As was shown in the debates last night, as well as on her website, Hillary Clinton puts forth a very good argument for continuing President Obama’s institution of the Affordable Care Act and its inauguration of non-damaging, gradual, effective, and positive change in our healthcare system.
Rather than immediately ripping everything out — including Medicare and Medicaid as well as the ACA — and starting from scratch, keeping and refining the ACA allows for a change that is far less threatening to our recovering economy. That’s not just me saying, that’s Paul Krugman saying that:
First, like it or not, incumbent players have a lot of power. Private insurers played a major part in killing health reform in the early 1990s, so this time around reformers went for a system that preserved their role and gave them plenty of new business.
Second, single-payer would require a lot of additional tax revenue — and we would be talking about taxes on the middle class, not just the wealthy. It’s true that higher taxes would be offset by a sharp reduction or even elimination of private insurance premiums, but it would be difficult to make that case to the broad public, especially given the chorus of misinformation you know would dominate the airwaves.
Finally, and I suspect most important, switching to single-payer would impose a lot of disruption on tens of millions of families who currently have good coverage through their employers. You might say that they would end up just as well off, and it might well be true for most people — although not those with especially good policies. But getting voters to believe that would be a very steep climb.
As our very own Triple-B says, Sanders needs to level with Democrats about his ‘revolution’. “Clap louder!” is not a plan.