Please watch this interview with Hillary Clinton. The whole thing is worth watching, but the portion about healthcare policy and the best route forward starts at around 9:20 in and runs less than 7 minutes, to 16:00 (It's supposed to be cued up to exactly 9:20 but you may have to scrub forward to get to it depending on your device).
Please take 6 minutes and 40 seconds out of your day to actually listen to the words which are coming out of her mouth.
UPDATE: Full, verbatim transcript by yours truly:
Andrew Ross Sorkin: “I want to talk to you a little bit about healthcare, because I know it’s an issue that you care about deeply and have thought a lot about.”
Hillary Clinton: “I have.”
Sorkin: “Because we seem to be in a very divided world, not just among two different parties, but even within the Democratic Party. Medicare for All versus a Public Option. You look at what Elizabeth Warren presented last week, and you think...what?”
At a campaign stop Monday in Northern Virginia, Hillary Clinton reiterated her support for a government-run health plan in the insurance market, possibly by letting let Americans buy into Medicare, to stem the rise of health-care costs.
UPDATE: I've expanded the second half of this entry.
A week or so ago, I took a good look at Bernie Sanders's Single Payer healthcare proposal and was, as I put it, "beyond disappointed" due to it's lack of detail, and naiveté about not only the political realities of trying to get such a plan through (which is the biggest issue that Sanders supporters insist can be overcome through a "political revolution" etc etc), but also due to the sheer mountain of legal, economic, infrastructure and logistical headaches that would have to be navigated.
The irony is that, for me, the math behind such a plan (ie, how much it would end up saving people overall in terms of actual dollar savings as well as reduced administrative overhead, greater efficiency, etc) was something which I didn't even get into. I was operating on the assumption that, while the specifics would obviously jump up and down here and there, the numbers were generally in the right ballpark. HOWEVER, according to Emory University expert Kenneth Thorpe (who's actually a strong single-payer advocate who has authored several SP plans himself), that may not be the case whatsoever. Dylan Matthews of Vox writes:
I've been debating (pun intended!) how to handle the ongoing 2016 Presidential primary season when it comes to the ACA. While the ACA has barely come up at all in either of the first 2 GOP debates, it's almost certainly going to start popping up sooner or later (and I'll be stunned if it isn't a major topic at the Democratic debates).
I'm gonna try doing an occasional "Candidate Roundup" with the latest ACA-related happenings when it comes to the various candidates...and there have been three major developments this week:
