Hillary Clinton’s sharp move towards the right has many liberals questioning how much further right she will move in the general election, and if elected president. Her recent attacks on Bernie Sanders for his advocacy of a single payer health plan, which as I have noted she once supported, has resulted in considerable criticism from the left and a major nurses organization.
Jonathan Cohn, Why is she talking like a Republican? He also pointed out, “This is why Hillary Clinton makes so many progressives queasy.” Jim Newell at Slate wrote, Hillary Is Already Triangulating Against Liberals: Her new attack on Bernie Sanders’ single-payer health care plan shows her indifference to progressive voters. He pointed out that “she is a Clinton, and this is what they do.”
National Nurses United, which previously endorsed Bernie Sanders for president, has issued a press release to respond to Clinton’s attacks on Sanders over his support for a single payer plan:
National Nurses United, the largest U.S. organization of nurses, condemned the Hillary Clinton campaign today for its attack on Sen. Bernie Sanders’ proposal for healthcare for all, including its slanted use of data on the economics of Medicare for all.
“Any politician that refuses to finance guaranteed health care has abandoned my patients, and I will never abandon my patients. That’s why we support improved Medicare for all, and that’s why I support Bernie Sanders,” said NNU Co-President Jean Ross, RN.
“While the Affordable Care Act corrected some of the worst injustices in our insurance, profit-based healthcare system, the work of healthcare reform is far from done,” said Ross. “Today, 33 million Americans remain uninsured. Tens of millions more remain underinsured, facing bankruptcy due to unpayable medical bills or the choice of getting the care they need or paying for food or housing for their families.”
“The only fix for our broken system once and for all is the prescription Bernie Sanders has so eloquently presented – joining the rest of the world by expanding and updating Medicare to cover everyone,” Ross said.
NNU also criticized Clinton for citing a rightwing report first published in the Wall Street Journal on the inflated cost of $15 trillion to implement a Medicare for all system. The Journal report claimed as its source research by University of Massachusetts Amherst economics professor Gerald Friedman.
But Friedman himself has criticized the Journal report, noting in a Huffington Post column that the “economic benefits from Senator Sanders’ proposal would create dynamic gains by freeing American businesses to compete without the burden of an inefficient and wasteful health insurance system.”
Those include a “productivity boost coming from a more efficient health care system and a healthier population, [that] would raise economic output and provide billions of dollars in additional tax revenues to offset some of the additional federal spending,” said Friedman.
Friedman estimates nearly $10 trillion in savings while still reducing national health care spending by over $5 trillion. “With these net savings, the additional $14.7 trillion in federal spending brings savings to the private sector (and state and local governments) of over $19.7 trillion,” Friedman wrote.
Clinton is “ignoring the enormous savings that would come by assuring people could get proper care where and when they need it,” Ross added.
For example, a report out just last week noted $6.4 billion in lost wages and productivity in low income communities through premature deaths due to colon cancer, according to researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“Dismissing the yearning of millions of Americans for a more humane healthcare system not based on ability to pay, and relying on a disputed data is disgraceful,” said Ross. “It’s a reminder again why nurses across the U.S. have been rallying and campaigning for a candidate who will never stop fighting for guaranteed healthcare for all.”
I further discussed Clinton’s fallacious attacks on Sanders here.
By attacking Sanders from the right on health care and economic policy, along with reminding the left how hawkish she is in her recent speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, Clinton risks seeing progressive voters refuse to vote for her.
Conor Lynch at Salon warns that Hillary Clinton is playing a dangerous game: How her anti-Bernie talking points could cost her — and America — big time. He began, “Hillary Clinton is starting to remind progressives why the name Clinton brings up such a mixed bag of emotions, and why it’s so hard to believe Clinton’s pivot to the left this campaign season.”He concluded:
But Clinton is making it harder for progressives to support her. With a history of hawkish foreign policy and Wall Street backing, she truly is the lesser to two evils. (A neoliberal is better than a fascist, after all [referring to Donald Trump]) But many on the left tend to vote with their conscience, and going after single-payer healthcare and hurling dishonest attacks on Sanders will only alienate progressives further.
Her problem is also not likely to be limited to progressive voters. When Clinton campaigns as a Republican-lite, many potential Democratic voters are not going to see very much reason to turn out to vote, risking the same fate for Democrats as they suffered in 2014.
Originally posted at Liberal Values