Going Bold on Healthcare Reform with Elizabeth Warren
We begin with Hillary Clinton’s criticism of the Sanders and Warren “Medicare for All” proposals which she said without naming the authors, that their healthcare reform and a tax on the assets of the very wealthy were unworkable and politically impractical. The former chief corporate spokesman for CIGNA and head of corporate communications at Humana, Wendell Potter, who is now a senior analyst on healthcare at the Center for Public Integrity and the founder of Tarbell.org, joins us to discuss the $20.5 trillion price tag in new government revenues necessary to finance Elizabeth Warren’s Medicare for All plan. With the Urban Institute estimating the ten-year figure for total healthcare expenditures in America at $59 trillion, we will examine the tradeoff between the savings gained from the $11 trillion currently paid by individuals in insurance premiums and deductibles which presumably would go back into American’s pockets under a single-payer model, with the new revenues required under Medicare for All. Unfortunately the sticker shock from Elizabeth Warren’s $20.5 trillion Medicare for All price tag seems to have grabbed the headlines whereas the savings from abandoning the current private health insurance model has not been emphasized. But clearly is time to go bold since more and more Americans cannot pay the exploding private healthcare costs that have risen from under $500 per household when the Clintons tried healthcare reform back in 1992 to $20,500 per household today.
A Call to Arms to Take Back Our Government from the 1% Who Own It
Then we speak with Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School and host of the podcast “Another Way” about his new book, just out, “They Don’t Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy”. He joins us for an incisive examination of our failing political culture for which he offers a detailed reform platform of proposals along with issuing an urgent call to arms to every citizen to take back our government from the one present who own it and save our democracy to make it work for all of us.
The Blue Wave That Swept Virginia on Tuesday
Then finally we get an analysis of the aftermath of the blue wave that swept Virginia on Tuesday and what control of the House of Delegates, the State Senate and the Governorship by Democrats will mean for the Equal Rights Amendment which only needs a 38th state to ratify it assuming the Congress can pass a new deadline. Dan Palazzolo, Professor of Political Science and the Chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Richmond in Virginia, joins us to discuss how the Confederacy is now dead in Virginia.