On Debate Night, Clinton’s Moral Concession Met With Unthinking Applause

Why Clinton Has to Insist We Can’t Have Universal Healthcare

During last night’s debate, Hillary Clinton told us about her limits.

“Well, Andrea,” says Clinton, “I am absolutely committed to universal health care.”

Ok, but…

“But here’s what I believe, the Democratic Party and the United States worked since Harry Truman to get the Affordable Care Act passed.We finally have a path to universal health care. We have accomplished so much already. I do not to want see the Republicans repeal it, and I don’t to want see us start over again with a contentious debate. I want us to defend and build on the Affordable Care Act and improve it.”

Now, the thing is this was a minor concession speech delivered with an ironic tone of victory accompanied by audience applause.

But I’ve heard this concession speech for 12 years now. When Howard Dean made universal healthcare the strongest plank in his 2004 platform, I defected from John Edwards to follow Dean’s campaign. I was 18 then, voting in my first Presidential primary and absolutely certain that when I graduated from college in 2008, universal healthcare would be enshrined into law. Certainly by 2016, we’d be taking it for granted.

Except, obviously, it wasn’t.

The 2008 campaign would be the first time Hillary Clinton would stand behind a podium and tell America we still couldn’t have universal healthcare. The only thing universalized under Clinton’s mandate plan was the penalization for lacking insurance. People who couldn’t pay for insurance would still be unable to pay for healthcare, but now they had no choice but to also pay a fine.

Even then I thought it was a shitty plan orchestrated more for the benefit of private insurers than for the good of the people. It did very little but punish the poor for lacking something they were unable to afford. To me, it screamed bad policy. That’s why I didn’t vote for her in 2008.

So I already know what Clinton’s healthcare vision looks like. Last night she came out and said it: it looks like Obamacare. A private-public boondoggle creating oceans of profitable arbitrage separating Americans from public healthcare. The getting is so good for private insurers right now, companies that once lobbied against Obamacare are now lobbying to defend it. As it turns out, making everyone buy shitty private insurance is actually really great for private insurance companies! Who knew?

What we’ve learned from Obamacare is that a universal insurance mandate can’t fix a broken healthcare system anymore than mandating homeowner’s insurance can solve the housing crisis. Caking on layers of financial bullshit rather than address the heart of the problem has created nothing but a derivative bullshit market for derivative bullshit solutions.

And it has set Clinton up for bizarre moral traps. She has to champion women’s access to private abortion, but not to public healthcare. She’ll insist an addict can get an overdose antidote but says nothing of the medical bankruptcy that befalls her after going to rehab.

There’s a reason Hillary Clinton can’t come out and declare healthcare a human right. We know who Hillary Clinton works for. They write her checks. Hillary can’t declare healthcare a human right because she’d obliterate an entire industry now bankrolling the DNC.

When Bernie Sanders says healthcare is a human right, he’s ushering the end of medical insurance. He’s saying a future worth living in won’t support the criminal profiteering off of human suffering. He’s saying, more politely than I could, that only Clinton promised the insurers anything. Clinton’s limits are not our limits.

And that’s why Bernie Sanders can insist:

Healthcare is a human right.

We start from there and work backwards.