Nearly a decade after then-Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin nixed a plan for a publicly funded system, advocates have renewed a push to transform health care with a single-payer system.
About 60 House Democrats have signed onto a proposal that calls for eventually replacing private health insurance premiums in the state with a public financing system. This week, supporters of the plan announced the creation of a universal healthcare caucus to push for the approval of the single-payer system.
The bill’s primary sponsor, Rep. Brian Cina, D-Burlington, said despite efforts to bring down the rate of uninsured Vermonters, thousands of people are still without healthcare coverage. He said those who may be eligible for healthcare plans have “fallen through the holes of a tattered social safety net.”
I'm not gonna dig back through the past 5 election cycles to verify whether this claim is accurate or not, but I did at least check into it for the most recent election last month.
Hey @Culinary226, check in with your government affairs people. There are not 60 votes in the Senate to ban the private health insurance you got in your union negotiations, nor will there be after the election. You're gonna be okay.
Yes, apparently the new strategy to win over support from organizations which don't like one of the core tenets of your preferred candidate is to reassure them that there's absolutely zero chance of that tenet ever actually happening.
I don't normally post blog entries about the occasional Twitter flare-ups I get into with die-hard Medicare for All supporters, but this one strikes me as being especially noteworthy for several reasons.
David Klion is the News Editor at JewishCurrents and a writer for The Nation and The New Republic. As you can imagine, he's a pretty left-wing/progressive kind of guy, and a devout Bernie Sanders supporter. He has a verified account (as I do) and has about 55,000 Twitter followers (compared to my 35,000, FWIW). In other words, both of us have small but respectable followings on social media and are what the powers that be would likely consider "low-level" (?) Twitter influencers.
He and I have followed each other on Twitter for several years. We don't directly talk to each other very often, however.
So last night I whipped up a bit of a fuss on Twitter with my response to an exchange between Pete Buttigieg and Rachel Maddow:
Asked by @maddow about a McKinsey client laying off thousands of insurance company workers — and whether Buttigieg’s work played a role — Buttigieg turns it around and warns that Medicare for All advocates would end every insurance worker’s job.
Maddow: "When you did that cost & overhead assessment for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, a couple years after that, they laid off like 1,000 people. Was your work part of what led to those layoffs?
Buttigieg: " I doubt it...I don't know what happened after the time that I left, that was in 2007, when they decided to shrink in 2009. Now, what I do know is that there are some voices in the Democratic primary right now who are calling for a policy that would eliminate the job of every single American working at every single insurance company in the country."
A few minutes ago the Congressional Budget Office released a new report on a national, universal single payer healthcare system (commonly known as "Medicare for All" these days, although that's a bit of a misnomer since the proposed "Medicare for All" bills are quite different from today's definition of Medicare).
It's important to note that while this report came from the CBO, it is not a budget analysis of either the House or Senate MFA bills; it instead lays out the structural components which would be required to be in place in order to put such a system together and, I presume, in order to run such a budget analysis.
I'm swamped today between the rollouts of both the Choose Medicare Act and the revised Medicare for America Act as well as this new CBO report, so for the moment I'll just repost the summary and link to the report itself, along with a few notes as I'm able to add them:
Regular readers know that I'm a strong supporter of going with the "Medicare for America"-style approach to achieving universal heatlhcare coverage as opposed to the "Medicare for All" proposal. Regardless, this is still an historic moment in U.S. history:
Chairman McGovern, Congresswoman Jayapal, and Congresswoman Dingell Announce Historic Rules Committee Hearing on the Medicare for All Act
WASHINGTON, DC — Rules Committee Chairman James P. McGovern (D-MA), Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), and Congresswoman Debbie Dingell (D-MI) announced today that the House Rules Committee will hold an original jurisdiction hearing on the Medicare for All Act of 2019 on Tuesday, April 30th at 10am ET in H-313, The Capitol. It marks the first time Congress has ever held a hearing on Medicare for All. Witnesses will be announced later this week.
Over the past month or two, I've written a couple of pieces which explored the whole "MFA would eliminate private health insurance" issue.
My main point was that while most MFA activists have long insisted that eliminating (or virtually eliminating) private health insurance companies is not only a feature but the entire point of moving to single payer, ever since Kamala Harris walked back her “get rid of all that!” comment in a CNN Town Hall the next day, I’ve seen some MFA activists fall all over themselves to suddenly insist that “no, no...there’d still be plenty of room for private insurance, really!”
In September 2017, Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced his "official" Medicare for All, universal single payer bill to much fanfare. At the time, it garnered a lot of attention, but it also had some gaping holes...most notably the lack of any actual funding mechanism or specifics, as well as a big coverage gap which could be found in both the "Medicare for America" bill which I'm a big fan of as well as the House MFA version.
Today, Sanders launched a revised version of the bill which supposedly addresses both of those issues along with others. Let's take a look.
First of all, who's co-sponsoring it? In 2017, it was cosponsored by 16 Democratic Senators:
Mr. Sanders (for himself, Ms. Baldwin, Mr. Blumenthal, Mr. Booker, Mr. Franken, Mrs. Gillibrand, Ms. Harris, Mr. Heinrich, Ms. Hirono, Mr. Leahy, Mr. Markey, Mr. Merkley, Mr.Schatz, Mrs. Shaheen, Mr. Udall, Ms. Warren, and Mr. Whitehouse) introduced the following bill; which was read twice and referred to the Committee on Finance
The official title of the bill is literally "The Medicare for All Act of 2019", and for the most part it's pretty similar to the Senate version rolled out in September 2017 by Sen. Bernie Sanders and a dozen or more Democratic Senators. However, there are several key differences between the two:
