Medicare for All Goes to the Hill
House committee hearings for Medicare for All are finally starting today. It’s a testament to M4A’s rising popularity — but overcoming opposition from Republicans, Democrats, and the health care companies will require a mass movement.
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Remarkably, the real legislative fight to win Medicare for All is just beginning. With a hearing today, the Ways and Means Committee of the US House is the first congressional committee to consider Medicare for All that has primary policy and funding jurisdiction.
Witnesses will include Rebecca Wood, who spoke in 2017 at the introduction of Sen. Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All bill about her inability to get appropriate dental treatment, among other horrors visited upon her and her family by the US health care industry — a bleak typical picture of workers’ experience with their private health insurance. Former CMS administrator Donald Berwick, a strong single-payer advocate, will also testify.
Otherwise, at the hearing academics and consultants affiliated with the health care industry offer their prescriptions for “universal coverage.” State-based health exchanges created by the ACA, in the business of marketing private plans, have latched onto the “public option” (at least in Democratic-led states), so they will be represented in the hearing as well.
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