Meanwhile, while in place of those taxes, and while eliminating private payment and employer payment of insurance premiums, there would surely have to be taxes paid by individuals and businesses to fund a new public insurance system like Medicare for All, there need not be a major increase in middle-class taxes. Harris and other half-hearted "backers" of the Sanders program - and Sanders himself - should be calling for massive cuts in military spending, which is now running at a record $1.3 trillion per year. Some of the tax savings from cutting military spending down to size could go to fund public healthcare.
Now that would be real "national defense"!
I don't object to Harris's proposal in her pathetic CNN interview, that taxes be increased on Wall Street and the Financial sector to fund health care, but that's small beer compared to the funds available from cutting the US military down to size and ending the current imperial policy of endless wars and of military action instead of diplomacy in foreign affairs.
First though, we need an honest debate about Medicare-for-All - not one that hides the issue behind false warnings about "increased middle-class taxes" to fund it.
Everyone will save money under Medicare-for-All, and we will have a far, far healthier population to show for it. Even Sanders himself has done a poor job of making this point in his campaigning. Why doesn't he just say it: Americans will be financially, and medically, better off if they paid a bit more in taxes to obtain full coverage under Medicare for All and eliminated the premiums they and their employer now pay for increasingly costly and ever less adequate private insurance coverage.
The clear advantage of government-provided over privately funded health care is why every other developed nation in the world, and many l ess developed ones, has some form of nationally-funded health care system that treats health care as a right, why every one of those countries spends less total money as both a share of GDP and national budget, and on a per-capita basis than we do in the US, on healthcare, and yet, in all developed country cases and in many less developed countries, they have better health statistics than we have here in he US (that includes life expectancy, infant mortality rates, incidence of diabetes and untreated high blood pressure, etc.).
Time for some god-damned honesty about this issue from both our politicians and the media!
DAVE LINDORFF is a member of ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, seven-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site. His work, and that of colleagues JOHN GRANT, JESS GUH, GARY LINDORFF, ALFREDO LOPEZ, LINN WASHINGTON, JR. and the late CHARLES M. YOUNG, can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net(Article changed on July 19, 2019 at 17:47)
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