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1. While they fought in total unity against the GOP assault on health care, Dems were also thinking ahead. A slew of bold ideas are coming.
2. Bernie is unveiling an actual Medicare for All bill on Wednesday. Just wrote this thread:
3. @brianschatz has a big proposal in the works as well: Medicaid as a public option, for anyone who wants to buy in vox.com/policy-and-pol…
4. @ChrisMurphyCT is working on another idea: Medicare as a universal public option. An "on-ramp" to single payer. vox.com/policy-and-pol…
5. Others are sure to follow. I'm guessing fighters like @KamalaHarris & @SenWarren—already Sanders co-sponsors—will support multiple ideas.
6. This spate of new bills is already generating thoughtful & energetic debate—e.g. thenation.com/article/medica… & thenation.com/article/can-me…
7. The point of these bills isn't to pass something via McConnell, Ryan, and Trump. It's to drive the kind of debate we'll need for later.
8. None of these bills will be a perfect finished product, and none is a litmus test. They're constructive attempts to envision the future.
9. During these Trump years, most of our focus is necessarily on averting horrors—ACA repeal, DACA reversal, voter suppression. And yet:
10. It's a part of maintaining our moral integrity to not merely resist, but also to prepare to build again.
11. We can't become what the GOP became in the Obama years, enraged and hollow and feral. The point of *our* politics isn't revenge.
12. We do have to win. Our side sometimes forgets that. But we don't win for the sake of winning. We don't seek power for the sake of power.
13. The point of our politics is, as Paul Wellstone said, doing well for people. That's no easy thing. It's complex—the work of lifetimes.
14. But that vast complexity, however daunting, is the whole point. That's why this flourishing of progressive health reform ideas is great.
15. These bills may seem like pipe dreams now, but the ideas hashed out in obscurity change millions of lives down the road.
16. Look back at 2007 and 2008. The health care debate in the presidential primary profoundly shaped the system you live with today.
17. Edwards proposed an individual mandate. Clinton rightly picked it up. Obama ran against it—but ultimately realized they were right:
18. To make a near-universal-coverage market based system work, an individual mandate was necessary. So into Obamacare it went.
19. Let's be real. It may be a *long* time before there's another attempt at universal health care. But when it comes, we'll need big ideas.
20. And in the meantime, Dems laying out a vision is a way of showing what they stand for. And who they fight for.
21. That all of us are created equal—and endowed with inalienable rights. That health care is one of those rights.
What a radical idea.
What a radical idea.
