Establishment Dems worried they'll get primaried if they don't back single-payer healthcare

Who is Warrner?

This is the same “negotiating with yourself before you get to the table” that has turned the DNC into the party it is today. If you’re fine with settling for improvements to Obamacare after a long, contentious debate, that’s one thing. But not even trying to get something better in the first round tells me that they either suck at negotiating or not really on my side.

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Moving an agenda against corporate dominance and for retirement, health care and housing security is not a liberal agenda, it is a populist agenda that would attract enough Trump voters to vote Democrat or would undercut Trump’s appeal to those voters who would stay home on election day.

But the Democrats are going to fight this tooth and nail. Thus, the Democrats are our primary impediment and Trump is a symptom of their electoral collapse due to political malpractice.

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Sure, they’ve split into different factions within the same party structure, but that is not sustainable or going to bring about any change. Sanders and Trump should have really run outside of the Dem/GOP parties but out system is stacked against that from happening. For any real voice and (hopefully change) the Dems need to split into a Progressive party, Neo-lib (?) Dem party, while the GOP needs to splinter into the Republicans (true repubs), Tea(bagger) party, and the Trump party. But perfect world and all.

I think what he’s saying is you don’t start the negotiation where you want to end up, start on the bat-shit crazy left: free healthcare for all paid for by an 80% tax on anyone making over $1M. Put them on the defensive and control the conversation. That is where the Repubs and 45 start and then end up where they want which is pushing everything to the right in the most unacceptable manner. And they can keep pushing because the opposition party doesn’t set a boundary. The fact that it’s acceptable to call Social Security, something that we all pay into to get back, an 'entitlement shows just how much they have controlled the dialogue about this. The Dems in office (for the most part) sit back and accept this without a fight. Quite frankly it’s outrageous and very telling of the Dems true alliances.

((edited to fix a typo or two))

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I agree and it is clearly getting nobody nowhere. Unfortunately, I don’t know how our system could sustain more than two parties without a parliamentary overhaul, national runoff elections, and a complete change in how districting is determined. Just as with the Electoral College, the functionality of these institutions is so complex and opaque that I doubt we’ll ever get the reform that would support anything but this pendulous R vs L ideological divisiveness.

It can also be argued that they shot themselves in the foot, perhaps fatally, by bowing to the Tea Party & Trumpist wings. I mean, they’ve really accomplished very little since the rise of the Tea Party and had to ride out a lot of humiliating defeats. Even if they’re not wins for the left, they’re stinging and brutal losses.

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Didn’t 45 assign this task to “the Kush”? ((insert sarcastically sad emoji))

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The DNC platform has no teeth and is basically meaningless. So is the honorary, nominal position bestowed on Bernie as Chairman of Outreach. It’s really just chairman of sheepdogging voters into the Democratic Party and away from any real progressive change.

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RomneyCare, now Obamacare was designed to be a foundation for single payer healthcare. The Democrats are kidding themselves if they think it wasn’t.

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I do expect the Democratic and Republican parties to have a statement of purpose. So they can con the people into voting for their candidates, only to renege when it’s time to take action against their corporate paymasters. I’ve seen it time and again in California. The Dems submitted a single payer bill twice to Schwarzenegger, because they knew he’d veto it. Now they don’t want to embarrass Jerry Brown by submitting it to him knowing he’d have to veto it too. So the craven Dems (Anthony Rendon) shelved it even though it passed the legislature.

From the article above “Jerry Brown was just not able to sign California’s single-payer health-care bill because that asshole sellout Jerry Brown wouldn’t let him.”

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The experience in California is exactly why this is being done bassackwards. This country has demonstrated time and time again that it is not willing to be taxed at rates that pay for the things it wants. Getting a bunch of people elected who will vote for single payer without first having an easily sellable plan to pay for it is just a recipe for even higher public debt than we already have. California’s plan was ludicrous, and anyone who thinks Rendon and Brown did the wrong thing are fundamentally unserious. With the pension bombs about to go off, not to mention the funding formulas @lloydcogliandro mentions, it would have been the most financially irresponsible thing possible, in a state that has a lot of pending problems that aren’t getting paid for as it is. There was just this huge feel-good rush to do it, consequences be damned, and that kind of unserious governance seriously worries me about being stuck in CA for the foreseeable future.

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are you saying that the outcomes to date of 45’s administration are at all close to what would have been the outcomes to date of a clinton 45 administration. or that the platform and objectives of the republican party are at all close to the platform and objectives of the democratic party? this is a serious and sincerely meant request for clarification based on what you have written so far.

If they don’t back what the people want then maybe they shouldn’t be reelected by the people in the first place.

Here’s something that surprises a lot of ‘progressives’ - not everyone wants single payer healthcare. Hell, most of the countries that get cited as examples of ‘single payer’ don’t have single payer (France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Singapore, Switzerland, etc.) I don’t know why this is the mountain you need to die on. Why not back universal healthcare, regardless of the method?

But if you’re getting political advice from Cory Doctorow, who repeated the lie that the TPP wouldn’t be available to read until after it passed, then you’ve already got problems.

See the bit of this starting at the 5:30 mark:

except the ridiculous thing about healthcare is that it will cost less to provide single payer coverage than it costs for our current mishmash.

it’d be hard to get this savings at a state level alone because it doesn’t restructure the federal costs - you’ll probably have to pay for both - but at the federal level? many other countries have proven it’s cheaper and more effective.

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So, is he a starry-eyed idealist, or is he pragmatic enough to do realpolitik?

Yup.

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And I assume that’s not counting how much you’d save more generally in the long run due to everyone being healthier.

But the real kicker is the effect of more freedom on the populace. TPTB don’t like anything that frees folks from servitude; it’s not just about propping up a corrupt and parasitic health insurance industry.

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I can’t predict where a Clinton 45 administration would be at today in comparison to the trump 45 admin. And I’m not trying to say that both parties are the same. What I am saying is that the splintering factions within both parties are causing a stagnation of progress for either side’s agenda. I proposed that the best political solution would be to let the parties fracture naturally thus opening up the political process to alliances and coalitions. But American politics is stuck in a fear of openess and change because it represents a loss of power. The Dem primary with Sanders and the DNC is a perfect example of that resistance to (hopefully) inevitable change. The GOP were more open to the tea baggers and the Trumpsters as they saw it as a means to an end but they’ve lost all control of the beast they created.

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