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TOP NANCY PELOSI AIDE PRIVATELY TELLS INSURANCE EXECUTIVES NOT TO WORRY ABOUT DEMOCRATS PUSHING “MEDICARE FOR ALL”

LESS THAN A month after Democrats — many of them running on “Medicare for All” — won back control of the House of Representatives in November, the top health policy aide to then-prospective House Speaker Nancy Pelosi met with Blue Cross Blue Shield executives and assured them that party leadership had strong reservations about single-payer health care and was more focused on lowering drug prices, according to sources familiar with the meeting.

Pelosi adviser Wendell Primus detailed five objections to Medicare for All and said that Democrats would be allies to the insurance industry in the fight against single-payer health care. Primus pitched the insurers on supporting Democrats on efforts to shrink drug prices, specifically by backing a number of measures that the pharmaceutical lobby is opposing....

PRIMUS IS KNOWN in Congress as one of the staunchest foes of Big Pharma, while Pelosi’s posture toward Medicare for All is more complicated. Publicly, she has long said that she supports it aspirationally. “I was carrying around single-payer signs probably before you were born, so I, you know, I understand that aspiration,” she said in 2017 during an interview with TV host Joy Reid.

“This is an idea that if we had a tabula rasa, if we were just starting clean, would be the most cost-effective way to go forward. We don’t have that,” she said. “Over 120 or 150 million people in our country have employer-based access to their health coverage and insurance....

At the time, her objection to Medicare for All was that it distracted from the fight to defend the ACA, which Republicans were trying to gut. “So right now, I’m going to be crude. Now we’re in my living room, so I can be crude. It isn’t helpful to tinkle all over the ACA right now,” Pelosi said. “Right now, we need to support the Affordable Care Act and defeat what the Republicans are doing.”

At other moments, she has said that single payer isn’t popular, arguing, also in 2017, that “the comfort level with a broader base of the American people is not there yet.”

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which operates under Pelosi, in 2017 presented House Democrats with survey data, claiming that it showed that single-payer was a political loser, and that Democrats should focus their messaging on lowering drug prices and protecting the ACA.

Yet a significant number of Democrats who flipped Republican districts blue in 2018 were publicly supportive of Medicare for All, suggesting that it isn’t necessarily the albatross Pelosi and the DCCC believe it to be. A poll from October found that more than half of Republicans support the concept.
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This is kind of non-news news, as none of it is really that surprising or unknown. It isn't good optics to the progressive faction though, particularly if Pelosi wants to keep them in line. They'll certainly subscribe to her push for lowering drug prices, but I'm not confident that the price cuts will be substantial enough to translate into tangible carrots for the base. Even among generic medications, prices are often substantially higher in the US than other developed countries.

It is frustrating that among the establishment Democrats, the sticking point seems to be the fact that this would undo the ACA. Medicare for All is just a name, just as ACA is, and fwiw Medicare for All would be precisely what many who voted for Obama thought it would be: a single-payer system with a private option. The inherent problem with the ACA is its faith in the private market taken to such an irrational extent that it assumed the market could solve a unprofitable problem--no surprise considering it was in design essentially the Republican alternative to HillaryCare. This assumption was as irrational as the assumption that Republicans would work with Obama in fulfilling his campaign promises of bi-partisanship. In spirit, however, Medicare for All does exactly what ACA set out to do. It wouldn't be a stain on the legacy of Pelosi or Obama; rather their legislation would later be viewed as stepping stones.

I find the reference to survey data in articulating an argument against single-payer to be laughable in the context of post-Trump politics. They forget what surveys said about Trump and they forget too that Trump ran in part on providing cheaper, more affordable health care, of which his previous remarks on universal health care were not gone without note by his lower middle-class base. Most of my Trump supporting family members support universal health care in one way or another. They also seem to assume that if a single payer system were to be passed, people would rebel against it a la 2010. I don't see this happening.

The article wraps up with some economic arguments I'd be interested to see the opinions of @Dak on. I don't have time to touch on it now as I've got to run, but I do want to quickly point out the comedy of the deficit argument considering the fact that the elephant in the room is never address: the military budget.
 
Black Orifice said:
The article wraps up with some economic arguments I'd be interested to see the opinions of @Dak on. I don't have time to touch on it now as I've got to run, but I do want to quickly point out the comedy of the deficit argument considering the fact that the elephant in the room is never address: the military budget.
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I assume you're referring to the reference to deficit issue within the current monetary policy regime, as well as the mention of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) or as I like to call it, Magic Money Theory. MMT is some absurd wishful thinking and there are numerous rebuttals on the interwebs, so I won't spend time on that. Edit: You know it's bad when even Krugman is on the record long ago saying it's wrong.

I've long stated the military budget is too large and chock full of waste and that perspective is not going to change even being back in the service. However, eliminating the entire military budget wouldn't erase the current annual deficit. So appealing to potential budget cuts to pay for increasing Medicaid coverage is already running into fiscal limitations. Add to that fact the federal debt interest payments are only increasing to grow, and we have serious debt problems facing the nation. None of these budget realities even touch yet on the actual current estimated cost of Medicaid for all, nor what subsidizing healthcare is likely to due to increasing future costs, nor what it's likely to do to quality and availability of care. These are the questions that simply aren't really addressed in that article. So we get well worn policy failure suggestions like price controls and decree by fiat.
 
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https://www.redstate.com/elizabeth-...ddDx_p_muJ8WhcOEfveFsIdpn02TTjnkLBkvzCrHuyvec

hahah im so happy to see this poisonous bitch getting tossed in the fryer. She has dont nothing but spew propaganda and hate against the right. One of her most recent statements being something along the lines of "yea we wanted those Covington kids doxxed and tossed in the fire because were desperate and will do anything to get Trump out of the white house". Smh. Even happier to see the left once again continuing to crumble with all the scandals that have popped up in Virginia for the past few weeks.
 
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