Why Beto O'Rourke Doesn't Support Medicare For All

So during the town hall, Beto O'Rourke was asked about healthcare, which direction would he go in? Does he support Medicare for All? Spoiler alert, he does not. What does he support? Well, here's his answer. Your plan or the plan that you signed on to Medicare for America, why not Medicare for All? I think about Diane. I think about Joey, a young man, 27 years old that I met in Laredo, Texas. He's been to a doctor once in his life because he does not have insurance. And that doctor told him that he had diabetes, that he had glaucoma, and that he would be dead before the age of 40 because he's not getting any care right now in this country. Joey, Diane, others, they don't have time for us to get to the perfect solution. If we were to start from scratch, maybe we would start with a single payer. But we've got to work with the system that we have here today. The surest, quickest way to get there is Medicare for America. All right, that is a deeply, deeply misleading answer. Okay, terrible answer. Horrible. So let me explain why, okay? So first of all, look at the title of Medicare for America. It's borrowed from Medicare for All because they know how popular Medicare for All is. It is meant to deceive you from day one. And then he says, why not Medicare for All, which is more expansive? It gives everyone insurance and better insurance than they have now. He says because it's gonna take too long. Well, that's not remotely true. In fact, the criticism that they had of Bernie Sanders' plan was that it takes too short. They're like, well, how are you gonna transition the whole system in four years? And then Jayapal said, no, I think we can do it even quicker. Her version is the House version. And they lay it out, and it has great specifics, and they tell you exactly how they're gonna do it. So there's no plan that says, okay, you know what? Let's take 20 years to transition it, ironically, except for Medicare for America. Medicare for America says, let's do a really long transition from what we have now to maybe everyone eventually having Medicare 20 years from now. So that is a deeply ironic and misleading answer about, my God, Joey's about to die. So let's take a lot longer to get to Joey, total nonsense. And then the part that they never tell you about, never, ever clarify on TV. And I had Neera Tanden on the program, who's a big advocate of that, obviously, head of Center for American Progress. And then I had a big advocate for Medicare for All, Michael Lighty, on the program. And we compare the programs. And the difference is, as Michael Lighty points out, that Medicare for All immediately gets everybody into the same single-payer system, so you can lower costs. Medicare for America leaves the private companies still in the system, which then they take all the healthy customers. They say, hey, healthy customers, I'll make your premiums lower. But that's because they don't have a lot of costs. And then they load up all the costs of the American taxpayers, so we pay all the costs. And then they turn around and go, look at how expensive the public option is. No, you gotta go with the private option, wink, wink. It's a trap. It's a trap to maintain the corporate power over health insurance. So somebody has to explain that. It reminds me a little of what's going on with the public school system. I mean, it's apples and oranges a little bit. But the reason why public schools are suffering is because people with the means will take their kids out of the public school system, and they'll put them in private schools. And then they will support politicians who wanna defund public education. Look, in order for Medicare for All to work, it needs to be well-funded, and it needs to have the negotiating power necessary to ensure that we're not paying way more than everyone else on pharmaceutical drugs. I mean, there's safety in numbers, right? And so that's what makes Medicare for All such a powerful idea. Everyone is in the same system, and you've gotta play ball with the Medicare system. If you're a pharmaceutical company or if you're a health provider, a doctor, whatever, you have to be willing to negotiate. And it's one of the best parts of Medicare for All, if you ask me. Well, I mean, I can't wait for his tree new deal, if we're talking about knockoff policies. Medicare for America and the tree new deal, Beto O'Rourke 2020. You might have been amused that when I said, somebody has to say that right after I said it. So let me explain what I mean by that. This is why a lot of the candidates don't come on the show. Now, we've had ten presidential candidates on already, so a lot of them do come on. But we ask in the detailed questions that get into these specifics. Television almost never does. So they just let Beto O'Rourke answer that question and mislead people. And I get it, it's a limited amount of time. I'm not trying to bash Dana Bash, right? But no one on TV, A, ever explains the difference between Medicare for All and Medicare for America. And then on top of that, they do a blockade of all progressives. So since no progressives can get on TV, no one can give that explanation. So everybody that was listening to that town hall, since they don't know those details, they're watching it on TV will think like, my God, Beto's, I guess Beto's right. We gotta get Joey that attention right away. I'm for Medicare for America. To be fair to Dana Bash, though, she did ask good follow-ups. She did. No, that's why I said, I'm not trying to pick on her. She had excellent follow-up. Yeah. And also, though, I mean, when I heard Beto's response, I think it reminded me of Clinton's response in 2016, which was, we can't wait around for the perfect solution because people are dying. And it's a terrible, terrible, cynical argument that galvanizes and inspires no one. Yeah. In particular, when it's used, as you pointed out, specifically to push for a plan that is less bold, is less well-suited to fix the problem, and slower, in fact. Yeah. Yeah, it's deeply cynical and in favor of the status quo, things that apparently don't play well. That's why we didn't win last time.