https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bG27bB2ERk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bG27bB2ERk

Originally shared by Dan Thompson

Bernie put Obamacare ahead of Single Payer

But Sanders needed all of 10 seconds to make clear that his purpose at the debate was different. “These gentlemen have on five occasions tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act, throw tens and tens of millions of Americans off of the health insurance they currently have, and make it impossible or very difficult for people with pre-existing conditions to get the health care that they can afford,” he said.
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It continued like this for an hour. Sanders and Klobuchar returned again and again to the Congressional Budget Office analysis that showed that Graham-Cassidy would throw millions off health insurance. In defense, Graham and Cassidy couldn’t really say what their bill would do, because the entire point of their proposal is to change Obamacare’s spending into block grants and let governors and state legislators decide for themselves how health funds should be spent. Sanders pointed out that governors and state legislators had all pretty much decided before Obamacare that people with pre-existing conditions were on their own. Graham didn’t have much to say about that. Instead, he and Cassidy frequently tried to make hay out of Sanders’ politics.

Sanders, of course, was happy to defend the principle of a single-payer system, but he never let that get in the way of the task on hand, nor did he reject the incrementalism the Senate sometimes lives and breathes by. Of course Medicare-for-all won’t be passing anytime soon, he said. But in the meantime, there were bipartisan fixes to made to Obamacare, and opportunity to act on prescription drug prices—an area of agreement, Sanders noted, between he and President Trump. They might even consider lowering the age of Medicare or offering a Medicaid or Medicare buy-in option—ideas his Democratic colleagues Brian Schatz of Hawaii and Chris Murphy of Connecticut are currently working on.
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No one in the caucus has put as much skin in the fight against repeal as the Vermont senator, who kicked off the party’s health-care resistance with a rally in Michigan a week before the inauguration and has been touring the country and in opposition pretty much non-stop. It is, for someone who has been marked as a revolutionary, an uncynical theory of change—the best way for him to build the coalition he needs is to be the man who saved Obamacare.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/09/bernie-sanders-health-care-debate-was-a-good-idea-for-a-very-simple-reason/