What is the argument for Joe Biden in a crisis? Biden’s plan for healthcare, even at its most ambitious, would leave 3 million people
without health insurance. Now, people are
dying from COVID-19 because they don’t have health insurance. Under Biden, even after the years-long process of getting some minor improvements to the insurance system through, for many people a pandemic would inflict exactly the same kind of financial distress on people that it’s doing now.
The case for universal free healthcare just got about 1,000x stronger. Biden used the opportunity of the last debate to trash single-payer healthcare, saying that it hasn’t saved Italians. But it
has saved Italians from having financial ruin go along with a pandemic. The point of a social safety net is not to cure coronavirus, but to make sure that something like coronavirus doesn’t also leave people destitute. We’re seeing now the human consequences of having health insurance tied to employment: As staggering record numbers of people are thrown out of work, they will also lose their health insurance. This was always Bernie’s point in response to those who touted their “good private insurance” or said that Medicare For All would “take away” people’s insurance. In fact, Medicare For All would make sure you always got to keep your good insurance, no matter what happened with your job, while under our current system, millions can find themselves uninsured overnight.
The things Bernie has been shouting about for the entire campaign are suddenly becoming far more obvious. If corporations own the government, and congresspeople are bought and paid for by
lobbyists, then even in a pandemic the priority of the government will not be to save the lives of working people but to protect corporate profits and the stock market. Healthcare that operates for profit
is not going to plan for or tend to the needs of those people whose illnesses are not profitable. Once people were scared of “government healthcare.” Now they’re all desperately wondering: Why isn’t there any government healthcare? Where are the free public hospitals? Why isn’t the federal government
doing something? And the answer, in part, is because there has long been a bipartisan consensus around government austerity, believing that the private sector will solve problems as if by magic through the divine protection of an Invisible Hand that hovers above us all. (Yes, capitalism is a religion.) Actually, problems only get solved because people roll up their sleeves and
do shit, and government is the collective coordinating apparatus that helps us know what shit needs to get done and who needs to do it.
Bernie Sanders has a
coronavirus plan, and it’s a good one. Free healthcare indefinitely, not just for coronavirus, because coronavirus is going to cause many other conditions to worsen. Paid leave, a moratorium on evictions and foreclosures, expanding food stamps (which the Trump administration tried to cut
during the pandemic). But most importantly: Bernie can lead people. He can organize. This campaign has shown that he can do what Biden is hopeless at: build an army of activists ready to go out and work (or, during a pandemic, stay online and work). Bernie has always been very clear about what is necessary, and he has a long record of fighting for working people. He’s fighting for them even now, while Biden’s team spend a few more days adjusting the lighting in his home studio in the hopes it disguises the fact that Joe Biden is Joe Biden.