Bernie Sanders' Health Care Debate Was a Good Idea for a Very Simple Reason

SEP. 26, 2017 11:39 AM

Excerpts:

When CNN announced last week that it would hold a debate on health care between Republican Sens. Bill Cassidy and Lindsey Graham and progressive Sens. Bernie Sanders and Amy Klobuchar, the reaction in some Democratic circles was anxiety. “I’m not sure single payer vs Graham-Cassidy is the debate we want right now,” mused former Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor. With the Affordable Care Act once more on the ropes, the argument seemed to go, Sanders was choosing to advance his personal politics ahead of the priorities of the moment.

Those fears were unfounded. A Monday night cable news special was never going to be the make-or-break moment for health care reform, but more importantly, Sanders’ skeptics, and his Republican debating opponents, misunderstood his entire approach to health care reform—no one in the Senate has as much riding on Obamacare’s survival as he does.

Sanders and Klobuchar returned again and again to the Congressional Budget Office analysis that showed that Graham-Cassidy would throw millions off health insurance. In defense, Graham and Cassidy couldn’t really say what their bill would do, because the entire point of their proposal is to change Obamacare’s spending into block grants and let governors and state legislators decide for themselves how health funds should be spent. Sanders pointed out that governors and state legislators had all pretty much decided before Obamacare that people with pre-existing conditions were on their own. Graham didn’t have much to say about that. Instead, he and Cassidy frequently tried to make hay out of Sanders’ politics.

Sanders, of course, was happy to defend the principle of a single-payer system, but he never let that get in the way of the task on hand, nor did he reject the incrementalism the Senate sometimes lives and breathes by. Of course Medicare-for-all won’t be passing anytime soon, he said. But in the meantime, there were bipartisan fixes to made to Obamacare, and opportunity to act on prescription drug prices—an area of agreement, Sanders noted, between he and President Trump. They might even consider lowering the age of Medicare or offering a Medicaid or Medicare buy-in option—ideas his Democratic colleagues Brian Schatz of Hawaii and Chris Murphy of Connecticut are currently working on.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/09/bernie-sanders-health-care-debate-was-a-good-idea-for-a-very-simple-reason/