I failed to see this post earlier - replying now.
This is an interesting charge. As you must recall, HIllary Clinton was very involved in trying to provide universal health care. Launched by this speech by Bill Clinton,
Bill Clinton said:
Millions of Americans are just a pink slip away from losing their health insurance, and one serious illness away from losing all their savings. Millions more are locked into the jobs they have now just because they or someone in their family has once been sick and they have what is called the preexisting condition. And on any given day, over 37 million Americans—most of them working people and their little children—have no health insurance at all. And in spite of all this, our medical bills are growing at over twice the rate of inflation, and the United States spends over a third more of its income on health care than any other nation on Earth.
She set to work on a proposal. She was EXCORIATED by the healthcare industry and the pharmaceutical industry. Surely you remember this. They HATED her efforts and spent tens of millions of dollars running commercials to stop her.
And here you are saying she is in their pocket. That does not comport with history.
But she learned something valuable,
Wiki said:
In 2005, referring to her previous efforts at health care reform, she said, "I learned some valuable lessons about the legislative process, the importance of bipartisan cooperation and the wisdom of taking small steps to get a big job done."[28] Again in 2007, she reflected on her role in 1993–1994: "I think that both the process and the plan were flawed. We were trying to do something that was very hard to do, and we made a lot of mistakes."[34]
So yes. She, and I and anyone awake at the time, learned how hard the push-back was going to be.
And we felt it, viscerally, in the 1994 election, surely you remember this, where the voting public spoke about how much voter support we had for such a huge step.
Those of us who are progressives knew that we didn’t have the numbers we thought we had, and we knew we would have to prove step by smaller step, the value of the programs in order to achieve, ultimately, universal healthcare.
Wiki said:
A few weeks later, Mitchell announced that his compromise plan was dead and that health care reform would have to wait at least until the next Congress. The defeat weakened Clinton politically, emboldened Republicans, and contributed to the notion that she was a "big-government liberal" as decried by conservative opponents.[28]
The 1994 mid-term election became, in the opinion of one media observer, a "referendum on big government – Hillary Clinton had launched a massive health-care reform plan that wound up strangled by its own red tape".[29] In that 1994 election, the Republican revolution, led by Newt Gingrich, gave the GOP control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate for the first time since the 83rd Congress of 1953–1954, ending prospects for a Clinton-sponsored health care overhaul.
Pyramid said:
She has no substantive critique of Medicare for All and is just regurgitating Biden's campaign platform, which is the same as the Republican talking point (how will we afford it, it's too disruptive, etc.) and the same as the insurance lobbyists' line of attack. They all amount to the same thing: more people dying or going bankrupt because of medical expenses.
On the contrary, it is nothing like the Republican talking points, which I have heard since the days of Reagan - surely you have, too?
She does NOT support bankruptcy as an option, they do.
She does NOT support exclusions, they do
She DOES support government oversight to make sure they aren’t gouging, Republicans don’t.
The list goes on and on. In fact, the closest thing to a Republican talking point that I see is this claim that Hillary Clinton is an evildoer.
Your referring to the real, life-or-death struggles of ordinary people to buy medicine, get checkups, and see specialists as whiny babies demanding candy is emblematic of a real disdain for poor people.
You misquote me.
I absolutely do NOT disdain these struggles, I want them solved as soon as possible, not shuffled off to suffer under Trump in the name of ideological purity. I disdain those who were willing to wait another 4 (or 8) years with a petulant vote while people struggle and die, because they weren’t willing to take Clinton’s steps forward when she was the only thing between us and Trump.
If you see my concern, based on many decades of watching the GOP cause bankruptcy anguish and death, and my desire to STOP them by whatever means possible, at every single opportunity, as somehow being disdainful, then you will never understand the damage done by every progressive who did not vote to STOP TRUMP.
Based on your answers, I am guessing that I have been an activist for health care reform a shitload longer than you have been. And you learn nothing from history and you have repeated it. Those of us who lived it knew what a disaster for the common person Trump would be, and no amount of petulant crybaby whining would have stopped us from voting for Clinton when she was the only remaining candidate to stop him. She, a candidate who already put forth significant effort, at significant personal cost, to try to change that tide. And you think she didn’t learn the right answers from her struggle and how to try a new play to get around the blockage, when you don’t even show any knowledge of what happened then, or in the Reagan years.
It speaks to an inability to see political progress as anything other than something the dumb masses appoint enlightened rich people to do behind closed doors, and we should take whatever corrupted, watered-down, easily challenged legislation the wealthy elites agree to.
The lessons I have learned is that we progressives are not as numerous as we think. We NEED the moderates. We don’t have enough numbers to pass anything on our own. You follow a guy (Sanders) who has been a political gadfly, who also fails to appreciate this. A guy who, in 40 years, is still the only guy in his party; he hasn’t gained a single legislator into his cohort.
Let me point out clearly - I LIKE the idea of universal government healthcare. I WANT it. I would support it with additional private health care add-ons for those who are wealthy - I’m fine with a two-tier system, as long as the first tier is as good as it should be. People can shit in gold toilets if they want, as long as everyone has at least ceramic.
The only thing preventing everyone from having free, high quality medical care in this country is the lack of organization behind a political faction capable of successfully taking on the private actors and institutional barriers that stand in the way.
No. It is the lack of numbers of people supporting it.
You and I are a minority, pyramid. There aren’t enough of us. We can’t sell the whole package at once. The voting public is not buying it. We have tried that, it has backfired and swung us away. We need to demonstrate effectiveness and we can do that in incremental steps.
But some people are claiming that incremental steps are evil. They are doing the Republicans work for them. Throwing out the baby with the bathwater, cutting off their noses to spite their faces, looking a gift horse in the mouth. All of that.
And every time you call us, who
want the same ultimate goal as you do! evil and corrupt, you hand the GOP a demon to attack and you weaken your own pool of support.
I don’t give a shit about what you think of me. I have been fighting for the freedom and liberty that comes with health care access for a long time. Your disdain for me will not stop me. But your disdain for me may stop others, and that is the stupidest possible action a progressive could do. You harm our mutual cause. That action harms those who are struggling with health care costs. Those who would say, “I would have been happy getting part way there this year. Because I don’t have time to wait for perfect.”
Such a faction is materializing and growing before our very eyes, and is gaining momentum.
But they are NOT a majority yet. They are not yet powerful enough to act without moderates. I get that and I will reach out to moderates and help them through this change. You are willing to let everything be a disaster for another 12 years and hope the opponents die of old age. Trying to show with the disaster how we need to leap to the perfect solution all at once. But too many people don’t have that long to wait. And too many people will not take that message from the scorched earth disaster you allowed to happen. It’s backfiring. They pulled away further.
The only people who think that at this point in history the correct move is to stall that momentum rather than to unite behind it are those with nothing at stake except their tax rate.
Stall the momentum?
Stall the momentum!?! People who voted in a way that let Trump gain the white house didn’t
STALL THE MOMENTUM!??
What a bunch of blinkered bullshit.
!! ). And this intended destruction of everything Sanders stood for was known long before they cast their vote in vivid red-hatted orange color. They voted for a known destruction.
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on Twitter: ".@AOC instagram stories with bernie are just 
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