Transcript of the Democratic Presidential Debate
The New York Times, January 17, 2016
(The debate is sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus Institute)
Brief excerpts
Hillary Clinton: We finally have a path to universal health care. We have accomplished so much already. I do not to want see the Republicans repeal it, and I don’t to want see us start over again with a contentious debate. I want us to defend and build on the Affordable Care Act and improve it.
Bernie Sanders: No one is tearing this up, we’re going to go forward. But with the secretary neglected to mention, not just the 29 million still have no health insurance, that even more are underinsured with huge copayments and deductibles. Tell me why we are spending almost three times more than the British, who guarantee health care to all of their people? Fifty percent more than the French, more than the Canadians. The vision from FDR and Harry Truman was health care for all people as a right in a cost-effective way.
Bernie Sanders: What this is really about is not the rational way to go forward — it’s Medicare for all — it is whether we have the guts to stand up to the private insurance companies and all of their money, and the pharmaceutical industry. That’s what this debate should be about.
Hillary Clinton: So, what I’m saying is really simple. This has been the fight of the Democratic Party for decades. We have the Affordable Care Act. Let’s make it work.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/18/us/politics/transcript-of-the-democratic-presidential-debate.html
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Health Reform Realities
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times, January 18, 2016
Obamacare is … what engineers would call a kludge: a somewhat awkward, clumsy device with lots of moving parts. This makes it more expensive than it should be, and will probably always cause a significant number of people to fall through the cracks.
The question for progressives — a question that is now central to the Democratic primary — is whether these failings mean that they should re-litigate their own biggest political success in almost half a century, and try for something better.
My answer, as you might guess, is that they shouldn’t, that they should seek incremental change on health care (Bring back the public option!) and focus their main efforts on other issues — that is, that Bernie Sanders is wrong about this and Hillary Clinton is right.
… as the health policy expert Harold Pollack points out, is that a simple, straightforward single-payer system just isn’t going to happen.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/18/opinion/health-reform-realities.html
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Here’s why creating single-payer health care in America is so hard
By Harold Pollack
Vox, January 16, 2016
The experience of peer industrial democracies suggests that a well-designed single-payer system would be more humane and markedly less expensive than what we have right now.
Passing a single-payer plan requires precisely the same interest-group bargaining and logrolling required to pass the ACA. The resulting policies will thus replicate some of the very same scars, defects, and kludge that bedevil the ACA.
Progressives should still push for basic reforms that improve our current system. I supported the public option in 2009. I still do. I hope it resurfaces in some form, particularly for older participants in the state marketplaces . It may open a pathway to a true single-payer. If it doesn’t — which I suspect it will not — it might still provide a valuable alternative and source of pricing discipline within our pathological health care market.
http://www.vox.com/2016/1/16/10779270/pollack-single-payer-in-america
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Bernie Sanders’s single-payer plan isn’t a plan at all
By Ezra Klein
Vox, January 17, 2016
Sanders calls his plan Medicare-for-All. But it actually has nothing to do with Medicare. He’s not simply expanding Medicare coverage to the broader population — he makes that clear when he says his plan means “no more copays, no more deductibles”; Medicare includes copays and deductibles. The list of what Sanders’s plan would cover far exceeds what Medicare offers, suggesting, more or less, that pretty much everything will be covered, under all circumstances.
Behind Sanders’s calculations, both for how much his plan will cost and how much Americans will benefit, lurk extremely optimistic promises about how much money single-payer will save. And those promises can only come true if the government starts saying no quite a lot — in ways that will make people very, very angry.
This is what Republicans fear liberals truly believe: that they can deliver expansive, unlimited benefits to the vast majority of Americans by stacking increasingly implausible, and economically harmful, taxes on the rich. Sanders is proving them right.
http://www.vox.com/2016/1/17/10784528/bernie-sanders-single-payer-health-care
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Why We Can’t Wait
By Martin Luther King, Jr.
“For years now, I have heard the word ‘Wait!’ It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’ We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that ‘justice too long delayed is justice denied.’”
http://thekinglegacy.org/books/why-we-cant-wait
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Comment:
By Don McCanne, M.D.
Martin Luther King, Jr. already said it, and that was half a century ago.
[PNHP note: Physicians for a National Health Program is a nonpartisan educational organization. As a consequence, it neither supports nor opposes any candidate for public office.]