Think Again Elizabeth

While it is weeks before candidates begin to be selected for the 2020 election, these days many of us are struggling with our own choices even as we stay in touch with those who will make the decisions. As the weeks have rolled by I have tentatively focused my attention on supporting Elizabeth Warren, backed up by Mayor Pete. It strikes me that a woman at the head of the ticket and a young male as a possible Vice Presidential candidate, might be our strongest option. Among other strengths, of all the possible candidates Elizabeth Warren may just be feisty enough not to be steamrollered by Trump.

But before I go any further, Elizabeth has a problem. While I consider climate change to be the nation’s number one issue, perhaps health care will get and is getting top billing among potential candidates. And here is where I have a serious problem with Elizabeth’s current stance.

Medicare for All may well be the best possible long-term solution as the nation seeks a way to see that everyone is insured. But it is not the best current political solution if it cannot and will not resonate with America’s voters. In fact, as things stand now, anyone advocating Medicare for All will probably doom the nation to four more years of the current disaster.

Elizabeth Warren was lured into supporting Medicare for All through the gate developed by Bernie Sanders who first advocated it and was the author of the“damn bill.” Sanders wants to establish himself as the most radical of all the candidates, and Elizabeth Warren also longs to be on the far left of the political main-stream.

But neither of them has made the case for Medicare for All, or explained just how it would be financed. To say that middle-class families will save money even if their taxes go up may be accurate, but few of these Americans are jumping on that bandwagon. The ten year cost of thirty TRILLION dollars is too large a lump for most Americans to swallow, even if that gigantic bill gets funded by unspecified Federal budget reductions together with revision of the obscene Trump tax cuts.

While neither of the advocates will admit it, obviously there will be an across-the-board tax increase of some size. There appears no other way to pay for it. The prospect of a middle-class tax increase is bitter medicine that just won’t go down. Savings in co-payments is not a convincing argument, and a significant number of current Medicare recipients must also have expensive supplemental policies. Medicare costs, unless you are in a HMO that pays all the bills, will not evaporate just because everyone is required to join it.

There is another gigantic problem. Medicare for All automatically eliminates private insurance and nullifies the hard-won contracts that have been negotiated by America’s unions. And where are many of these industrial collective bargaining bodies centered? Why, in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin, the very states the Democrats must win if they are to garner enough electoral votes. This attack on the work of the nation’s unions may spell defeat for every progressive cause and candidate supporting Sanders and his Medicare for All. And no one should discount the political power of the insurance industry and its employees.

Few politicians are comfortable when asked to modify a position they have defended, even if holding on to it spells political disaster. But at this point Bernie Sanders is becoming obsolete and Elizabeth Warren is in serious trouble as the economic and political facts about Medicare for All continue to surface.

There in another option that may guarantee the universal coverage Democrats support. It is Mayor Pete’s “Medicare for all who want it.” This option would welcome everyone into the Medicare system and at the same time allow those who want to hang on to their private plans to do so. This route to universal coverage would cost a fraction of Medicare for All, and would guarantee choice.

As long as Elizabeth Warren is wed to Bernie’s approach, I think her drive to be the Democratic candidate is toast, and even if she manages to get the nomination, my current guess is that her electability would be doomed.

Elizabeth, take another look before it is too late.