Will Conservative Freshmen Dems In Swing Districts Serve As A Road Block Against Medicare For All?

If she refuses to support Democratic policies, why should we care if she loses in 2020?

On Thursday, CNN had Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson on for a brief interview. When asked a process question about how she can win, her response stuck with me. "My strategy is not strategy. My strategy is that I seek to speak as deeply, articulately and passionately as I can what I see to be the deeper truths confronting our nation, challenging our nation to live up to them. I'm speaking from the depth of myself to the depth of the American in all of us. This is not strategy. The whole strategic mind is a mark of the corruption of the political system. I'm not trying to figure out what to say to get people to vote for me. I'm seeking to have the conversation that I believe we need to be having."

It drives me crazy to hear a debate inside the Democratic Party not on the merits of the legislative reforms that make people choose Democrats over Republicans-- above and beyond as a reaction against Trump and his enablers-- but about how it will play out in the career aspirations of usually conservative Democrats in marginal seats. If we pass progressive taxation will we be able to hold Blue Dog Kendra Horn's seat in Oklahoma City? Well, probably not, because Kendra Horn is a moron who doesn't have the faintest idea what progressive taxation is, let alone how to explain it to her constituents. Rather than learn, she just joined the Blue Dogs instead, where he brainless approach would be in supportive good company.

If Democrats pass Medicare-for-All will they be able to hold Blue Dog Mikie's Sherrill's seat in Morris County, New Jersey? Political pundit Ron Brownstein warns that perhaps not. He suggests, in fact, that the battle over single-payer health care "could become one of the principal crucibles in which the Democratic Party confronts its changing identity. It will test how a party increasingly drawn toward populist economics confronts the challenge of managing a political coalition growingly reliant on voters who are thriving financially and attracted to the party largely on cultural grounds. The Medicare for All debate sharpens that tension because the college-educated voters moving away from the GOP in the Donald Trump era overwhelmingly receive insurance through their employers-- and polls show that the vast majority of them are satisfied with that coverage."

Let me butt in here with a personal observation. Before I retired, I was a divisional president at TimeWarner. Long before I reached that status, attorneys for presidents and chairmen inside the TimeWarner conglomerate had negotiated eye-popping terms for their clients-- a class-- that included insurance. Without having to fight for it, my contract included the best private insurance available anywhere in corporate America. Better than what Ron Brownstein's happy suburban college-educated newly-mined anti-Trump Democrats have. And then I turned 65 and was forced off the plan and onto Medicare. And Medicare in every way-- except George Bush's deceit drug plan to benefit Big Pharma (Part D)-- is much better than private health insurance. I learned that after $2 million dollars worth of hassle-free (financially-speaking) cancer treatment from the best most cutting-edge specialist in the entire world, during which time Medicare never said "boo!" I have a feeling many of Ron Brownstein's happy suburban college-educated newly-mined anti-Trump Democrats will find out faster than he has about the drawbacks of even the best private insurance in comparison to Medicare.

I only see 10 freshmen on this list. Where the hell are the others?

The last version of Medicare for All had over 120 cosponsors. The new version, improved by Pramila Jayapal, came out of the shoot with considerably fewer. All but one of the Blue Dogs, Mike Thompson (CA), who signed on last year, for example, are missing. Now that there's going to be an actual vote on it, where are Lou Correa (Blue Dog-Orange County, CA), Jim Cooper (Blue Dog-Nashville, TN), Adam Schiff (Blue Dog-Glendale, Burbank, Hollywood, CA), Sanford Bishop (Macon, Columbus, GA) and Filemon Vela (Blue Dog-Brownsville, McAllen, TX).

And these are the members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus are haven't signed on, at least not yet:

• Alma Adams (NC)
• Karen Bass (CA)
• Don Beyer (VA)
• Gil Cisneros (CA)
• Katherine Clark (MA)
• Bonnie Watson Coleman (NJ)
• Angie Craig (MN)
• Elijah Cummings (MD)
• Madeleine Dean (PA)
• Rosa DeLauro (CT)
• Antonio Delgado (NY)
• Val Demings (FL)
• Lloyd Doggett (TX)
• Veronica Escobar (TX)
• Dwight Evans (PA)
• Marcia Fudge (OH)
• Sylvia Garcia (TX)
• Jared Golden (ME)
• Jahana Hayes (CT)
• Katie Hill (CA)
• Steven Horsford (NV)
• Hakeem Jeffries (NY)
• Joseph Kennedy III (MA)
• Eddie Bernice Johnson (TX)
• Andy Kim (NJ)
• Brenda Lawrence (MI)
• Dave Loebsack (IA)
• Zoe Lofgren (CA)
• Gwen Moore (WI)
• Joe Morelle (NY)
• Donald Norcross (NJ)
• Frank Pallone (NJ)
• Jimmy Panetta (CA)
• Katie Porter (CA)
• Debbie Musarsel-Powell (FL)
• Lisa Blunt Rochester (DE)
• Lucille Roybal-Allard (CA)
• Linda Sanchez (CA)
• Mary Gay Scanlon (PA)
• Jan Schakowsky (IL)
• Brad Sherman (CA)
• Darren Soto (FL)
• Bennie Thompson (MS)
• Susan Wild (PA)
• John Yarmuth (KY)

Many of them will eventually sign on as co-sponsors. Others are just in the CPC as ruse... to trick progressive voters back home, a trick CPC co-chair Mark Pocan uses to raise money (dues) and pad the membership roll so it looks like the CPC-- now stuffed with crooked New Dems-- is still the biggest Democratic caucus. Anyway, if any of these congresscritters are yours, call them at 202-858-1717 and give them a piece of your mind, especially the ones who campaigned on Medicare-for-All and got you to contribute to them or vote for them because of that.

Brownstein's piece in The Atlantic is about politicians unable to understand, let alone explain, the details of policy-- in this case Medicare-For-All and a bumbling Kamala Harris. Her stumbling answers during an interview this week, caused Brownstein to speculate that "the idea of trying to completely eliminate private insurance unnerves many veterans of the health-care fights under former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. After the ACA’s passage, Obama-- who had famously promised that those who like their insurance plan could keep it-- faced a huge backlash after only a few hundred thousand people in the individual insurance market were forced to give up coverage that did not meet the law’s standards. Ending private insurance would affect the 181 million Americans who today receive health insurance through their employers, according to census figures. The share of Americans who receive coverage through work is significant: about two-thirds of adults with a high-school diploma, three-fourths of those with a two-year college degree, 87 percent of those with a four-year degree, and 90 percent of those with graduate education. Not surprisingly, that means extremely large percentages of adults receive health coverage through their employers in many of the affluent suburban districts that powered the Democratic takeover of the House last November.

More than four-fifths of the population receives employer-provided coverage in a wide range of districts that Democrats flipped from the GOP in 2018, including suburban seats in Northern Virginia and New Jersey, and seats in Chicago, Minneapolis, and Detroit, according to census results. And roughly three-fourths receive health insurance through their employers in districts that Democrats won elsewhere: in northeast Iowa; Irvine, California; Salt Lake City; Virginia Beach, Virginia; and the suburbs of Richmond, Virginia; Atlanta; Des Moines; Kansas City, Kansas; and San Diego. By contrast, in the much more working-class New York City district won by the liberal champion Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, just 56 percent of the residents have employer-provided insurance.

Very few of the winners in these suburban seats endorsed the single-payer idea, as the journalist Libby Watson has tabulated. (The law professor Katie Porter, who beat Republican Mimi Walters for the California seat centered on Irvine, was one of the rare exceptions.) And many longtime Democratic health-care experts are dubious that most of these suburban members would ever vote to eliminate private health coverage for their constituents-- especially when the options of allowing younger adults to buy into Medicare or creating a more robust public option could also substantially expand coverage without provoking as much of a potential backlash.

[Watson's analysis, used by Brownstein, is nearly worthless since counting was far from over when she wrote it and several races were won by Democrats who back Medicare-For-All after it was published.]

...[I]t’s clear that single-payer advocates are gathering more momentum than ever before in the party. In addition to Harris, Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Cory Booker-- all either announced or likely 2020 presidential candidates-- have endorsed the legislation from Sanders (a possible candidate himself) to eliminate private health insurance and replace it with a single government-run system. Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington is expected to introduce similar legislation in the House soon, with co-sponsorship from about half of the Democratic caucus.

The single-payer idea is also attracting increasing interest from organized labor, which historically has been ambivalent about proposals that would eliminate its role in delivering health-care benefits for its members. “There’s lots of discussion about this,” says one high-ranking union official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. “The only real resistance is from Building Trades and Teamsters who administer big health-care plans and have mixed feelings. They’re torn between cost increases and a legacy sense of the importance of being the source of member insurance. If Dems move Medicare for All, unions will likely push it strongly.” Groups that advocate for single payer are mobilizing to build awareness of the policy: The National Nurses United union, one of the leading supporters, is organizing dozens of events across the country in early February.

Polling consistently shows that Democratic voters’ initial reaction is to support these ideas. In the latest monthly health-care tracking poll by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, four-fifths of Democrats (and 56 percent of all adults) said they supported “a national health plan, sometimes called Medicare-for-All, in which all Americans would get their insurance from a single government plan.”

But the same survey found much more hesitation, even among Democrats, when respondents were told [lies] that such a plan could mean higher taxes, longer waits for treatment, and the elimination of private insurance companies. Support among the general public in the Kaiser poll plummeted to just 37 percent when respondents were told it could eliminate private insurance companies. Support sagged to the same level when respondents were told it could require most Americans to pay more in taxes. Only one-fourth still backed the idea if it meant longer wait times for care.

Most self-identified Democrats still supported the proposal when told it would eliminate private health insurance or require higher taxes, according to more detailed results Kaiser provided to me. But both possibilities roughly doubled opposition among Democrats, to about two in five. And a substantial majority of Democrats, nearly two-thirds, said they would oppose single payer if it meant longer waits.

The shifts were even more dramatic among the broader population of college-educated whites, whom Democrats increasingly rely on in elections, and the working-class whites whom the party is hoping to pry back from Trump. Support from both groups dropped to only 34 percent when respondents were told private insurance could be eliminated, and to about one in four when they were told single payer could mean longer waits. Higher taxes were less of a deal breaker for college-educated whites: 45 percent of them (compared with only about one-third of non-college-educated whites) said they would still support single payer if it required more taxes on most Americans, as analysts have estimated it would. (Supporters argue that while the system shifts costs from employers and consumers to the government, it would increase efficiency by squeezing out insurance companies and reduce the nation’s overall level of spending on health care.)

The Democratic pollster Geoff Garin, who has polled extensively on health care, says the Kaiser results-- and the findings of his own recent survey for the advocacy group Protect Our Care-- underscore the turbulence in the health-care debate, especially after the defeat of GOP efforts to repeal the ACA. “I don’t think there is a settled opinion on this,” Garin says, referring to the single-payer idea. “And there are definitely serious questions that the supporters of Medicare for All will have to navigate. But I think there is an openness to significant change in the way people receive their health-insurance coverage.”

In the near term, Garin says, Democrats don’t need to resolve these questions: His survey, like the Kaiser poll, found that voters, including Democratic partisans, want Congress to focus this year mostly on defending and improving the ACA-- for instance, by maintaining patient protections and doing a better job of controlling costs.

“People want a conversation about universal coverage,” says Leslie Dach, the founder and chair of Protect Our Care. “But this is a complicated issue. Do people fully grasp what it means for their employer insurance, what [it means] for other aspects of the health-care system? At the same time, there’s a critical agenda that is in front of the Congress today that is straightforward and hugely meaningful.”

But the longer-term debate over the party’s direction on health care, sharpened by Harris’s declaration on Monday, looms as a probable centerpiece of the party’s 2020 nominating contest. Several likely candidates, including Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, have already signaled they will propose more incremental changes to expand coverage. In Garin’s survey for Protect Our Care, Democrats split exactly in half on whether they want the party to pursue reforms that build on the existing employer-based system or replace it entirely with a single-payer structure.

How that debate sorts out-- through the 2020 primaries and beyond-- will gauge the new balance of power among Democrats, as the party still envisions itself as the voice of the struggling, but represents a growing number of the comfortable.

The corrupt establishments of both paries-- not the essence of the parties, their establishments-- are exactly the same kind of toxic garbage. Don't think the Democratic garbage is better than the Republican garbage. Without values and ideals, the two parties are just self-serving careerists. I don't care about Mikie Sherrill's or Kendra Horn's or Jeff Van Drew's careers. I care about the policies they will kill while putting their careers over the interests of the American people. Watch this new short video about the former president of her college's Young Republican Club and GOP operative, all the way through: