The historic support for Bernie Sanders' healthcare bill shows single payer is becoming mainstream

SEPTEMBER 13, 2017

Excerpt:

Sanders championed single payer every chance he got throughout the primary—on TV appearances and at his mass rallies. This past spring and summer, congressional town halls were jam-packed with constituents demanding a health insurance system that would provide them with the care and the drugs they need to survive without driving them into bankruptcy. Groups such as National Nurses United, Physicians for a National Health Program, Healthcare Now!, Our Revolution, Justice Democrats and the Democratic Socialists of America energized their membership to knock doors, petition representatives and build public support behind single-payer.

Meanwhile, advocates for single payer have followed Sanders’ lead in making the moral case for a universal healthcare system in the United States. Rather than focusing on the need to bring down healthcare costs to cut the deficit, supporters have rejected the vocabulary of austerity and instead called upon the need for a humane and just system that doesn’t discriminate based on economic stature.

The approach was on full display during a MSNBC-hosted town hall event with Sanders in McDowell County, W.Va., in March. McDowell, a former mining community, is one of the poorest areas in the state and was won by Donald Trump in 2016 with 75 percent of the vote. Speaking to a crowd of McDowell residents and Phil, a former coal miner who voted for Trump, Sanders said:

“What I am going to tell you is not utopian, it’s not crazy, it is real. For a start, healthcare must be a right of all people, workers and retirees.

“Let me pose this question to Phil and to other people. We are the only major country on Earth, the only one that doesn’t guarantee healthcare to all people as a right. What do you think? Do you think we should join other countries and guarantee healthcare as a right of all people?”