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Divided We Stand

Divided We Stand
New book about the 2020 election.

Sunday, June 4, 2017

Single Payer

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the Sanders candidacy and the liberal drift of the Democratic Party.

Democrats continue to gallop leftward.  As Alexander Burns and Jennifer Medina write at The New York Times, the latest example is support for single-payer health care:
At rallies and in town hall meetings, and in a collection of blue-state legislatures, liberal Democrats have pressed lawmakers, with growing impatience, to support the creation of a single-payer system, in which the state or federal government would supplant private health insurance with a program of public coverage. And in California on Thursday, the Democrat-controlled State Senate approved a preliminary plan for enacting single-payer system, the first serious attempt to do so there since then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, vetoed legislation in 2006 and 2008.
With Republicans in full control of the federal government, there is no prospect that Democrats can put in place a policy of government-guaranteed medicine on the national level in the near future. And fiscal and logistical obstacles may be insurmountable even in solidly liberal states like California and New York.

...
A study published in January by the Pew Research Center found that about 40 percent of Democrats favored a single-payer system, including a slight majority of self-described liberal Democrats. Among all Americans, support was markedly lower: Just 28 percent said government should be the sole provider of care.