Where Sanders went wrong on MFA and why

[NCProgressive]

Because of Sanders' personal and visceral hatred for corporations, CEOs, insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies, Sanders had a major blind spot to bring the most powerful constituency to his side and that doomed his MFA completely.

Corporations and CEOs: Every product made and service delivered has a health care component in its pricing. An average car contains nearly $2,000 to $3,000 in health insurance for auto-employees and so on. Most corporation would love to get rid of this expense and saddle the government with it. Sanders should have held meetings with the corporate leadership and the chamber of commerce explaining how they could increase profits from his plan.

Insurance Companies: The demonized health insurance companies actually have the infrasturcture, technology, doctors and hospitals to deliver care efficiently and eliminate fraud and waste. When faced with no business at all, they would have absolutely loved to have Medicare act as the funds collector and gate-keeper for payments in exchange for their structure and business remaining in place plus with an opportunity to shift their riskiest insureds to medicare. Sanders should have had them on his side to make his plan work - instead, he chose to malign them.

Pharmaceutical Companies: Let's face it, American pharma and device companies come up with over 90% of the new advances in medicine and healthcare. Those things cost an enormous amount of money to develop and this money has to be amortized in the short lived patent protection. Total patent protection is 17½ years of which as many as 12 years are eaten up by R&D plus regulatory processes leaving just 4-5 years for a pharma company to recoup its investments plus investments in failed drugs and technologies. For every 20 things tried by scientists, only one ends up being successful in the market. Sanders should have met with the Pharma companies and separated their R&D and regulatory expenses in the form of block grants. By adding more years of patent protection, he could then have leveraged the pharma industry to lower the costs of the drugs and technologies without significant upheaval.

There was a clear path to build a consensus but Sanders' own hatred and visceral desire to destroy the existing system came in the way and he lost the war very badly.