http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/11/hillary_clinton_triangulates_against_bernie_sanders.html
A standard Democratic presidential nominee representing the center-left of the party might call a single-payer system politically impractical in order to argue against it. “If I were designing a system from scratch, I would probably go ahead with a single-payer system,” Sen. Barack Obama said during his 2008 presidential campaign, for example. He then explained why he wouldn’t pursue such a model: “People don’t have time to wait. They need relief now. So my attitude is let’s build up the system we got. Let’s make it more efficient. We may be over time—as we make the system more efficient and everybody’s covered—decide that there are other ways for us to provide care more effectively.” In the end that approach resulted in the Affordable Care Act, compromise legislation that greatly expanded coverage without really overhauling the country’s private health insurance model. But Obama didn’t really disown the idea of single-payer, which many progressives still prefer to the current system.
Clinton, however, is going much further by appropriating one of the right’s central talking points against government-funded universal health insurance: Think of the taxes! She’s not just saying that a single-payer system is a political nonstarter with conservatives. She’s reciting the actual conservative talking point that would make a single-payer system a political nonstarter.
There are fairly obvious policy counterpoints to that argument. She is well-aware of them and chooses to ignore them, because they would either blunt or negate her convenient political attack. Sure, under Sanders’ plan, the combination of the income and payroll taxes would add up to 8.9 percent (assuming employers pass on the full 6.7 percent payroll tax) on most earners. But people would not be paying for health insurance anymore, and a universal, public system would save money by eliminating all of the actuarial costs and profit expectations associated with the private insurance system.
If Clinton wanted to say that she wouldn’t push for a single-payer system because it’s a political dead-ender right now, or because she’s spotted another legitimate policy flaw with the idea, that would be more acceptable. What she’s doing, instead, is essentially red-baiting about Bernie Sanders’ Wacky Taxes in her dismissal of a policy that, on paper, draws plenty of support among Democratic voters. That’s not good for the single-payer health care movement, which is hoping that some blue states will be able to use ACA waivers to experiment with single-payer in their states but so far are running into trouble thanks to the exact talking point Clinton’s deploying. And it’s not good for American liberalism in general, which is supposed to defend the belief that government funded by taxes can solve problems and improve people’s livelihoods.
= new reply since forum marked as read
