie allows no such illusions, he attacks the concept head on and rightfully so as being a dysfunctional system contributing nothing to actual health care, just lining the pockets of a leech industry.

Bernie's Medicare for All proposal would be superior to existing Medicare, 100% coverage, no deductibles, no co-pays, dental, hearing, and vision coverage.

It only seems utopian because we have come to view health care through a feudal lens with the "health" insurance industry being our Dukes or Barons.

or does just want us to trust him? What’s his interim plan if the ACA gets known down by SCOTUS before we reach the Promised Land?

approximately 30 years.

So, how dies he go from the starting point (which I hope will still be the ACA) to full Medicare coverage? He’s had 30 years to develop it.

Over 80% of the people like their employer provided private coverage and won't give it up to a government run program.

What is worse is Bernie not settling for modifications to ACA where people can choose Medicare as an option. He said so on Chirs Hayes' show. Medicare for all or NOTHING. Let people die without care but he won't help fix the ACA.

to something they are unsure of.

I am on Medicare, and it has some advantages over some private plans, but I can't imagine anyone with a halfway decent private plan jumping on to it.

ACA was tough enough to pass, and was passed with the assumption that it was a plan that would be improved over the years. Even that was tough, and we are seeing it attacked today.

Bernie's Medicare for All proposal would be superior to existing Medicare, 100% coverage, no deductibles, no co-pays, dental, hearing, and vision coverage.

Having said that, even existing Medicare is very popular with the American People.

Americans With Government Health Plans Most Satisfied

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Americans' satisfaction with the way the healthcare system works for them varies by the type of insurance they have. Satisfaction is highest among those with veterans or military health insurance, Medicare and Medicaid, and is lower among those with employer-paid and self-paid insurance. Americans with no health insurance are least satisfied of all.




(snip)


https://news.gallup.com/poll/186527/americans-government-health-plans-satisfied.aspx

And it only asked people who were currently ON Medicare how they felt about it. Same for the other categories, the respondents are only those who are participants in each.

Even 69% were satisfied with their employee subsidized plan.

So how do you draw the conclusion that (non-existent) Medicare for All is superior to existing Medicare? we don't even have the details of the proposal other than a few bullet points.

some history on the subject.

Medicare as Reflected in Public Opinion






https://www.asaging.org/blog/medicare-reflected-public-opinion

is not the issue here.

The issue is "Will you give up your current plan for a medicare for all" and 80+% say NO.

Conflating the issue doesn't help.

For example, I may not be entirely happy with my burger joint but that doesn't mean I'll switch to a new burger joint run by the government. It is even more weighty when it comes to health care than burgers.

Medicare for all as proposed by Sanders is politically suicidal. It will never pass.

What is sad is that it is being brought out to put other Democratic candidates in an impossible bind. This is what Hillary wrote in her book "What happened?" as the "One minute abs." In my opinion, the issue is not designed to actually pass anything but to weaken other excellent Democratic candidates.

We have all experienced it before. Especially Hillary.

LBJ had to lie about what Medicare cost - even back in the days when people didn't live as long and there wasn't as much in the way of expensive treatments - to get it passed.

The CBO doesn't let one get away with that now.

Two reasons that Medicare is affordable:

1. Many more people pay into it than are on it.
2. It doesn't cover dental, rx, vision care, or hearing care.

So, getting rid of those two measures ups the cost of MFA exponentially.

Green Mountain Care - which interestingly enough Senator Sanders refuses to even discuss, let alone articulate lessons learned from - failed in part because it was a platinum plan (even by Canadian standards).

Certainly it's good salesmanship to promise many many things when one is a candidate, especially if one has never been expected to deliver on them, but when it comes time for the CBO score, or when the state that elected Bernie Sanders to the Senate can't muster the political will to make it happen, simply refusing to talk about it will wear thin.

Link to tweet

I agree with the Washington Post and I strongly disagree with sanders

Link to tweet

Sanders' crap shoot. The sheer amount of systems change required in the unstable environment in which we find ourselves would be a catastrophic shock all around. Where is all of the money fore retooling and staffing coming from? I trust our Democratic leaders are moving us forward in a responsible way. We can have change without compromising the vulnerable in an all or nothing gambit. I'm not kidding either. He doesn't have my vote.

because a quarter of those who listened to him again refused to vote Democrat, 12% of his people even angrily voting Republican because of they'd come to believe about Democrats, and we lost a second critically narrow race?

Sanders of course has a legal right to run, but does he have a moral right when his ideology and dissident approach make him an asset to the Republicans and to Russia? And he is. The Mueller report established that.

Because we lost in 2016, we're only ONE more uberconservative justice away from having Medicare declared unconstitutional. And possibly not even that. To the kind of conservatives being appointed, the argument that the constitution never meant the federal government should create this kind of giant government programs is the only valid one.

Here's an explanation of the shaky underpinnings of the Social Security Act, also in grave danger thanks to our disastrous loss in 2016.

NO Medicare. No Social Security or Medicaid. No national healthcare, not even the "lousy" ACA he despises. For the rest of his life, and possibly most of ours. Not that HE needs them with his elite perks, but what about everyone else?

What goes on in this man's head?

Link to tweet

Bernie never said he opposed the ACA 2, he doesn't support it but that's an entirely different animal.

It's a conflation of what Bernie is running on as President; that being Medicare for All and his work in the Senate as exhibit A. the video below.

Prof Krugman is correct on this issue

Link to tweet

with McConnell controlling the Senate and Trump holding the Oval Office until after the 2020 elections.

Bernie is unequivocally running on Medicare for All and should he/we be so fortunate as to win the primaries and G.E. (which I have great confidence in) this would signify a major watershed moment in American Political power dynamics.

The Republican SC will either kill the ACA or they won't but there is nothing Bernie or any other political leader can do about it if they do other than protest, vote or run for political office.

And for two if the Supreme Court doesn't kill the ACA , the transition years in Bernie's plan will not kill it overnight, Americans are on it now until they turn 65, it would just be a reduction in age phase in.

I am a member of the Democratic Party and I support the plan of the Democratic Party to improve the ACA