WHY, NANCY, WHY?!

is Pelosi a Master Tactician or Anti-Progressive?

On February 5th, 2019, The Intercept ran a piece by Ryan Grim entitled, TOP NANCY PELOSI AIDE PRIVATELY TELLS INSURANCE EXECUTIVES NOT TO WORRY ABOUT DEMOCRATS PUSHING “MEDICARE FOR ALL” 

Pelosi Aide Tells Insurance Execs Not To Worry

According to the Intercept,  the Aide -- Wendell Primus, well known as a staunch opponent of Big Pharma -- met with executives of Blue Cross/Blue Shield less than a month after the Democrats won the midterm elections, many of them campaigning on "Medicare for All." Primus, said Grim, told the executives that "the party leadership" had "strong reservations" about single-payer healthcare, and assured the Executives that the Democrats would be their allies in the fight against single-payer, because their chief focus was fighting against Big Pharma's high prices, and they wanted the insurance companies' assistance in that fight.

All this was conveyed in a presentation of slides which were obtained by The Intercept and "re-created" to protect their sources. One of them appears below:

Note that the 5 bullet points objecting to single-payer boil down to three:

1. It's too expensive.
2. It's controversial.
3. It would be hard to implement.

As for the first, national economics differs radically from kitchen-table economics. In the latter, you try not to spend what you don't have. But for the United States as a whole,  that kind of economics  went out when we went off the Gold Standard. The truth is that the government can fund whatever it wants to. As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez points out, our government has no problem writing a check for trillions -- when it will benefit the super-rich. It's only when the money is for good, moral causes, like education, healthcare, or fighting global warming that our pockets are suddenly empty, and we become deficit hawks.

Unfortunately, Pelosi is herself a deficit hawk who seems really to believe that stuff. The Intercept notes:

When [Pete} Peterson, a billionaire who spent hundreds of millions of dollars to push Washington policymakers toward austerity, died in 2018, Pelosi delivered a floor speech that praised him and his vision effusively, speaking of the man as if he’d dedicated his life to eradicating child malnutrition or curing cancer, rather than as a Wall Street tycoon who spent millions pushing for major cuts to Social Security and Medicare. “Pete was a clarion voice for fiscal responsibility, and a strong moral conscience in Washington,” Pelosi said in her House floor eulogy of Peterson, who, by 2012, had already spent half a billion dollars targeting Social Security, Medicare, and other spending programs.

As for the second point. who are the "stakeholders against it" here? According to Grim's article, Primus (and his sponsor, Pelosi) seem to believe that the only stake holders are the insurance companies and Big Pharma.  But what about the American People, whose stake in this is their health, not to mention their money: Don't they have a stake in this, too?  And as for winners and losers, the THE WINNERS WOULD BE EVERYONE -- except Big Insurance and Big Insurance.  But if Big Pharma's profits were less grand, and if millionaire insurance CEOs went away, that wouldn't bother me. Some of the insurance employees would need help finding new jobs, but that is feasible. 

And as for the other implementation challenges -- sure there would be some. But in my experience, when a problem poses a dire threat, somehow the difficulties solving it seem well worth overcoming.

Now before we brand Pelosi as our enemy, let's give her the benefit of the doubt: She is a master tactician to be sure, and she may be feeling that instead of attacking healthcare's entire profit-making nexus at once, better to attack one at a time. And in attacking Big Pharma, she fixes on a problem not only for the American people at large, but also for the health insurance companies, who really don't benefit from high-priced pharmaceuticals.

Maybe Pelosi hopes to make the insurance companies into an ally -- albeit a temporary one.

Having said all that, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that, having been pressured by the progressives in her caucus to let single-payer be debated, she agreed to a debate -- but not in the Ways and Means Committee which has the power to frame legislation, but in the budget committee which has no such power.

So what is she -- master tactician, anti-progressive, or both?

You decide.

Dio

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PPS: We know that there are plenty out there who have stories to tell -- stories of your trying to cope with our dysfunctional healthcare system. Trouble is, we don't know what these stories are! That's where you come in. If you have a story to tell, you can email me at indivisible12401@gmail.com. You can be as anonymous as you like. Thanks!