Bernie Sanders Won't Support House Democrats' Plan to Strengthen Obamacare (2019)

[TomCADem]

You know Bernie's commercial praising Democrats and how he was supportive of President Obama's legacy? It is classic BS. If Bernie can't get his way, he has and will side with Republicans to try to tear down benefits, because they do not go far enough. This is sort of like Trump saying that he did not support Russia election sanctions, because they were not tough enough. Like Republicans, Bernie wants the ACA to fail, so that more Americans can suffer, so that he can have a blank slate on which to build his revolution with him leading the charge. So, when Bernie attacks the healthcare system, don't forget that he turned his back on efforts to improve it.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/bernie-sanders-wont-back-house-democrats-obamacare-bill.html

Fears that progressives will make support for a single-payer health care system a mandatory litmus test for all Democrats became more serious on Tuesday night as Bernie Sanders refused to support, or say anything positive about, a very high-profile House Democratic bill aimed at strengthening Obamacare.

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It seems to represent a crossing of the Rubicon in which the candidate treats incremental reform as an abomination: “Right now we’re working on what I have fought for my entire life,” he said. “Healthcare is a right. It has to be comprehensive. The current system is dysfunctional. It is enormously wasteful.”

The trouble is, of course, that House Democrats from across the ideological spectrum united behind the bill Bernie is disrespecting. It was designed to exploit the Trump administration’s startling decision to threaten Obamacare yet again by supporting a judicial elimination of the entire Affordable Care Act, and was intended to sidestep differences of opinion on broader health-care reforms like Medicare for All.

In Sanders’s defense, the House bill is purely a “messaging” device that will very likely never see the light of day in the Republican-controlled Senate. But his refusal even to pay Nancy Pelosi the courtesy of positive lip service toward a bill that is central to House Democrats’ 2020 strategy will likely be taken as a sign that he and his supporters intend to go to the mat for his vision of Medicare for All and excoriate anyone who doesn’t bend the knee. Accordingly, fresh hopes that Trump had divided his own party on health-care policy while uniting Democrats appear to have been premature.