Democrats Want Single-Payer, No Matter The Cost

Amid Republican efforts to fix the broken Obamacare law, Democrats move farther left and advocate for a single-payer health care system.

Pulled left by their own party leaders, the few remaining moderate Democrats are stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Now that most House Democrats have endorsed legislation to implement single-payer, the party must answer for a $32 trillion tax increase at the expense of the American taxpayer.

Via The Washington Post:

Randy Bryce, an ironworker and labor organizer challenging Speaker Paul D. Ryan for his Wisconsin House seat, was having a good week. His campaign, kicked off by an emotional video, raised nearly $500,000 in less than 30 days.

This week, Bryce beamed into CNN to keep up the momentum — and ran straight into a question about whether he, like a growing number of Democrats, supports European-style universal health care.

“You want to raise $32 trillion in taxes?” asked CNN’s John Berman.

“There’s a lot of people not paying their fair share in taxes,” Bryce said. “There’s corporations getting away with a lot.”

“That would be quite a tax hike,” said CNN’s Poppy Harlow. “That’s an astonishing number, $32 trillion over a decade.”

Democrats, who are largely using the week-long recess to rally opposition to the Republicans’ deeply unpopular attempt to repeal parts of the Affordable Care Act, are now facing a political challenge of their own: increasing pressure from their liberal base to embrace universal, government-funded health-care coverage.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), perhaps the country’s most prominent proponent of universal coverage, is waiting for an opening — likely after the GOP’s repeal push succeeds or fails — to introduce a new bill. Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), both seen as potential 2020 presidential candidates, each said last week that the party needed to get behind “Medicare for all.”

“When you look at the majority of House Democrats, they support a single-payer, $32 trillion bill backed by Bernie Sanders,” Spicer said last month. “We need to accept that Obamacare is dead, we need to understand that the reality is that what the choice is between putting in a system that is affordable and accessible, or a single-payer $32 trillion health-care plan that the majority of House Democrats support.”

The $32 trillion refers to H.R. 676, a Medicare-for-all bill sponsored every year by Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.); the cost estimate comes from a study by the Urban Institute. For the first time, most House Democrats have endorsed the bill, and many can explain how a single-payer system would end up saving money.

“I continue to be surprised, though perhaps I shouldn’t be, that they keep moving further and further left, especially after getting burned politically by Obamacare for so long,” said Rob Engstrom, the political director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “Where are the days where Rahm Emanuel and Howard Dean would come in and find moderate candidates that could actually win in the South and West?”