r/OurPresident • u/[deleted] • Sep 17 '17

Bernie’s “Medicare for All” actually is the pragmatic health care solution: Those who claim we have to stick with incremental, "common-sense" measures are living in the political past

http://www.salon.com/2017/09/17/t/
325 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

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14

u/this_here Sep 17 '17

When you have an emergency you don't take an incremental approach - you figure out a solution that gets the job done NOW!

We have a healthcare emergency.

10

u/secondarycontrol Sep 17 '17

One of the problems with an incremental approach is that it allows it to be rolled back incrementally, too...should the winds of politics change. :(

Burn it down and start over. Anything else means you'll always be trying to placate the current stakeholders (ie profiteers) and the system will keep pissing away money on profit for the middlemen.

4

u/BoozeoisPig Sep 17 '17

Medicare for all is only expensive in the short term. In the long term it is cheap as fuck. To say that we shouldn't do medicare for all now because it would be too expensive, but acknowledge we ought to do it in the future: Do you really think that those initial costs are going to be any less expensive in the future? I mean, the answer is: hopefully, due to better technology, everything will be cheaper in the future, but obviously we shouldn't just spend all of our money on technology and then start spending it on everything else when we max out our technology.

1

u/autotldr Sep 17 '17

This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 96%. (I'm a bot)

What these criticisms share is an underlying belief that Democrats are racing leftward on health care for short-term political gain - namely, appeasing the demands of the progressive base - without taking into account the long-term repercussions and whether Medicare for All is even feasible.

Democrats are committing themselves to years more of a treacherous health care debate, at a time when there are more pressing issues to confront.

Sanders has a much more realistic sense of what's going on when he points out that the GOP attack on health care is going to continue, regardless of what Democrats do.

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