Outflanked 3: the Healthcare Outflankening

How many times can you fall for this?

If you’ll forgive me for belaboring the obvious:

• Compensating hospitals who treat the uninsured for specific emergencies is both not “single payer” and a longstanding part of the American healthcare system.
• The last Democratic administration signed a massive, historic expansion of the public insurance program for the poor, and every Democratic candidate running this cycle (including Biden) ran on substantially expanding the ACA. Floating the idea that the government should temporarily compensate hospitals who treat uninsured patients if they have one particular illness “outflanks” the Dems from the left only if you have no idea what Democratic healthcare policy is.
• It’s amazing to see people fantasize about Trump becoming the party of single payer when 1)the Trump administration’s top legislative priority was to take health insurance away from 10s of millions of people to pay for a massive upper-class tax cut and 2)Trump is currently supporting a suit that would strike down the entire ACA, the Medicaid expansion included. How can you delude yourself?
• Mitch McConnell’s explicit plan is to do nothing until April 20 and then focus on confirming more judges who (among many other things) will vote to strike down any healthcare reform the next Democratic Congress can pass.
• People who imagine that Comrades Trump and Cotton and Romney are going to OUTFLANK the Dems from the left are the anti-anti Trump left equivalent of reporters who rush to give “today is the day Donald Trump became president” takes whenever he can string together three sentences without any insult comedy.