Yes, of course he wouldn’t mean it. But as a recent article by Russell Mokhiber points out, www.commondreams.org/… he has said and written favorable things about single-payer before:
“We must have universal health care. Just imagine the improved quality of life for our society as a whole,” Trump wrote [in his 2000 book, The America We Deserve]. “The Canadian-style, single-payer system in which all payments for medical care are made to a single agency (as opposed to the large number of HMOs and insurance companies with their diverse rules, claim forms and deductibles) … helps Canadians live longer and healthier than Americans.”
And in 2016, he appeared on David Letterman’s show:
“A friend of mine was in Scotland recently,” Trump told Letterman. “He got very, very sick. They took him by ambulance and he was there for four days. He was really in trouble, and they released him and he said, ‘Where do I pay?’ And they said – ‘There’s no charge,’ Not only that, he said it was like great doctors, great care. I mean, we could have a great system in this country.”
Biden and Harris need to wake up to this and endorse Medicare for All. Harris already had spoken in support of it as a candidate, but then began to walk back that support.
The polling means that it’s a no-brainer: 87 percent of Democrats support it, and 69 percent of Independents. Even Republican support is 43 percent, and after a few more months of people in red states losing their employer-based health insurance and getting stuck with huge hospital bills, more of them are likely to come around. www.newsweek.com/…
As Mokhiber’s article points out, a last-minute endorsement by Trump of a single-payer system could peel away a few voters in swing states, and allow him to potentially get an electoral college win.
Biden and Harris need to head this off now. And it’s time for the DNC to stop trying to get wins that don’t beat the spread. Endorsing single-payer now would crush Trump and make down-ballot wins that much more important. And now that we’ve had 6 months of people losing their employer-based health insurance, what exactly is the argument for keeping the current system?
