Election 2024: A Single Payer Healthcare Group’s Revealing Pivot
Whatever you are doing about the presidential election, consider a revealing pivot. Healthcare Now is a “grass roots” lobbying group for a single payer health care system (improved and expanded Medicare for All). Almost four years ago at the end of 2020, they broadcast an email:
Trump will be gone soon; but the fight for our basic rights will absolutely continue in 2021. ... Rep. Pramila Jayapal and Sen. Bernie Sanders will reintroduce their Medicare for All bills in Congress; Healthcare-NOW is working with our network of national groups to ensure we file these bills with a record number of cosponsors.
It was the typical “progressive” strategy: persuade, demand, and beg enough Democrats, and maybe some centrist Republicans, to pass a big legislative reform. We might not get it this term, but we can make progress toward it.
Can’t sell that cotton candy any more. On Sept. 10, 2024 Healthcare Now broadcast an email that opens:
With Kamala Harris — who has backtracked on her past support for Medicare for All — as the Democratic nominee, we know that whoever gets elected this November, folks like us are going to have a lot of work to do to keep up the grassroots fight for real healthcare justice.
Even though neither of the two major candidates is a champion of Medicare for All, who wins this election will still have an immense impact on the future of our movement.
The Republican plan for the next four years is outlined in Project 2025, a terrifying document compiled by the Heritage Foundation with a lot of help from former Trump staffers and appointees and current Trump cronies.
…Understanding Project 2025 is essential to understanding what’s at stake this election cycle. This fascist manifesto… (emphases added)
What inspiration! We can’t get any closer to Medicare for All with Harris, but we must suspend our entire reform program because of Project 2025 and go all out for her.
Four years ago Kamala Harris abandoned nominal support for Medicare for All in favor of more goodies for health insurance corporations. She did that during her 2020 presidential run as soon as centrist Democrats brought it up. The Harris campaign website today says she will “expand and strengthen the Affordable Care Act” without a word about what and how.
Fifty years ago, after a Great Depression in the 1930s, World War Two, the class struggle of the trade union movement and the small-d democratic struggle of the civil rights movement, a lot of workers had jobs with vacation time, a regular 40-hour week, a group health plan, a dependable pension to go with Social Security, and wages from which we could send our children to an affordable college education. Nearly the last big reform was the enactment of Medicare on July 30, 1965.
Since 1973, nearly all that has eroded away.
Dear progressives and social democrats, there is nothing left to gain in the bourgeois republic. For fifty years – while communist equality, communist planned economy, and communist security of education and health care and retirement were demonized – progressives followed the Democratic party through the labyrinth of the bourgeois republic, urging it to do one more good thing.
While capitalism grew, it was possible to achieve real reforms through struggle, to win chunks of relative mass prosperity. No more. As Karl Marx put it, “At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production… From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution.”1 With the decay of the capitalist economic system comes the disintegration of the bourgeois republic.
It is time to set out on the socialist-communist road.
Charles Andrews is the author of The Hollow Colossus.
A list of his occasional essays is at http://www.hollowcolossus.com/moreCA.htm
Footnotes
1. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Collected Works, Volume 29, International Publishers, 1987, p. 263.