ABC's debate moderators don't understand what universal healthcare is

[bluewater]

Corporate news media has turned universal health care into a wedge issue to protect their Big Pharma paymasters

Omitted entirely from Thursday's Democratic Presidential debate segment on the American healthcare system was any real discussion of how sick and inhumane of a system it really is, and what a high price we pay for it — not merely in terms of exorbitant costs, but in the preventable pain and suffering of millions.

For a while now, the corporate news media, whose profits are increasingly reliant on ad revenue from the predatory pharmaceutical industry, have done their best as debate moderators to frighten Americans into believing that the universal health care model proposed by Senator Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren is a threat to them and all they hold dear.

In the last debate, ABC News’ George Stephanopoulus set up former Vice President Joe Biden nicely to slam this “menace” from the left by framing the health care question on what Americans stood to lose with the boogie monster of radical reform.
“Both Senators Warren and Sanders want to replace Obamacare with Medicare for All,” he said. “You want to build on Obamacare, not scrap it. They propose spending far more than you to combat climate change and tackle student loan debt. And they would raise more in taxes than you to pay for their programs.”
He continued the softball windup: “Are Senators Warren and Sanders pushing too far beyond where Democrats want to go and where the country needs to go?”

Stephanopoulos played Biden’s wing man, by reducing the terms of the health care debate to money, raising the specter of tax hikes — playing into a strategy the right often uses to ward off social welfare programs.
[snip]

There was absolutely no reference to what Americans are actually getting, or not getting, for the $3.5 trillion we spend annually (which comes out to $10,739 per capita).
What a different course the debate might have wound had Stephanopoulus opened by asking the candidates to comment on how American life expectancy has declined over the last three years — something that has not happened since World War I.

What does that say about the American health care system?

https://www.salon.com/2019/09/14/abcs-debate-moderators-dont-understand-what-universal-healthcare-is/