Besides, an economy the size of California has immense power. We're not talking about Utah. All the hospitals and doctors and pharmaceutical companies are not going to stop selling their goods and services in California. And once single-payer becomes a reality in California, it will catalyze a movement in every other state and on the national level. That--the fact that it will start a wildfire of imitation--and not the fact that it's too expensive, is what the California Democratic Party is desperate to avoid, and what its donors and lobbyists are ordering it to block.
A particularly precious element of this is that Nancy Pelosi had recommended that the states try it, because it couldn't be done "yet" at the national level:
I say to people, if you want that, do it in your states. States are laboratories. It can work out. It is the least expensive, least administrative way to go about this," she said. "States are a good place to start.
So, the Democrats don't do it at the national level, and "It's only--really, we swear!--because the Republicans and all. Why don't you try it in the states?" Then, when, thanks to the hard work of healthcare activists and genuine progressives, it advances to a point of decision in a supermajority Democratic state, it's: "Can't do that in one state. How are we going to pay for it?" repeating all the arguments of the Republicans.
As David Sirota points out, since 2012, Anthony Rendon has taken over $100,000 from pharmaceutical and health insurers, and the California Democratic Party over $2 million plus another million or so from specific groups opposed to SB 562. Of course, that, like Hillary's $600,000+ in bribes emoluments speaking fees from Wall Street banksters, means nothing; Only the Koch brothers' and oil companies' donations to the Republican Party are evidence of the kind of corruption that must be met with outrage and #Resistance.
This is the Democratic Party. Lying losers who will do anything to avoid taking an effective stance for a healthcare policy that would immediately solve one of the worst horrors American families face every day, that would be immediately and concretely helpful to everyone, and, to top it all off, would be immensely popular. The dissembling Democrats are throwing away just about the most popular policy anyone could imagine--something people are literally dying for. As Charles Idelson, spokesman for the NNU, says: "There is broad support for single-payer not only in California, but nationally, even among registered Republicans and Republican and conservative business leaders."
Passing single-payer in California and fighting for it everywhere else would guarantee the Democrats electoral victories. But they will not do it--they'll say they will, but they will not--because they are fervent supporters of the capitalist market system in healthcare (and everything else), and they are corrupt agents of the health insurance and pharma industries.
Because it captures and cages the energies of so many well-meaning progressives, the Democratic Party is the most effective obstacle to, and enemy of, single-payer, and it has to be fought. People in wheelchairs and cancer patients and all their healthy friends should be sitting in and obstructing Democrat Rendon's, as well as any Republican's, office, until he lets the bill through. Then they should move on to the Democratic governor's office. And thence to Pelosi's and Schumer's offices as well as Graham's and Ryan's. This is not a Trump problem, and not a Republican problem, it's a bipartisan capitalist elite problem.
We have to engage in this kind of fight against all of these politicians. Anyone who thinks such a fight can be avoided in order to play the Democrats' game of defending the for-profit insurance plan called Obamacare while obsessing about Trump being a Russian spy, is helping to perpetuate this rotten healthcare system. Twenty-eight million people are now without healthcare, and, if the Republicans' edited version of Obamacare passes (which it probably won't, because even many Republicans know they can't get away with making things worse than they are), there'll be twenty-four million more. There is no time for either of these contemptible parties and their contemptible bullshit.
(Article changed on June 29, 2017 at 18:07)
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