Medicare For All is winning
Reagan, the actor, warned us that Medicare would doom us all to a socialist tyranny.
It didn't turn out that way.
What it did do is give millions of elderly people access to health care that they otherwise wouldn't have.
It gave working class people a chance to live their final years with some amount of dignity.
Last year the polls showed that Bernie's idea of Medicare For All was catching on.
Because who is really scared of Medicare?
Republicans were still on the attack against Obamacare and Medicaid, so they didn't notice that the public was going the other direction.
Republicans only woke up to the "danger" of Medicare For All when this August poll came out.
A vast majority — 70 percent — of Americans in a new poll supports "Medicare for all," also known as a single-payer health-care system.The Reuters–Ipsos survey found 85 percent of Democrats said they support the policy along with 52 percent of Republicans.
When even 52% of Republican voters support MFA the GOP realized that they were losing the messaging battle. They had to answer with something.
So what did they do? They followed in the footsteps of Saint Ronnie by fearmongering and lying about the evils of socialism.
"Throughout the year, we have seen Democrats across the country uniting around a new legislative proposal that would end Medicare as we know it and take away benefits that seniors have paid for their entire lives," Trump wrote.The president again blasted the concept during an interview on Fox News, calling it a "catastrophe" and "disaster."
So today a new poll came out.
Guess what? Trump didn't have any more influence than Saint Reagan did.
More than half of Republicans in a new American Barometer poll say they support "Medicare for all," also known as a single-payer health-care system.The survey, conducted by Hill.TV and the HarrisX polling company, found that 52 percent of Republicans polled said they supported the option, while 48 percent said they opposed it.
Trump didn't move the needle at all.
Reid Wilson, campaign reporter for The Hill, told Hill.TV's Joe Concha that Republicans have yet to find their messaging on the issue.
"This is a debate that has only just started, and there are a lot of Republicans right now who are trying to figure out ways to talk about 'Medicare for all' in ways that will bring that number down, and bring the overall number down," Wilson said on "What America's Thinking."
They've had 60 years to think about it. The problem isn't the Republican message.
The problem is that you are defending a badly broken system.
The change on the Democrats side is even more dramatic.
Two years later MFA has 16 cosponsors in the Senate and 123 cosponsors in the House.
Comments
Ronald Reagan & Mitch McConnell
Bernie Sanders needs to make an ad mimicking Ronald Reagan's ad and statement:
These people never quit. Just last week Mitch McConnell blamed Social Security, Medicare, & Medicaid for the record-high deficit.
That 13pt swing away from private insurance to gov't run is ALL
Bernie's doing.
If nothing else he is brilliant at hammering over and over the same, clear, simplified message. Michael Moore was just recounting a conversation he had recently with (ugh) John Podesta for his latest film, in which he implores the Dem Party to just simplify its message of universal healthcare, to which even the conspiring $hills sycophant has to admit that that's just what the Dems need to do. But of course we know won't.
As for the B-actor, corporate salesman, hippie-hating, Black Panther-fearing, Phony Cowboy and his classic fear-mongering statement...
The idea of "free" is one of the more powerful sentiments sold to us as Americans. But it means vastly different things to different people.
The RW dupe reading into this statement looks around his backyard and garage, contemplates his lawnmower, hunting equipment and second refrigerator, and thinks he's a he-man individualist who earned all this by himself, with no help from any one. He's willfully negligent of a history that all legislation written that he benefited from, everything from the 8hr work day, 7day work week, workers comp, social security and is because of the efforts of social movements of anarchists, socialists, communists, feminists, etc, that enshrined into law with their blood, sweat and tears (and their lives). All the roads he drives on for work, schools that educated his workers and much of the biggest research developments that developed the technology he relies upon were paid for by the government, the last person Reagan said he'd like to see at his door offering help. The sheer audacity of that statement, coming from the highest government employee, still baffles all these years later.
The dope who uttered the statement and those who wrote and concocted it for the actor, use the idea of free to mean free to do whatever they want, as rulers in the pursuit of endless profit, all under the deity of the Free Market, which is perhaps the greatest Lie of all and the cornerstone of the twin false myths of the American Exceptionalism and the American Dream.
True Freedom, to me, is not having to live in the shadow of being foreclosed upon for a medical emergency, enslavement through student/consumer/mortgage debt, the public ownership of any and all sectors every person relies upon (i.e. energy, internet, schools, etc) and both a universal basic income and living wage to all citizens.
Everything else is FreeDumb. Like Reagan.
"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC"
- Kurt Vonnegut
End of the Reagan Era
Movements have a shelf-life and the Libertarian/Neoliberal era has reached its sell by date. Trump's election and its repercussions will result in the end the Reagan era. The "twin myths of American Exceptionalism and the American Dream" will no longer sell well. Incidentally, I don't think I've ever heard Trump mention the two words "Ronald Reagan". Let's just hope a Progressive era returns, as it has in the past. There are some encouraging signs, in spite of all the noise.
Key has been grassroots push
To get pols to commit to MFA while running for election or reelection.
Next up;
How to make that happen?
A truth of the nuclear age/climate change: we can no longer have endless war and survive on this planet. Oh sh*t.
"one of these days you and I are going
to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free".
Actually, I spend a lot of time doing that now, talking about the time before pols of both parties sold us down the river.
I tell them too about "when men were free"
About their maternal great-Grandfather and millions of other young men "riding the rails" and hiding in boxcars from the railroad dicks as they roamed the country looking for work.
He learned to cook brewing mulligan stew in hobo jungles. That's what Reagans "freedom" was all about - working men ground into the dirt.
I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.
Yeah, I debated about that part
but when I was a kid, the future wasn't so dark, the present so dim, andhaving the feeling you could make a difference. You also felt like you could really go off the grid if you wanted. Today with spy satellites you build a cabin in the middle of nowhere between the DEA and gov. and private satellites there's going to be somebody knocking on your door.
Word is getting out about how great
The need.
A truth of the nuclear age/climate change: we can no longer have endless war and survive on this planet. Oh sh*t.
Can we haz Medicare for pets too?
I'm about to drop $4200 to pay for my poor little puddy-tat who developed a horrendous urethral blockage. Had to take him to the emergency clinic because it was Sunday, and they (over)charge outrageously. He required surgery to flush the grit out of his bladder, and if he blocks again he will probably require more surgery to route around the "problem area".
Too many people have their pets KILLED because they can't afford the obscene medical charges to fix their problems.
Land of the Fee, Home of the Knave.
There is no justice. There can be no peace.