The Nation.
since 1865UPFRONT
4 DC by the Numbers: Leak
not into the abyss; 5
ICE-Nein; 8 Comix Nation:
Tom Tomorrow; 10
Trump delays response
to Mexican earthquake.
Sad!; 11 Snapshot:
Rohingya refugees
3 Bernie’s Brilliant Bill
4 Harvard’s Shame
John Nichols
9 The Score
Mike Konczal
COLUMNS
6 Subject to Debate
Hillary Clinton Tells All
Katha Pollitt
10 Beneath the Radar
Winning Isn’t
Everything
Gary Younge
11 Deadline Poet
No Wall?
Calvin TrillinFeatures
12 The Future of BLM
Dani McClain
Activists in the Black Lives
Matter movement turn their
attention to the electoral
process.
18 Trump and the
Triumph of Fear in
American Politics
Sasha Abramsky
Who let the presidential
candidate get away
with demonizing entire
communities?Books &
the Arts
25 The Culture Veil
Joan W. Scott
30 Pilgrim Bell (poem)
Kaveh Akbar
31 Blaming the People
Jan-Werner Müller
34 In Free-Speech
Territory
Gara LaMarche
36 Films: Ex Libris: The
New York Public Library
đƫ 0ƫ%()
Stuart KlawansVOLUME 305, NUMBER 8,
October 9, 2017
The digital version of this issue is avail-
able to all subscribers September 21
at TheNation.com.
Cover illustration by Nurul Hana
Anwar.S
ingle-payer health care is not a new idea, not even here
in the United States, the only wealthy Western nation
without universal coverage. In 1944, President FranklinRoosevelt proposed a Second Bill of Rights that included
“the right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and
Bernie’s Brilliant Bill
enjoy good health.” Roosevelt, of course, spoke at
a heady moment, when Democrats were signing up
as co-sponsors for sweeping national health-care
legislation. After Roosevelt’s death, Harry Truman
embraced the cause and agitated for it more aggres-
sively than any president since, only to be blocked
by a Red Scare that presaged McCarthyism, as
well as a vicious campaign funded by the American
Medical Association.
President Lyndon Johnson used his 1964 land-
slide election to enact Medicare and
Medicaid, but the Democratic presidents
who came after him have pulled their
punches on health care—mostly promot-
ing schemes to better organize the in-
tersection of private and public care that
mirrored those once advanced by a dying
breed of moderate Republicans.
And here Democrats have paid a
political price, not for compromising
on any eventual legislation, but for fail-
ing from the outset to put forward a clear and
simple vision of health care as a fundamental
right. In 1993, Bill and Hillary Clinton produced
a byzantine and dispiriting plan that blended new
regulations, subsidies, mandates, and free-market
competition in a stew they called “managed care.”
“We have no pride of authorship” over any aspect
of the bill, they both conceded during the rollout.
Lacking a moral center, the proposal died quickly
under a withering attack from the right and the
insurance industry. Barack Obama, of course, was
considerably more successful in this regard. But
he began the negotiations by preemptively taking
single-payer off the table, despite having repeat-
edly stated that such systems make the most sense.
With Obama’s punt, there went any room to nego-
tiate even for a public option.
Now Democrats find themselves yet again
defending a law that even its eponymous spon-
sor publicly acknowledges needs significant fixes.
Make no mistake, the latest Republican attempt
to repeal and replace Obamacare—this time with
the Graham-Cassidy bill—is in many ways stu-
pider and crueler than its predecessors. There
is no Congressional Budget Office score yet for
this hasty, last-ditch effort, but replacing most of
the Affordable Care Act with inadequate block
grants to states, along with other cuts, will easily
leave upwards of 32 million people un-
insured. Seemingly as a middle finger,
the bill disproportionately targets the
blue states that expanded their Med-
icaid rolls. To this moral obscenity,
Democrats have been unified in saying
no. But what are they saying yes to?
Enter Senator Bernie Sanders. Build-
ing from a presidential campaign that
rocked the Democratic Party establish-
ment by putting unabashedly progres-
sive proposals front and center, Sanders has used
his newfound stature to assemble an unlikely coali-
tion of Democrats to back a “Medicare for All” bill.
The basic premise isn’t novel: Medicare for All
has been introduced in the House of Representatives
by Congressman John Conyers for over a decade,
as well as promoted by groups like Physicians for
a National Health Care Program and the National
Nurses United. Four years ago, when Sanders pro-
posed a similar measure, he found exactly zero
co-sponsors. Today he has 16, including prospec-
tive 2020 presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren,
Kamala Harris, and Cory Booker. So what changed?
Galvanized by the economic and social move-
ments that found expression in Sanders’s cam-
paign, Democrats are undeniably more willing
to embrace big ideas, even and especially in the
age of Trump. As Hillary Clinton observes in her
memoir What Happened, “the conclusion I reachEDITORIAL