The “liberal” top-down class and propaganda war on the progressive populist Bernie Sanders is something to behold. It advances at least four master narratives.
by Paul Street
Part 3 - Trashing Medicare for All
A third variant of anti-Sanders “liberal” media conduct is the constant claim that Medicare for All will destroy peoples’ existing health insurance and bankrupt the nation. The fear-prompting soundbite – ubiquitous across the “liberal” media landscape and in the campaign rhetoric of Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and Bloomberg – is primitive in its reptilian simplicity: big bad Bernie wants to take your medical coverage away and tax us all to death.
This is transparent bourgeois nonsense. Sanders’s plan makes quality health care a human right by replacing a burdensome, expensive, and poorly performing for-profit health coverage racket with a streamlined system that abolishes the administratively burdensome and cost-inflating parasitism of corporate health insurance.
In a recent study published by the prestigious medical journal The Lancet, leading epidemiologists from the Yale School of Public Health, University of Florida, and University of Maryland School of Medicine find that a Single Payer system would slash national health expenditures by 13 percent – more than $450 billion a year – and save 68,000 lives a year.
By replacing premiums, deductibles, co-payments and out-of-pocket costs with a progressive tax system, the researchers determined, Medicare for All will save the average U.S. family $2,400 a year and give lower-income household new access to medical services they need.
Republican and corporate-Democratic objections to Single Payer based on the prediction of rising costs are not based on empirical reality. Economics and actuarial outcomes aside, the authors believe that it is a “moral imperative to provide health care as a human right, not dependent on employment or affluence.”
The “liberal” mantra that Sanders’ programs are “fiscally irresponsible” and “too radical” for the American people are false. Sanders pays for his popular programs (hardly radical or all that “socialist” when compared to policies in place in numerous other rich nations) with increased taxes on the absurdly under-taxed American rich and their absurdly under-taxed corporations and financial institutions – and by rolling back massive public subsidies (accurately described by Sanders as “socialism for the rich”) government grants Big Business.
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