Why I’m supporting Clinton over Sanders: Liberals don’t need a “savior,” but someone who can actually get things done in Washington

www.salon.com|Amanda Marcotte

Sitting down to craft my explanation of why, going into the primary season, I’m endorsing Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders, I made a critical mistake. I read the unhinged, downright embarrassing attack on Sanders by the Washington Post’s editorial board published Wednesday night. The piece, which is a series of straw man attacks on Sanders’ platform (denying that single-payer healthcare is workable, even though it works perfectly well in Canada and the U.K., for instance) and red-baiting that would make Joe McCarthy proud. It made me want to vote Sanders, just to piss them off.

It’s a shame, too, because there’s actually a germ of an argument here that the biggest problem with Sanders is that his promise of transformative politics is undermined by his unwillingness, in many cases, to give the public and his followers especially a realistic path to actual change. The problem with his single-payer healthcare plan, for instance, isn’t that it’s unworkable — he’s right that replacing insurance premiums with a generic tax that pays for every person probably would save most Americans money — but that he might as well be promising everyone a pony, for all that this is ever going to happen.

Bernie Sanders is right about Obamacare: Here’s why it’s time to talk about single-payer

www.salon.com|Daniel Denvir

Obamacare does have some very good features, including the expansion of Medicaid (in many states thwarted by Republican governors with the Supreme Court’s permission). Thanks to Medicaid and tax credits provided to those close to the poverty line (and the threat of a fine) an estimated 17.6 million uninsured people had, as of September, become insured since the law’s implementation began.

But many working- and middle-class people are still getting squeezed hard, forced to sign up for bad and confusing programs with high deductibles, high co-pays (and coinsurance) and in many cases high premiums—all so that they can hunt for care in sometimes very limited networks.

In November, the New York Times reported that more than half the plans on many states’ HealthCare.gov marketplaces had deductibles of at least $3,000. A recent Kaiser/New York Times survey found that 1-in-5 working age Americans with health insurance had trouble paying medical bills over the past year. Many had to spend down their savings, spend less on food, run up credit cards, and work more hours to pay for medical expenses. More than half of those without health insurance—a population that still includes more than 1-in-10 Americans—reported problems paying their bills.

Paul Krugman: Progressives would be stupid to attempt Bernie Sanders’ proposed “do-over” of liberal’s biggest victory

www.salon.com|Scott Eric Kaufman

In his column on Monday, the New York Times’ Paul Krugman argued that Hillary Clinton is in the right, and Bernie Sanders much less so, when it comes to correcting the perceived failures of Obamacare.

The question is whether progressives “should re-litigate their own biggest political success in almost half a century,” and Krugman firmly believes they should do nothing of the sort. Switching to a single-payer system at this point would mean cutting out private insurers, “and like it or not, incumbent players have a lot of power.”

Hillary Clinton’s fatal weakness exposed yet again: Why Bernie Sanders’ surge is exposing her biggest political shortcoming

www.salon.com|Daniel Denvir

It feels like September 2015 all over again, when the Clinton campaign, facing her first major shock from Bernie Sanders, decided on a course correction and apparently on purpose gave the New York Times a behind-the-scenes look at their “new efforts to bring spontaneity to a candidacy that sometimes seems wooden and overly cautious.”

Clinton is a very wealthy former first lady, senator and secretary of state with expensive homes in Washington D.C. and Chappaqua, New York, who launched her campaign with an Uber-esque logo and a slogan—fighting for “everyday Americans”— that rendered actual humans into a plastic composite sketch. Clinton is unlikeable because she comes across as the end product of a poll-derived algorithm with a calculus that accounts for everything—well, almost. Asked what kind of ice cream she liked last year, she conceded a system malfunction, responding “I like nearly everything.”

Hillary Clinton’s absurd Bernie smear: Why attacking him from the right on healthcare makes literally no sense at all

www.salon.com|Gary Legum

After years of the right wing trying one scheme after another to take away Obamacare, it jars the senses to watch Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton accuse her primary rival, Bernie Sanders, of wanting to take away Obamacare.

Sanders, she now insists, would do so from the left by instituting a program — single-payer healthcare — that would be more progressive than the Affordable Care Act. Yet this possibility is portrayed in the starkest of terms. It’s as if the Clinton campaign saw a house burning down and told the fire department to put it out by setting the house next door on fire to suck up all the oxygen feeding the flames.

The attack is predicated on a bill that Sanders introduced in the Senate in 2013 that would have set up national single-payer. The bill would have required each state to set up its own single-payer program. A federal board would oversee these state programs and take charge of any that don’t meet whatever requirements it lays out. All federal programs – Medicare, Medicaid, SCHIP – would have been folded into these state-run ones.

ABC buys the right’s spin: This Obamacare question might have been the debate’s worst — and Hillary and Bernie need to push back

www.salon.com|Simon Maloy

You probably didn’t watch the Democratic presidential debate on Saturday night because you’re a normal human being who has better things to do on the weekend before Christmas than watch two presidential contenders and Martin O’Malley argue about politics. But for those of you who defied the Democratic National Committee’s wishes and actually watched the debate, you were unfortunately treated to a pretty frustrating discussion about a critical issue: the Affordable Care Act.

In a question to Hillary Clinton, ABC’s Martha Raddatz noted that the number of uninsured Americans had plummeted since the Affordable Care Act went into effect, but “for Americans who already had health insurance the cost has gone up 27 percent in the last five years while deductibles are up 67 percent, health care costs are rising faster than many Americans can manage.” Having laid the issue out in those terms, Raddatz asked Clinton to identify what is “broken” with Obamacare and what she would do to fix it.

Hillary Clinton just slimed Bernie Sanders with a discredited Rupert Murdoch attack on single-payer health care

Clinton's attack on Sanders' health plan gets its numbers from a Wall Street Journal story disowned by a key source

www.salon.com|Eliza A. Webb

While debating Bernie Sanders last night in New Hampshire, Hillary Clinton made an egregiously dishonest claim.

During the candidates’ discussion on college education, Clinton stated that Senator Sanders’ proposals would cost trillions of dollars, saying, “Free college, a single payer system for health, and it’s been estimated we’re looking at 18 to $20 trillion, about a 40 percent [dent] in the federal budget.”

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Sanders is critic of the Affordable Care Act, arguing that it doesn’t go far enough and calling for a “Medicare-for-all” single-payer healthcare plan, similar to programs in most developed democratic nations.

“We are the only major country on earth that doesn’t guarantee healthcare to all people as a right and yet we end up spending much more than they do. So I do believe that we have to move toward a Medicare for all, single-payer system,” Sanders told ABC News.

Sanders called the “massive transfer of wealth from the middle class to the top one-tenth of 1 percent” in America “obscene” and has called for a return to a much higher marginal tax rate. “If you have seen a massive transfer of wealth from the middle class to the top tenth of 1 percent, you’ve got to transfer that back” Sanders toldCNBC.

Sanders has proposed the College for All Act, a plan to provide free education at public colleges funded by a small tax on Wall Street transactions.

Sixty-three percent of respondents supported a similar proposal from President Obama earlier this year, including 47 percent of Republicans.

Sanders is running forcefully against money in politics and his campaign has shunned super PAC support funded by undisclosed billionaires.

According to polls, Americans are most in sync with Sen. Sanders on this issue.

A New York Times poll released this month found that “Americans, regardless of their political affiliation, agree that money has too much influence on elections, the wealthy have more influence on elections, and candidates who win office promote policies that help their donors.”

The Supreme Court just recently expanded the right to marry to same-sex couples but Sanders has been a supporter dating back four decades, voting against 1996’s Defense of Marriage Act and supporting his state’s legalization of same-sex marriage.

According to a May 2015 Pew poll, 57 percent of Americans agree, including most Republicans under 45.