Death Wish: The Politics of American Healthcare

Bernie wanted a single payer system: Medicare for All.  Hillary wants to tinker with Obamacare in a slow transition to God knows where.  Trump wants voters, but has no plan.  But Ryan does and his plan is to keep alive the part of Obamacare that everyone likes (no pre-existing conditions), but to separate the sick voters who want things he doesn’t think they deserve from those young healthy voters who might go Red in the future.

As for the electorate, like the American girls in the Rolling Stones song, they “want everything in the world that you can possibly imagine”.  Some for just themselves and some for everybody.

Sorry.  Nobody is going anywhere.  Bernie was right about single payer, but it’s not enough to get elected.  One must also rule.  President Bernie would never have been able to lift that rock, for reasons I shall go into.  Hillary knows she has to rule, so in her usual cunning fashion she is setting the bar as low as possible for herself right at the start.  And Trump/Ryan are looking for a neutron bomb that will kill all the really sick people and leave a core of friendly voters and all the businesses standing.

What would we need to do to fix things and why can’t we do it?  Read below.  And weep.  I’ll try to keep this one simple.

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