The Democratic Healthcare Hoax

The following story is co-published with Luke Savage’s Substack .

Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries recently appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and fielded a question about “Medicare for All” from host Kristen Welker, who among other things noted his co-sponsorship of Medicare for All legislation from 2013 to 2021. Here’s the rest of their exchange:

Jeffries: Well, listen, these are all conversations that the House Democratic Caucus is going to have to have. Right now, we’re focused on Nov. 3, not Jan. 3. What we are promising the American people is that we’re going to fight to make healthcare affordable for every single American. And we know there’s a lot of damage that Republicans have done that we’ve got to restore and repair. For instance, Republicans have enacted the largest cut to Medicaid in American history. More than a trillion dollars or so has been cut from Medicaid. And what you’re going to have is about 14 million Americans lose access to healthcare.

Welker: Do you personally support Medicare for All? Do you personally support Medicare for All?

Jeffries: No. As you indicated, I haven’t co-sponsored the Medicare for All legislation that has been introduced over the last several years. I do think we need to figure out how to fix our broken healthcare system and then build something better once we repair the damage that has been done. Now, that will include doing things like extending the Affordable Care Act tax credits so that more than 20 million people who have seen their health insurance premiums skyrocket in some cases by up to $1,000 a month, that’s not sustainable. And that’s something that Donald Trump and Republicans have visited upon the American people.

Pressed by Welker a third time, Jeffries then concluded the exchange like this:

I think as you’ve, uh, indicated in your question to me, it’s not legislation that I currently am co-sponsoring or that I support. … But we do support the notion that we’ve got to find a path forward to fix our broken healthcare system and make healthcare affordable for every single American.

So, there you have it. The House leader of America’s nominal liberal opposition party opposes Medicare for All but boldly supports “the notion” that Democrats “have got to find a path forward” to fix a broken system and make healthcare “affordable” for every single American.

Forgive me for including yet another quote, but this related comment from Neera Tanden (head of the most powerful liberal think tank in Washington) feels relevant here too:

I’ve been writing critically about America’s elite liberal class for more than a decade now but still find myself taken aback by the rank cynicism on display here. Both Tanden and Jeffries are perfectly aware that some 90% of their own voters back Medicare for All. They’re also, I’m sure, perfectly aware of studies like this one from Yale, which found it would “save 114,000 lives and reduce overall healthcare spending in America by more than $1 trillion a year.”

Medicare for All has robust popular support, would save countless lives and improve the quality of countless others, and would be both more efficient to deliver and more effective than America’s current model. Political parties are, at least theoretically, supposed to care about public opinion and should theoretically want to behave in ways likely to attract more public support.

Instead, however, Democratic elites have — for going on two decades — relied on a rotating arsenal of talking points designed to preclude all except the most minor changes in healthcare policy. A few of the classic vintage, in fact, appear in what I’ve quoted already:

- In their bid to muddy the waters as much as possible, liberal opponents of Medicare for All have sought to quietly redefine the phrase “universal healthcare” such that it means universal insurance coverage through a patchwork of different programs rather than a single program, free at the point of use and available to all.

- Instead of talking about “free healthcare,, which is both the right moral horizon and straightforward to explain, liberal opponents of Medicare for All make incessant use of words like “affordability” and “access.” Rhetorically speaking, this evokes a vague spirit of reform while enabling elite Democrats and their auxiliaries to avoid making clear commitments of any kind. And it goes without saying that making something “affordable and accessible” is not the same as making it universal and free.

- Tying it all together, we have the transparently false insinuation that there is some kind of good-faith policy debate at play here, i.e., every Democrat shares the same ultimate goal but some respectfully disagree about how it can be best achieved.

This final point is particularly important because it speaks to what the real nature of America’s healthcare debate has always actually been: a political struggle pitting the basic needs of millions of Americans against the narrow interests of an immensely lucrative industry whose profits depend on the status quo. The former group might be more numerous, but its democratic weight pales in comparison to what the healthcare industry has in its corner.

As David Sirota has noted , politicians like Hakeem Jeffries can rake in hundreds of thousands (and sometimes more) in campaign contributions from healthcare PACs in a single election cycle. Health insurance companies are also major advertisers, which is among the main reasons you’ll rarely find support for Medicare for All anywhere on cable news.

In any case, I’m not sure any single issue better illustrates the moral cynicism and rank hypocrisy of the people leading the Democratic Party . Ahead of every election cycle, they are content to make the rounds on TV and rattle off the same dishonest talking points while fully cognizant of the fact they are actually standing in the way of reform. Jeffries, who inherited the conch from Nancy Pelosi, will eventually hand it off to a successor who will dutifully court all of the same donors and say all of the same things — as will the likes of Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom come 2028.

The GOP is widely understood to be a party more radical and extreme than its Canadian or European equivalents. Less well understood, by liberal Americans especially, is the fact that its would be center-left opponent has been a functionally center-right formation since the 1980s: “progressive” in an aesthetic sense, perhaps, but small-c conservative when it comes to most things that matter.

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