What Bernie Won [View all]

Aug. 31, 2017, at 3:30 p.m.

Excerpts:

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., may have lost his presidential primary challenge to Hillary Clinton last year. But he's winning the long game. Case in point, Sanders plans to release a single-payer health care plan in September, and whereas he bore the brunt of a lot of bad press and intra-party fire during the 2016 campaign for his desire to see a national health care system, he's now gaining supporters left and right. On Wednesday, in fact, Sen. Kamala Harris – the California Democrat who has been on the receiving end of a lot of 2020 speculation already – endorsed Sanders' still unreleased plan.

There is little doubt in my mind that any of this would be happening if Sanders had not had the success he did in 2016, which showed that a version of left-wing politics, long assumed to be dead and in its grave by the chattering class, may have a constituency after all.

Polling backs up the notion that Americans are at least single-payer curious. Kaiser's health tracking poll in July found that a majority favor it, an uptick that has "largely been driven by an increase among independents." An Economist/YouGov poll from the spring found majority support for expanding Medicare to everyone. A Morning Consult/Politico poll from around the same time found plurality support for having one government-based plan for everybody. Per the Pew Research Center, a full 60 percent of Americans "say the federal government is responsible for ensuring health care coverage for all Americans."

Not that I think a single-payer plan is necessarily going to happen in the short term – or that implementing such a system doesn't have its own set of big challenges, or a cast of opponents who aren't all as unsympathetic as Big Pharma – but talking about it moves the national discussion in a positive direction, toward the aspirational and rational goal of having a system that works for everyone and that doesn't throw tons of money down into the maw of big insurance companies.

All that said, whether it's for ideological reasons or pure political expediency, Democrats today clearly feel the need to put single payer on the national stage. That's a win for expanding the limits of political possibility – it'll be up to the voters who care about these things to hold them to it when they're back in power, to push back on the tendency Democrats have to back big, progressive goals only when they can't happen. Even if he doesn't run for president again or ever have another substantive achievement to his name, Sanders will always have that.

https://www.usnews.com/opinion/thomas-jefferson-street/articles/2017-08-31/kamala-harris-shows-how-bernie-sanders-won-the-single-payer-debate