[Occupymendocino] Fw: Medicare For All Is The Winning Strategic Line, Precisely Because Republicans Will Try To Cut Back Medicare

Wed Dec 21 08:18:13 PST 2016

________________________________
From: The Pen <theteam at peaceteam.net>
Sent: Wednesday, December 21, 2016 12:22 AM
To: annxpress at live.com
Subject: Medicare For All Is The Winning Strategic Line, Precisely Because Republicans Will Try To Cut Back Medicare

Dear Ann,

We promised you a major strategic and prophetic piece on the winning
path going forward and here it is.

To plan a winning strategy it is necessary to have a firm grip on
reality as it stands.

The first reality is that the so-called Affordable Care Act (ACA)
cannot survive. It's toast. And the more those on the Democratic side
now try to fight to preserve it, by perhaps trying to filibuster its
full repeal, the more ADDITIONAL seats in Congress they will lose.

Because the dynamic we sadly foretold in 2010 REMAINS in effect
UNDIMINISHED.

You think you are hurting now??? It's going to get WORSE unless we
take the correct decisive action immediately.

We told you the ACA was doomed the day it was passed. And we also
ruefully predicted 6 1/2 years ago that over a series of successive
elections the Democrats would lose control of both Congress and the
White House, behind a recurrent Republican election pitch that more
Democrats needed to be removed from office so that the bill could be
repealed.

What the Republicans will do now, with the political power they have
grabbed so far, is to cripple the ACA in budget reconciliation, which
cannot be filibustered, which will make it an even worse deal, and
then argue that to end the filibusters of full repeal MORE Democratic
senators need to be defeated in 2018, a year in which a
proportionally inordinate number of current Democratic seats will be
at risk.

The second reality is that beyond a couple corporate sales gimmicks
as window dressing, there is nothing in the ACA worth saving.
Otherwise it's just a pile of byzantine bureaucratic junk.

Notwithstanding anecdotal stories of individual people saving money
over what they were paying before, we are STILL paying absurdly more
for our medical care than any other first world country, because the
ACA corruptly put the medical insurance companies in charge of
setting prices, which are already dramatically escalating, in what
are now degenerating into single provider "markets" with no actual
competition.

The third reality is that there will necessarily be a debate on what
to replace it with, and THAT is our opportunity and our opening.

Republicans have sworn a nauseous number of times that they will
replace it (they just refuse to say with what exactly). The majority
of Americans agree with them that it's not good enough. . and SO MUST
WE, and make that majority our own by demanding that the ACA be
replaced with something truly better, Medicare For All.

If Democrats had passed Medicare For All in the first place, they
would still be in power today. They had bigger majorities in 2008
than the Republicans have today. And they poured all that power down
the drain by trying to con the American people with a corporate
boondoggle masquerading as health care reform.

The fourth reality is that Medicare is not only very popular, it is
popular with the highest participation segment of the electorate,
which are the seniors. These are people who VOTE, and this is the
most important point of all. When the Republicans try to turn
Medicare into some privatization scam, as they will, these VOTERS are
not going to like it.

We can and must make a powerful political argument that the best way
to strengthen Medicare is to bring more people, younger people into
the system, at the same time getting them covered and cutting their
health care costs as well, in a system with 2-3% overhead and
bargaining power for the people, versus 20-30% administrative losses
under corporate rule plus out of control costs for the medical care
itself.

It is an election winning argument.

There are other issues we care about and will also fight for. But for
example, as urgent as WE know the climate change crisis is already,
average people in their everyday lives do not have enough of a
personal connection with this threat to win elections against it on
this bandwagon. And by the time the water is at enough of their doors
for that to happen it will be too late to keep 50% of FL from going
under water. But the same politicians who will pass Medicare For All
we can get to vote to fight climate change.

So there you have it. We have given you the winning line.

We are told that 5 million people signed petitions this week to get
the members of the electoral college to stop Trump, and the
initiative was a miserable flop, again just as we predicted.

Why was it such miserable, embarrassing, naive, desperate flop? Can
we deal with reality here?

The most obvious explanation is because these PARTISAN operative
electors are not up for election again (technically they were shadow
elected by the votes by state) in an identifiable way so we have no
leverage on them. By contrast the Republican party has massive
leverage on them by threatening to essentially excommunicate them if
they had gone rogue.

But show us 5 million petition submissions, directed at members of
Congress who ARE all up for reelection, calling for Medicare for All
NOW, and we'll show you more political power than you can possibly
imagine. We only have about 5,000 submissions so far, that's short by
a factor of 1000 to 1, so you folks all need to get busy immediately
sharing this action page . . . presuming you actually want to start
winning again.

Medicare For All NOW action page:
https://www.utalk.us/?a=medicare_for_all_now
[https://www.utalk.us/UTalk_single_payer2.jpg]<https://www.utalk.us/?a=medicare_for_all_now>

Action Page: Replace The ACA With Medicare For All #TrumpTheFraud<https://www.utalk.us/?a=medicare_for_all_now>
www.utalk.us
The Republicans have promised to replace the Affordable Care Act with something better. President-elect Trump yesterday promised

And for the McAfee challenged, you can always submit our classic
action page at

http://www.peaceteam.net/medicare_for_all_now.php

We are giving away free Medicare For All NOW bumper sticker to anyone
who requests one. Show us 5 million bumper sticker requests and we'll
show you a Congress with hardly a Republican in sight.

Medicare For All Now bumper stickers:
http://www.peaceteam.net/medicare_for_all_stickers.php

We have "Single Payer Health Care" caps.

https://www.utalk.us/?g=2:H
[https://www.utalk.us/UTalk_trump_the_fraud2.jpg]<https://www.utalk.us/?g=2:H>

Action Page: Get your Single Payer Health Care cap at utalk.us<https://www.utalk.us/?g=2:H>
www.utalk.us
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Or do it not.

And two years from now we can do yet another post mortem on how not
just Democratic party, but progressives in general, became a
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publish elsewhere online so you can look back then on what we
predicted so clearly today.

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