Health care should be a right in this country … if it doesn’t cost too much. Thus saith former Vice President Joe Biden, candidate for president.
Asked by MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell in a taped interview Monday if he would veto a Medicare For All bill (in some form) if it reached his desk as president, Biden provided a somewhat cryptic answer.
Biden replied: “I would veto anything that delays providing the security and the certainty of healthcare being available now. If they got that through by some miracle, there was an epiphany that occurred and some miracle occurred that said ‘OK it’s passed’ then you got to look at the cost. I want to know, how do they find the $35 trillion?”
Biden was citing one estimate of the cost to the government over the next 10 years. Sanders has put the cost at closer to $30 trillion, a figure he has repeated on his campaign trail.
Sanders has cited a Yale study in The Lancet indicating a move to universal health care would save $450 billion in costs and save 68,000 lives per year.
Biden focused on how much treatment costs (not someone you’d want advocating for you in the emergency room). He’d rather tell you why we can’t have nice things.
“My opposition isn’t to the principal that there should be Medicare, healthcare should be a right in America, my opposition relates to whether or not, A—it’s doable, two, what the cost is and what the consequences for the rest of the budget are?
“How are you going to find $35 trillion over the next 10 years without having profound impacts on everything from taxes for middle classes and working class people, as well as the impact on the rest of the budget,” Biden told O’Donnell.
Like most TV these days, the interview played between pharmaceutical company ads for prescription drugs that promise to make your life better. Not one talks about how much the drugs cost. NOT ONE. Presumably, consumers buy what they are selling.
“Inspire through outcome, not process,” says progressive messaging guru Anat Shenker-Osorio, citing an example from a pollster.
“When we are walking through the grocery aisle and want to buy brownies,” she begins, “what is the image on the brownie box? The brownie! What’s not staring you in the face? The recipe! … We need to stop messaging our policy and talk about what our policy achieves.”
Biden would rather fret about costs and obstacles.
In the 1978 comedy Heaven Can Wait, quarterback Joe Pendleton (Warren Beatty) is “accidentally taken away from his body by an overanxious angel before he was meant to die.” He returns in the body of an eccentric millionaire. Pendleton explains to a boardroom full of executives why their tuna fishing operation should spend more to save “porpoises” (dolphins) and avoid lawsuits and controversy. One “suit” brings up the added expense.
“But we don’t care how much it costs,” Pendleton argues. “We just care how much it makes.”
The same for universal health care. We just care how much it saves and how many people’s lives. Talk about that. Talk about how much more money families will have in their pockets at the end of each month. Talk about not worrying the next health care crisis will bankrupt you.
Your kids will get well and stay well. You’ll be able to go to the doctor without risking your home. We’ll save 68,000 lives per year. One of them might be yours.
Go big or go home. “Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is, you’re fired.”
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. 2,600+ counties contacted, roughly 900 “opens,” over 400 downloads. (It’s a lead-a-horse effort.) Request a copy of my free countywide election mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.