During Thursday’s debate, Sanders once again portrayed the health care issue as a battle between a much abused public and the greedy drug and insurance companies. That is a grotesque oversimplification, and the voters know it, even if Bernie doesn’t. Refusing to confront the real problems, and the corresponding fears, involved in completely revamping roughly 17 percent of our economy does not help to sell the program to a public that is largely skeptical of expanded government.
In light of the Fifth Circuit’s decision in the latest of a never-ending string of Obamacare cases, I’m surprised that Sanders doesn’t make more of an effort to argue that M4A would actually be more legally defensible than Obamacare. If the current system is always going to be hanging by a slender legal thread, why not go for the whole enchilada?
The answer, I suppose, is that the legal argument, regardless of its merits, interferes with his favorite poor us and evil them narrative. That is a fundamental problem with his candidacy; he lets his ideology define the facts, like so many members of the GOP.