"Medicare PRICES for All" — latest neolib head fake

In a move of health care strategery that the likes of a Beto O'Rourke would surely love, two Obamacare flaks at neoliberal punditry mag Washington Monthly say "we" (who's that mouse in your collective pocket?) don't really need Medicare for All.

We need Medicare PRICES for all.

This is built on such a foundation of sinking bullshit, I don't know where to start.

First, if this does save my late-stage capitalist employer money on health care, he's not passing it on to me. But, you guys know that.

Second, my boss wants to keep me enserfed to health care benefits. "Bennies," so that I still don't want to change jobs. But, you guys know that, too.

And, talk about burying the lede? It's down in the last paragraph of the long piece:

So why not just keep it simple, at least to start? A “Medicare prices for all” plan doesn’t require tax increases or involve transfers paid for by the middle class. It doesn’t require Americans to give up their current health care plans. And it doesn’t repeal or replace the popular features of the Affordable Care Act. But it does directly attack the middle-class affordability crisis using a proven approach that the great majority of Americans might actually support.

In other words, you poor? Keep your state-largesse-dependent Medicaid. Working poor? Keep your CHIP for your kids. 

If you're "working poor" or lower-middle-class in a state that didn't do the Medicaid expansion with Obamacare, or did it, but with restrictions? Oh, so sorry. That "transfers paid for by the middle class" shows the gig is up right there. Because we can attack, or pretend to attack, an abstract health care industry, but we can't tax rich individuals more and more progressively as part of a national health care system.

They even outrightly admit that, two paragraphs up:

Even if the CAP plan was financed in good measure by new taxes on the super-rich, it would still involve large transfers from middle-income people, who will be at least partially financing their own benefits, to people with lower incomes, who would be paying nothing for the health care they receive.

This dreck may not be racist, but it certainly is classist. Beyond that, middle-class taxes already help pay for Medicaid and CHIP. And these neoliberal wingnuts know THAT, too. So, it's classist with a counterfactual pandering element.

And we sure as hell can't have a British-style NHS because that would be an even bigger giveaway to "them" than Medicare for All. (It would also address the increasing monopilization of hospitals that Medicare PRICES for All would not. What's to stop a hospital from going cash-only? Or a cartel of them, if the gummint doesn't investigate?)

Fuck you all. Fuck your Council for Affordable Health Coverage, since it's an insurance industry front group.