Sen. Kamala Harris' (D–Calif.) health care flip-flops are, first and foremost, a referendum on Kamala Harris, the candidate, and the fundamental emptiness of her presidential campaign.
Harris views health care through an exclusively political lens, wanting to be seen as a supporter of Medicare for All and its popular promises without reckoning with the trade-offs that a real single-payer health care system of the sort proposed by Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Sanders may be in it for the revolution, but Harris is in it for the optics.
Harris reportedly told a group of supporters at a fundraiser that she was "uncomfortable" with Sanders' Medicare for All plan,that would eliminate virtually all private health coverage in four years.
That’s the same Medicare for All plan that Harris co-sponsored all the way back in 2017, the same plan that she came out swinging for when she launched her presidential bid in January, the same plan she was listed as backing as recently as April of this year.
Harris has backtracked on health care multiple times over the course of the year, but it's hard to believe she was genuinely uncomfortable with a plan she so prominently backed.
What's more likely is that Harris was uncomfortable not with the plan itself, but with the unpleasant political position it put her in—having to defend not only the substantial cost of the plan but its swift elimination of private coverage and the disruption that would cause.
Which is why her own plan, released earlier this summer, is best understood not as a health care plan, but as a campaign messaging document that allows her to say she supports both Medicare for All and some allowance for private health insurance.
Notably, her plan contained no cost estimates and pushed the transition back 10 years—conveniently ensuring not only that it wouldn't happen during a Harris administration, but wouldn't show the full cost of implementation.
It's a plan that hides its least popular elements beyond the scope of a conventional legislative price tag, and past the political accountability of a two-term president.
Yet her plan, which allows private insurance only if is essentially designed by the government, would still lead to the elimination of employer-sponsored coverage as we know it, disrupting coverage for tens of millions of people in the process.
And while the party's left flank has stood by the “Medicare for All" plan and its essential radicalism, it's not clear that much of the rest of the party even agrees on what it means.
That's why both "Medicare for All" and copycat labels like Medicare for All Who Want It have regularly been deployed by those who favor something less than full-fledged single-payer, but still want to seem like they support the same basic goals.
So while it's true that Harris' chief rivals for the Democratic nomination—Biden, Warren, and Sanders—have clearer individual visions when it comes to health policy, it remains the case that the party as a whole is both divided and muddled in its thinking.
Any Democratic candidate who won the nomination would face the same challenge of reconciling those conflicting impulses, and then defending and explaining them to the voting public at large.
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" . . . it’s far too early for the mayor to crow “We have turned the corner of crime in our city.” nypost.com/2024/01/06/opi…
Overall crime in New York City dropped in 2023 over 2022; we’re still the “safest big city in America,” as Mayor Adams boasted recently — but that’s cold comfort when we’re still far behind 2019, the last year before the destructive effects of our criminal-justice “reforms” made themselves visible.
Consider car thefts: 5,438 in 2019; 15,802 in 2023.
All sent letters of support for convicted child sexual abuser BRIAN PECK during the sentencing phase of his trial for the horrific sexual abuse of @DrakeBell
Marsden’s letter:
“I assure you, what Brian has been through in the last year is the suffering of a hundred men.”
Democrat movers and shakers are grafting antisemitism onto the party’s DNA.
“There is a problem all across the country [with Democratic voters who will punish Biden if he continues to support Israel and I hope that the President and Blinken can get this thing calmed down,
In a 9-0 decision, the Supreme Court ruled states cannot use section 3 of the 14th Amendment to kick Donald Trump off state ballots over his alleged “insurrectionist” actions on Jan. 6, 2021.
Learning that state officials aren’t empowered to simply toss leading presidential candidates off ballots came as a great surprise to many incredulous left-wingers.
As he increasingly misinforms and misdirects the public, Tapper’s obsessive slander of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. becomes more deranged; revealing more about himself than the presidential candidate. reportfromplanetearth.substack.com/p/the-wayward-…
In a desperate attempt to discredit Kennedy, he suggests that readers examine the story of the Samoan measles outbreak of 2019.
An investigation into this healthcare calamity reveals the depth of Tapper’s dishonest journalism. His methods of manipulating information are analyzed herein.
Israel was attacked. It was attacked by Hamas terrorists who streamed over the border from Gaza. They came on foot and on motorbikes. They came by truck, by car and by paraglider. They came to Israel to murder and maim and mutilate anyone they could find. thefp.com/p/today-is-isr…
And that is what they did. is impossible to know the numbers of the dead or the missing or the injured.
The official numbers as of this writing: 300 Israelis dead; 1,590 wounded. And dozens—maybe many more—taken hostage into Gaza. They include women, elders, and children.
They shot people in cars and at bus stops, they rounded up women and children into rooms like Einsatzgruppen—yes, the comparison is appropriate—and machine-gunned them.