I appreciate and respect your frankness. I'm going to try to consider your viewpoint in interacting with you in the future. I think you have more at stake in all of this than I do.
I recently met and spent about an hour with a gentleman from Ethiopia who was brought to the US in 1993 to be part of Hillary Clinton's Task Force on National Health Care Reform. It sounded like they put together a pretty enlightened plan for Universal Health Care. It's a little ironic that she was shot down for being unqualified when it was probably the most qualified solution the country had seen to it's health care problem. Hillary picked this doctor. He was brilliant and had a compassionate charisma that's hard to describe. I wish we could extinguish whatever forces that are at work in our system that can start with a woman with a brilliant vision. like Hillary Clinton, and turn her into someone that says "It's never going to happen". It's so unfair.
I don't blame you one bit for not liking people, like me, who seem to be advocating for political roulette. If Hillary Clinton would have won in 1993, both of us would probably have different perspectives. We probably wouldn't be as desperate in such different ways.
I’m definitely a healthcare voter, but I’m not a single issue voter. But if you want to convince me you care about all these Lefty causes, you must *build a political machine* devoted to deliverables.
I find your story about Clinton and healthcare very interesting. The thing is, the opponents to UHC are embedded in every part of the system, the insurance companies, the managed care companies, the for-profit large medical chains, pharma, and more.
The public is much better informed now, and the problems with a system based on insurance as a perk of employment (for only a privileged portion of workers) are much more obvious as the public ages.
What the difference was between what Clinton knew then and now, I cannot say.
My own experience of the for-profit healthcare system is that it is ableist, predatory, and negligent, but asking sick people to give up their healthcare is still not the way forward. Disability is a minority anyone can enter at any time.
Healthcare is just an example of our corporate, neofeudal reality. If the system is so broken the democratic process cannot do more than tinker around the edges, that leaves us with:
1) building community solutions that increase individuals’ power to survive and thrive. In my own small way, I’ve done some work on that.
2) work on increasing the power and legitimacy of the democratic republic. This sounds impossible to get right, to libertarians who keep insisting the state is the problem, instead of capture of the state by oligarchy.
It is quite clear that the only forces that can push back at large entities like multinationals are other large entities. A legitimate state, based on the rule of law, can do more to push back at the oligarchs than anything else we have.
These choices are not either/or.
If you have an idea for the U.S. and similar countries that is not social democracy, what is it? I’m not asking for a list of what’s going wrong. What else is concretely possible that isn’t already in one of the two buckets I’ve listed?
