Bernie Sanders’s Medicare-for-all single-payer bill

Sen. Bernie Sanders’s signature policy — Medicare-for-all — was once again under attack at an event with union workers Tuesday, when the news broke: General Motors cut off health benefits to nearly 50,000 workers currently on strike.

Former Vice President Joe Biden took the stage at a presidential forum with AFL-CIO union workers Tuesday, arguing that Medicare-for-all could be bad for unions.

Sen. Bernie Sanders’s campaign says Sen. Kamala Harris’s “Medicare-for-all” plan — one that establishes universal health care through both government-run and private health insurance — is “privatizing Medicare.”

“Her plan is centered around privatizing Medicare, enriching insurance executives and introducing more corporate greed and profiteering into the Medicare system — and even then, waiting for 10 years before any changes happen,” Faiz Shakir, the Sanders’s campaign manager, wrote in a fundraising letter to Sanders’s supporters.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) took the stage at George Washington University Wednesday to reclaim an idea he’s made central to Democrats’ health care debate: Medicare-for-all.

Since Sanders brought Medicare-for-all into the mainstream in his 2016 presidential election, it has been embraced by progressives both as an aspirational end goal, and as tangible policy. It’s also been panned, by Democrats and Republicans who say it would be too expensive, too government-controlled, and too difficult to accomplish. The proposal has been attacked by other 2020 presidential candidates as well: This week, former Vice President Joe Biden adopted a misleading conservative talking point that under Medicare-for-all, “all the Medicare you have is gone.”

House Democrats are holding their second-ever hearing on Medicare-for-all, as the party tries to sort out what its next big step on health care should be.

The Ways and Means Committee hearing on Wednesday differs from April’s historic hearing on Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s Medicare for All Act, which would cover every American in one government insurance plan, in two important ways: For one, it’s being held in a committee that actually has significant jurisdiction over health care policy; and two, the single-payer proposal is being reviewed alongside more incremental plans to expand health coverage.

The first congressional hearing on Medicare-for-all was defined by the opening statement by activist Ady Barkan, who has ALS and used a computer system to testify to the House panel about why he believes America needs single-payer health care.

“Our time on this earth is the most precious resource we have. A Medicare-for-all system will save all of us tremendous time. For doctors and nurses and providers, it will mean more time giving high-quality care. And for patients and our families, it will mean less time dealing with a broken health care system and more time doing the things we love, together,” Barkan said.

Medicare-for-all is finally getting its first official hearing on Tuesday — followed by a big new analysis the next day.

For single-payer supporters, it is an achievement all on its own that House Democratic leaders agreed to hold a hearing at all on their proposal to completely overhaul American health care. But that jubilation has been tempered by the nagging idea the Democratic establishment is still working to undermine Medicare-for-all.

Bernie Sanders’s Fox News town hall Monday night was the uncomfortable mashup you might expect. If Fox envisioned this as a clash of the ideological titans with Vermont senator representing “democratic socialism” and the Fox hosts representing capitalism, however, they may have underestimated how popular Sanders — and the Sanders platform — would be with the town hall audience.

After Sanders answered an audience question about why government-provided versus private-sector health care by outlining his health care proposal, Baier decided to poll the audience about it, by asking people if they’d prefer it to their current, private-sector-provided health insurance. (That frame evokes Barack Obama’s famous promise that “If you like your health care, you can keep it” — something conservatives and Fox News frequently point to as a symbol of Obamacare’s broken promises.)

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has reintroduced his Medicare-for-all bill, which would create a single-payer health care system in the US.

The proposal, which Sanders also introduced in 2017, establishes a government-run health care system that covers all Americans. The plan would allow patients to visit doctors with no out-of-pocket fees. The inclusive coverage would only require patients to pay for prescription drugs.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is reintroducing his Medicare-for-all proposal in the Senate amid a raging debate in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary over abolishing (most) private health insurance.

His bill, which four 2020 presidential candidates have signed on to (Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Cory Booker (D-NJ), Kamala Harris (D-CA) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY)) calls for private health insurance to be eliminated for almost all medical care.

A few weeks ago, New York Times columnist David Brooks anointed Medicare-for-all as the “impossible dream.”

“There is no plausible route from here to there,” he declared.

Jonathan Chait, at New York magazine, says Bernie Sanders’s Medicare-for-all bill “gets America zero percent closer to single payer.”

Chait’s argument, which I largely agree with, is that “single payer has always been, and remains, a political dilemma that nobody has been able to resolve, and there is no evidence the resolution has grown any easier.” But his conclusion — that Sanders “has accomplished approximately zero percent of the necessary work” — misses what I think Sanders is trying to do, and what a reasonable definition of success looks like.

Medicare-for-all is a slogan that, like any slogan, underdetermines actual policy content and brushes aside some details and tough trade-offs. But the increasingly popular argument made by both Patricia Murphy in Roll Call and Margot Sanger-Katz in the New York Times that it resembles the Republican Party’s slogan-based call to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act is fundamentally misguided.

It’s true that slogans are extreme shorthand for policy ideas at best, and that, as Sanger-Katz writes, the Medicare-for-all concept “papers over intraparty disagreements and wrenching policy choices.” It’s also true that Bernie Sanders’s Medicare-for-all legislation is, deliberately, a very high bid offering no deductibles, no copayments, and extremely broad coverage (including dental, vision, and long-term care) of the sort that’s unlikely to be enacted by any realistic political coalition. But it’s not true that this was the problem with repeal and replace.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) released his new single-payer health care bill on Wednesday with the support of 16 Democratic senators.

“This struggle will ultimately not be won here on Capitol Hill, but through grassroots activism all across this country,” Sanders said at a press conference, according to his prepared remarks. “The reality is that when millions of Americans stand up and fight back, when they become engaged politically, there is nothing that will stop us.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) announced Thursday that she’ll support Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-VT) upcoming single-payer health care bill — an idea once deemed far outside the Democratic Party’s mainstream.

In an email to supporters, Warren asked her supporters to sign a petition expressing support for Sanders’s Medicare-for-all legislation, which is expected to be released next week.

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For the past few years, pollsters have asked about a thousand or so Americans the same question: Does the government have an obligation to ensure all Americans have health care?

On three separate occasions this July, staffers for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) began preparing for the rollout of his new single-payer health care bill.

But every time they started to do so, Senate Republicans would improbably revive their push to repeal Obamacare — and Sanders’s team would postpone the launch of their “Medicare-for-all” campaign, according to aides to the Vermont senator.

Bernie Sanders is going to do his more moderate colleagues in the Senate Democratic caucus a big favor, in pursuit of the larger goal of trying to defeat Republican efforts to roll back the Affordable Care Act.

The Washington Examiner reported Wednesday night that Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) is planning to propose an amendment during debate this week to create a single-payer health care system.