Collective Conscious

Stu­pak is out and about, claim­ing that the Sen­ate health care bill “wouldn’t get ten votes in the House.”  This is per­haps a good thing — maybe we should scrap that bill and, I hate to say it, “start over.” But let’s go in the right direc­tion — left!

Stu­pak, like the rest of the House, is open to a pub­lic option; it proved that when it voted for it. 31 Sen­a­tors have pub­licly declared their sup­port for a real afford­able pub­lic plan. The whole thing has become a seri­ous cam­paign issue for Democ­rats — Amer­ica is vir­tu­ally demand­ing it at this point. Plus, there’s a way to exe­cute it that can only be pop­u­lar: Medicare for all. Let us extol its many ben­e­fits:

Most of the strate­gies for expand­ing cov­er­age using a rec­on­cil­i­a­tion bill would rely heav­ily upon expand­ing exist­ing pub­lic health pro­grams like Med­ic­aid, Medicare, and SCHIP. It is inter­est­ing that Stu­pak brings this up because deal­ing with Stupak’s con­cerns about abor­tion cov­er­age on the new exchanges has been one of the biggest stum­bling blocks to pas­sage of health care reform leg­is­la­tion. Since the cur­rent pub­lic pro­grams are all cov­ered by the Hyde lan­guage, which Stu­pak sup­ports, he, in the­ory, should have no abortion-​​related issues with sim­ply expand­ing pub­lic programs.

Two-​​thirds of Amer­i­cans sup­port it. The GOP can’t pos­si­bly flip-​​flop on Medicare being a good thing (okay, they prob­a­bly can, and with a straight face, too). It would fly for rec­on­cil­i­a­tion, since it would actu­ally save money for the gov­ern­ment. We’d all have health care, and it would be in the form of one of the most suc­cess­ful, pop­u­lar social pro­grams in the United States to date. In short, let’s get me some Medicare!