As featured in a front-page piece, polling proves health care is the issue for Democratic voters in the primary states (and across the country). Any candidates that are serious about winning the Democratic nomination and overturning the GOP majority in the Senate and the regime at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. has to make this one of their top 3 or 4 talking points. The corporatists will push back, and they should lose with voters.
But, progressives need to be serious about getting real single-payer Medicare for All. It’s not enough to cheer it as an applause line. We have to demand it from our leaders — and there will be a major effort in coming weeks to marshal support from voters and their members of Congress. The effort starts on Tuesday morning, when you can start calling your representative to get them to co-sponsor the new House bill (H.R. 676) before it’s introduced next month.
*If you don’t want to wade through a dense diary, you can scroll to the end to get the website and the routing number for calling your Cong’l reps. Spoiler: This website: Medicare4All.org — and use this phone number to route your calls and add your call to the dataset of calls made: (202) 858-1717. Also, please take the diary poll at the end, too.
On to the content:
Progressives will be coming together (hopefully) in the next several weeks to serve notice that Medicare for All is at the top of the Democratic agenda. It’s not H.R 1, which was election reform, and it’s not the Green New Deal, which will be a long, heavy lift, but it is legislation we want the House to start taking seriously. There were never hearings in the House on the old H.R. 676. That’s about to change and history will be made in the House.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal is introducing a new version of H.R. 676 — a real piece of legislation, rather than the flimsy policy statement of years past. Thousands of pages, not hundreds. A program that answers voters’ questions about how it will work. There will be hearings in a couple of committees. If we push hard enough, we might even get Ways and Means and the Energy and Commerce Committees to start their own process. Patients will get care, without invoices. It will be a revolution. The moment is now. More below on this — but you can learn what you can do in the coming weeks to support the effort. Just go to the Medicare4All website set up by National Nurses United.
This is a government shutdown issue, too. Federal employees who have enjoyed great medical coverage will soon lose their vision and dental insurance coverage, because of a lapse in paying their premiums. There will be a whole new set of voters who may feel new urgency about getting insurance companies out of their healthcare.
Getting back to the Presidential race, all of this really points up the mistake I think Sen. Elizabeth Warren is making by trying to ignore that she has supported Medicare for All. She didn’t even mention it in her first appearances. Her response to a reporter afterwards was that she wasn’t asked. This is a bad response. It should be front and center for her — something in her stump speech that she features before she takes questions. Every time.
I write about her, because I was deeply committed to Sen. Warren’s candidacy in 2015 — a race she decided not to run. Like so many who became Bernie Sanders supporters in the months that followed, Warren was our first choice — and we settled on Bernie because he was the most serious candidate remaining committed to reversing the path of aristocracy we set out on 40 years ago, and because, most of all, he was incontrovertibly committed to a single-payer plan to cover all Americans.
For me, the Sanders’ campaign was a success when Clinton spoke up to belittle the idea. I didn’t expect Bernie to win, but I believed we were now on the path to winning the debate that Clinton really launched that day. On this date, we should remember the Rev. Dr. King’s caution:
“Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle.”
Now that Liz Warren is in the race, I desperately want her to be as committed to this as Sanders is.
Maybe it’s a tactical thing for Warren, wanting to go after those Clinton supporters who have internalized the notion that we don’t really want it or that it’s politically impossible or economically infeasible. Maybe she wants to cede the ground to Bernie Sanders, thinking it’s not going to help her. She’s wrong. She’s wrong politically generally, and wrong for her brand. Hopefully, when the House bill comes out in 2-3 weeks, she might get on board. Rep. Jayapal’s version of H.R. 676 will be a huge improvement on the old House bill, and better in significant ways than Sanders’ Senate bill. Or, maybe she’ll renew her support for Sanders’ less transformative effort.
My dread is that she’s setting the stage for incrementalism. Perhaps expanding the age for Medicare, and offering the option to buy in to the program. This what CAP is calling Medicare Plus. It’s fundamentally what the public option was...and it sucks.
Rep. Jayapal’s bill really strengthens Medicare, so that even current recipients will see new, great expansion of their coverage and will no longer have trouble finding doctors. Ditto for those on Medicaid. The public option will wreck Medicare. It won’t improve the benefits package, and it will transform the program into something that has to compete with private insurers...by offering less coverage and charging high premiums and co-pays, instead of no premiums and no co-pays.
Let’s make sure that medical care is available and that people never have to decide if they can afford the care they need. Then, we can figure out to pay for all that. Start with the first principles. Warren can be a tepid candidate who fails to excite people by not really offering them something tangible — Wall St. reform is important, but it won’t transform Middle Americans’ lives. True Universal Healthcare will do that. If she wants her campaign to catch fire, she needs to be 🔥🔥.
I’m willing to consider devoting my life to her — or to Sen. Kamala Harris — instead of Sen. Sanders. To Sen. Harris’ credit, she’s been ‘tweeting the sh*t’ out of her support for Medicare for All. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand has also been a co-sponsor, but I’m waiting to see how much she’ll talk about this, or whether she’s going to start the weasel talk about “a Medicare for All plan” and “affordable access” for all Americans. I’m not optimistic, but I’ll be listening and hoping to be surprised. That goes for all the candidates.
The major candidates need to make clear they’re serious about the 2 most pivotal of the 4 or 5 biggest challenges we face. Besides wildly increasing inequality and the racism and sexism we’ve seen explode over the last 3 years (and the threats to democracy here and abroad), candidates have to talk about a Medicare program for all (not a publicly-owned or run commercial insurance), and a serious WW2-sized mobilization on climate — all parts of our government and all parts of our economy, making the Green New Deal a reality to make the changes we need here and to move the rest of the world to join us in the scale of the effort.
** It’s not all on the candidates, though. As noted, there’s going to be a new version of H.R. 676 being introduced by Rep. Jayapal in February. You can go to Medicare4all.org and see how to get involved.
There will be ‘barnstorm’ events around the country, around the introduction of the bill — they’re meant to recruit people to canvass or phone-bank. You can find one near you (or see if you can still sign up to host an event at Medicare4All.org site.
But there’s a crucially important first step before that. We need people to call their reps and get them to co-sponsor the bill now. Start by calling this campaign routing number — 202-858-1717.
Call your representatives. Whether they were a sponsor of the old bill, whether they’re new and ran on the issue, or whether they held out before, they need convincing. Please use this central Medicare 4 All routing phone number to do it, so the campaign can track how many calls went to each member of Congress. Again, the number for you to start dialing is 202-858-1717.
We’ve got 2 weeks to do it. If we can get 100+ co-sponsors, the momentum the bill will have will be significant. If it’s just 2 or 3 dozen, the leadership of the key committees will ignore it.
When we secure our personal futures with guaranteed healthcare and secure the future for the next generations by stopping the climate death-spiral, we will have the footing we need to make equality the reality of our lives — to realize the promise of MLK’s dream.