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TopicPolitics Containment Topic 250: Hearing Laws
red sox 777
11/25/19 3:23:58 PM
#42:


LordoftheMorons posted...
It's incorrect to say that you're throwing them off of insurance, but it's correct to state that you're telling them to give up insurance that they're familiar with in order for it to be replaced with something that you claim will be better. The question is then whether they trust you to deliver on that promise (which is a function not only of your intentions, but also of the competence of your implementation, and how robust the public plan is to sabotage*). In other words, you're asking people to take a big risk with something very important, and it's not a good idea to handwave that away as manufactured.

*What I'm thinking of here is sabotage when the GOP controls Congress. In particular, I think it's very likely that they would refuse to allow M4A to fund abortion.

I know! My grievance with the line that Buttigieg and the others launching this attack is that they're doing it in soundbite form which excises all that nuance! It's the line that you would see the GOP use to attack it to kill it and preserve the grotesque status quo. It is therefore extremely unhelpful to have it also used by those who are, at least nominally, in support of universal coverage.

I understand that its use is because it's effective as an attack vector by leveraging fear and uncertainty and because the media these days doesn't have the time or appetite for the required nuance but that doesn't absolve those launching the attack IMO.

Really, I think what you need from the single-payer side is to continue to educate the public on what it is and means - and Warren and Sanders have been doing that, albeit often under similar media constraints where the attention span isn't long enough sometimes to get deep into it - and stating "you don't trust the American people!" and "You're going to kick 140 million people who like their insurance off of it!" is actively harmful to that.

Now, I'm not saying it's the role of Buttigieg, Biden, etc. to defend single-payer when it is not a policy they support. However, I do think they should know enough to know what they're doing here and - again, I am speaking from a position sympathetic to single-payer so I'm not without bias on this - and it reeks of looking to score a personal political advantage at the cost of disingenuously characterizing the position of their rivals. They don't have to support or defend it, that would be nuts, but I don't think it's wrong to at least hold them to arguing against it in a fair way.


So I think this is missing the point a bit. The reality of single payer is that people will be kicked off their current health insurance plan. Maybe they'll get a better one - but there is no question that the current healthcare insurance system cannot exist indefinitely in parallel to single payer. It's just an economic certainty. When Biden and Buttigieg say this, it primarily makes them look honest.

Now, the fact that people will lose their current coverage is not necessarily a reason not to move to single payer. And, in fact, if single payer results in generally better plans, there's no problem. So the way to frame the debate is about which system produces better and cheaper healthcare.

You don't want to get sucked into ideological debates about whether single payer is "socialist" or restricts freedom. You will never win that argument. And that is the only argument you will have if you cannot bring the argument back to the strictly practical facts. And you will never be able to do that while you are pretending that you can have the best of both worlds, because the people will see right through you.

So when you attack people for refusing to lie, all you are doing is making people think there has to be something wrong with your policy proposal that you don't want them to know about.
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