Single Payer Healthcare

UPDATE 2/05/16: Unfortunately, I got swamped this week with the actual enrollment wrap-up stuff and never got a chance to write up the Part II promised at the end of this. I might have to re-think how I do this. I'll leave this post online, but might ot be referencing back to it for awhile longer than I expected. Sorry about that.

A couple of weeks ago, I made a YUUUGE mistake: I dipped my toe into the Hillary/Bernie/Single Payer fuss. Actually, the mistake wasn't so much my post, but cross-posting it over at Daily Kos, where it caused a bit of a fuss, which in turn led to my getting embroiled in the so-called "Bernie Bros Brouhaha" (Bro-Ha-Ha?), and so on.

Christ, it even turned into a bit of an M.C. Escher drawing, with Glenn Greenwald using the personal attacks on me by Bernie supporters to defend Bernie supporters, while Parker Molloy went from (indirectly) defending me (and other victims of "Bernie Bro" attacks) to actually accusing me of "Bernie Bro" behavior myself...because I made the mistake of responding to her Medium story via Twitter before I had actually read the entire story. (Note: I immediately realized my error and apologized, but she has yet to respond).

Better yet: This, in turn, led to another hostile encounter with another extreme Bernie supporter...a female one in this case, who was off her rocker, which in turn kind of proved Molloy's point about "Bro" not neccessarily having to be male. Additional irony: In both cases, I had actually been attempting to defend, or at least smooth over, the "Bernie Bro" insanity. And so it goes.

In any event, I had made a couple of other mistakes in my original post: While the title of the piece mentioned "siding with Hillary on healthcare", the post itself was really more about a) the problems I have with Bernie's plan and b) my own idea about how to eventually get to a single payer system...not what Hillary's plans actually are. In response, the following day I posted another piece which looked into what Hillary Clinton's ideas on healthcare policy actually are. On the one hand, they're far more detailed than Bernie's, which is a very good thing. On the other hand, even if every one of them were to be fully implemented, they'd significantly improve the current system but no, they still wouldn't bring about either single payer or universal coverage by themselves.

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