Hillary Clinton on health care = Carly Fiorina on climate change

What a time to be alive: Ted Cruz picked his running mate, Carly Fiorina. I too am trailing Donald Trump in delegate count for the Republican nomination — so I’ll be announcing my VP soon!

Meanwhile, while reading about this Cruz news, I noticed something. Here’s Fiorina on climate change, which she apparently admits is a real thing caused by human action:

“A single nation acting alone can make no difference at all. The only answer to this problem, according to the scientists, is a three-decade global effort, coordinated and costing trillions of dollars. Are you kidding? It’ll never happen.”

It’ll never happen.

Only a Sith deals in absolutes, but I’ll can the circa 2005 Star Wars references and roll with this. It’ll never happen.

I’ve heard that argument before. Fiorina’s justification for opposing climate action is the same as Hillary Clinton’s justification for opposing single-payer health care (aka Medicare-for-All).

Clinton says single-payer will “never, ever come to pass.”

This position is odd. From the premise that something won’t happen, it doesn’t follow that that thing shouldn’t happen. Clinton and Fiorina have both fallen into a weird version of my favorite logical screwup: the is-ought fallacy. Briefly, “is” does not imply “ought.” Just because a policy hasn’t passed doesn’t mean it shouldn’t pass.

“Wait!” you cry. “The Clinton-Fiorina argument isn’t fallacious if you accept that ought implies can. Since these things won’t happen, it’s fine to reject them. Andrew, you are a very stupid boy.”

Here’s the deal: these ideas aren’t actually impossible — just unlikely in the current political climate. While mitigating climate change requires a global agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions, getting 196 countries to agree on a legally binding treaty that cuts emissions enough would be incredibly hard. But diplomacy is ongoing: as climate change worsens, it’s possible that we’ll get an accord that goes further than the Paris Agreement.

Similarly, while 58% of Americans support Medicare-for-All, all Republicans and many Democrats in Congress do not. But political attitudes — and the people we elect — can change.

More to the point, it seems to me that this political practicality argument — but it will never happen — functions to let the speaker acknowledge a problem but reject the solution:

• Fiorina: Climate change is real, but a global greenhouse gas agreement will never happen.
• Clinton: Everyone needs health care, but Medicare-for-All will never happen.
• Me: I want to avoid dying before age 25, but me exercising occasionally and eating vegetables at least once a month will never happen.

On climate and health care, respectively, these two politicians reject the more surefire policy solution in favor of politically feasible fixes that rely on the private market. On climate change, Fiorina implies, private companies will do fine — if we leave them alone to innovate. On health care, Clinton says, private companies will do fine — if they comply with the Affordable Care Act.

To preempt the trolls: Yes, Clinton’s rhetoric on health care goes further than Fiorina’s rhetoric on climate change, by virtue of the fact that Clinton says we should do something about health care. Congrats! Clinton stood on her tippy toes and reached a slight bit higher than the low, low bar we call the Republican Party. #ImWithHer

But just as Fiorina wouldn’t try changing the fundamentals of human greenhouse gas emissions, Clinton wouldn’t change the fundamentals of America’s still-broken health care system. Clinton has no plan to achieve universal health coverage.

Of course, political feasibility is chill. The main point of policy is to pass it. And on some level, these two are right. A global agreement to truly tackle climate change, per Fiorina, would be tough.

The Paris Agreement doesn’t quite count. First, it’s not legally binding. Second, even if every single country fulfills their pledged cut in greenhouse gas emissions, we still don’t solve the problem. Brad Plumer writes on Vox:

Those pledges, in the aggregate, remain weak and inadequate. If you add them all up, global emissions are projected to keep rising through 2030, putting us on pace for 2.7°C (or more) of warming by century’s end. That’s well above the 2°C threshold that many scientists argue is unacceptably risky.

Still, nobody who takes seriously the threat of climate change throws their hands up and says, “Well, that’s it! A binding, adequate global climate agreement will never, ever come to pass, so we might as well lay down and wait to die in an inevitable future of rising sea levels, devastating drought, and deadly resource wars!”

Ditto on health care. Passing Medicare-for-All in Congress would be hard. Right now, it would be dead-on-arrival. Yet the status quo — with 33 million Americans uninsured in a system that will stay expensive, inefficient, and unequal even with some reform — is Actually Bad. Physician Adam Gaffney writes in Jacobin:

Single-payer is still the best way to achieve universal health care … Not all universal health care systems are created equal. Genuine universal health care includes the following four features, at a minimum: universal coverage (i.e. none left uninsured or uncovered), the elimination of financial impediments to care (i.e. no copayments and deductibles), comprehensive coverage (including services currently uncovered or poorly covered in the US), and no inferior “tiers” of access for particular economic or demographic groups.

This is what strikes me as jaw-droppingly stupid about Fiorina and Clinton’s shared argument. If some danger or damage — like a rapidly heating world or 4.5 million children without health insurance — is bad enough, it’s silly to suggest that we should just ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and give up the moment change seems difficult. You can secure feasible compromises now (like the Paris Agreement or Obamacare) while still working to push better ideas (like a binding treaty or Medicare-for-All) forward.

Another big problem with the “never, ever come to pass” thesis: What’s possible can change, often quickly. Just look at the fight for a $15/hour minimum wage, which leapt from being dismissed nationwide to being passed in New York and California — in just four years. That wouldn’t have happened if union organizers had accepted the Clinton-Fiorina Hypothesis: This seems impossible to pass, therefore it is bad policy.

Of course, political feasibility likely isn’t the only reason Fiorina opposes climate action. After all, many Republican campaign donors oppose climate action.

And political feasibility likely isn’t the only reason Clinton opposes Medicare-for-All. After all, she made $2.8 million from 13 speeches to the private health industry, which opposes Medicare-for-All. Health insurance and drug companies also contribute to Clinton campaigns.

That’s what’s nefarious about the Clinton-Fiorina political practicality argument: It’s deeply stupid, but it lets them sound reasonable while obscuring their real motivations for opposing good policy.