Expect the DEM 2020 candidates to push single payer healthcare to a nauseating fringe – PB/TK
Democrats, Beware the Single-Payer Siren – By Bill Scher / July 3 2017
Democrats who are giddily munching popcorn while watching Republicans struggle with trying to repeal Obamacare may want to put down the tub. They are on the verge of adopting a politically analogous health care plank, one designed to rev up their ideological base in the next campaign, but destined to make the party suffer once in power.
Last week, Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator and possible presidential aspirant, declared in a Wall Street Journal interview that after stymying repeal, the “next step” for Democrats should be “single-payer” — a health insurance system with only one main insurer run by the federal government. This is a shift for Warren; she had refused to back single-payer in her 2012 Senate run. And it has seismic repercussions for the Democratic Party.
Previously, only gadfly Democratic presidential candidates touted single-payer: Jerry Brown in 1992, Dennis Kucinich in 2004 and 2008 and Bernie Sanders in 2016. But Sanders graduated from gadfly to heavyweight contender, and in turn, intensity on the left for single-payer has grown. This year, for the first time, the perennial “Medicare for All” bill is being co-sponsored by a majority of the House Democratic Caucus. One health policy expert recently told Vox, “Democratic politicians I never thought would utter the words have mentioned single-payer to me in a non-joking way of late.”
Continue to realclearpolitics.com article: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2017/07/03/democrats_beware_the_single-payer_siren_134331.html
