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Here’s a quick review of Monday’s health care debate on CNN, which was so one-sided as to be dull. (During the debate, Yglesias tweeted: “The problem with Lindsey Graham debating health policy on national television is he doesn’t know anything about it.”) One-sided in favor of Sanders, I mean. I put Sanders on one side, and Graham, Cassidy, and Klobuchar on the other, not merely because he is an independent, and they are not, but because they put markets first, albeit in different ways, and Sanders puts people first (and mostly working class people, since there are more of them, and all would benefit from a universal program like Medicare for All.

Here’s the transcript. From the many rich exchanges, I’ll select and briefly annotate three topic areas, each of which illustrate wily veteran Sanders and his debating skills (in one case, simply evading an important issue).

1) Democratic Splits on Medicare for All (or, watch Sanders steal the liberal Democrats’ clothes)

2) Everybody Hates the Insurance Companies (or, watch Sanders turn an admission to his own advantage)

3) “States’ Rights” Is Lousy Health Care Policy (or, watch Sanders let Graham hang himself)

(1) Democratic Splits on Medicare for All

Here’s Sanders on the relation between the (now-defeated) Graham-Cassidy bill, ObamaCare (the ACA), and Medicare for All (S1804). He makes the same argument three times in different ways, and I’m quoting at length so you can see how he does it (and maybe deploy your own talking points).

SANDERS: We are looking at legislation supported by the majority[1] party which is opposed by every major health care organization in the country…. So our job right now short term is to defeat this proposal, and with a little bit of luck, that’s what we’ll do.

But that is not good enough. Our job now is to come together to craft serious short-term solutions that addresses the real problems that exist, high deductibles, high copayments, high premiums, high cost of prescription drugs. But longer term[2], we have got to come together and finally conclude that as a nation we cannot be the only nation, major nation on Earth not to see health care as a right.

Version two:

SANDERS: [O]ur job now is to defeat this disastrous proposal, get back to the drawing board, see if we can work together for some short-term fixes. Long term, in my view — I speak only for myself — this country has got to join the rest of the industrialized world, guarantee health care as a right of all people.[3]

Version three:

[SANDERS:]

I don’t think Medicare for all is an extreme idea. Every other major country on Earth guarantees health care to all people as a right. We end up spending, because of the dysfunctional and complicated system that we have right now designed to make insurance company profits, we spend twice as much per capita as any other country on Earth…

So to do it, every other major country on Earth is doing it. I live 50 miles away from Canada. I don’t think that that is a radical idea.[4]

But clearly, Medicare for all is not going to pass so long as my Republican colleagues control the Senate and the House. So what do we do?[5] How do we work together?

Well, here’s one idea. One idea is to take on the pharmaceutical industry. You’ll remember that Trump talked a whole lot during his campaign about how the pharmaceutical industry was ripping us off. He was right.[6] Let us work together. Let us have Medicare negotiate prescription drug prices. Let us have re-importation so that pharmacists and distributors can purchase lower cost medicine abroad.[7]

Now contrast Klobuchar’s incremental, Clintonian approach (Klobuchar, note well, is not a sponsor of S1804).

KLOBUCHAR: And I think every mom and dad should be able to take care of their kids that way and be able to have insurance. I believe politics is about making people’s lives better. But this bill, it doesn’t do that. It kicks millions of people off insurance. It raises the premiums. It basically passes the buck to the states, but doesn’t give them the bucks to cover people. So that’s why[8] I think we need to work together on the plans that are already underway to fix the Affordable Care Act and put the politics aside and focus on people first.

And:

KLOBUCHAR: What could we do immediately?[9] And that is the work that’s being led by Republican Senator Alexander, Democratic Senator Patty Murray to come together to say, look what they did just now in Minnesota. Republican legislature, my state, Democratic governor came together[10] and said let’s do something called reinsurance, which makes it so the most expensive person in a pool who’s had some major catastrophic health event, they get siphoned off and paid for by the government so that everyone else’s rates don’t go up. This is the kind of proposal they’re working on for the nation, along with other ways to help with co-pays and to allow states[11] to design some of their own insurance without — without — making the drastic cuts that we see in the bill that my colleagues have proposed.

And:

KLOBUCHAR: [Y]ou can have things available to you like treatment, right, but if it’s too expensive, is it really available to you? And if you see a Ferrari in a car lot, well, it’s available to you, but you can’t really buy it. And that is the problem if the prices skyrocket.

So it’s doing something immediately to stabilize these prices, but then in the long term making sure we can make health care more affordable. Bernie has one idea; I have some others. And we can talk about them later.[12]

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/09/health-care-debate-sanders-vs-graham-cassidy-klobuchar.html

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