There was a diary on the Recommended list yesterday with a title that explicitly claimed Bernie Sanders was not being completely honest about his Single Payer Health Care plan.
I found this claim to be extraordinary in that it was an explicit attack on Bernie Sanders character, a rather blatant insinuation that the man was intentionally withholding information from the public and his followers.
Why would he do such a thing? The implicit suggestion is that he presumably fears the political consequences of putting all of his cards on the table.
I looked through the article to find the place where the author explains the basis of hiser claim that Sanders is hiding important truths about his plan from public scrutiny, but couldn’t find it. So I asked in the comments where that part of the article could be found and got only one answer: he is hiding the fact that he can’t pay for his plan (presumably because he must increase the financial burdens besetting the Middle Class).
In my reply, I acknowledged that I had not scrutinized all of the diary’s calculations, but observed that even if the author’s foundational premise is correct---that Bernie’s Medicare financing numbers come up short---I still don't see what the big deal is all about, why Hillary’s supporters imagine there is some great significance in the fact that Bernie’s plan has not been rushed into publication.
Like everyone else, I do not yet know the details of Bernie’s forthcoming position paper, but I do know what his values are in making such decisions and I can tell you that he has no intention of increasing the financial burdens shouldered by the Middle- and Working-Classes.
What this ultimately means is that---if there is some kind of shortfall using his previous recommendations---he will not hesitate to increase the taxes of the wealthy, so as not to burden the Middle Class. The very reason he is proposing Single Payer Health Care is to help average folks out financially.
Nothing we know about the man tells us that some part of his soul could be afraid to publicly call for an increase in the tax ‘burdens’ of the wealthy. It is not something that he would ever want to keep a secret from the public, from his followers, or even from Hillary’s campaign consultants.
So none of these complaints about Bernie not letting the caucus goers in Iowa know the details of his plans to fund MedicareForAll make any sense. We already know what his plan will say. We know that no additional financial burden will be placed on Middle-Class households to pay for the plan and that the tax ‘burden’ on rich people will probably be going up.
Now on the face of it, those who have---in all innocence---been led by the HRC campaign to fear the possibility of increase financial burdens for the Middle Class ought to be reassured when thinking about these truths re: Bernie Sanders.
But if the real reason why some Hillary defenders have been pushing this ‘complaint’ about Bernie Sanders is actually because they’ve been itching for any excuse to launch a little character assassination volley at their opponent (echoes of Karl Rove), then they will not be reassured. They will simply look for their next excuse to defame Bernie’s character with insinuations.
The only other possibility I can think of is that they do expect Bernie to call for higher marginal tax rates on rich people so that they can try to attack that plan as unfair to rich people or as perhaps an idealistic socialist dream that Congress would never go along with.
Nah, that couldn’t possibly be it...could it?
Oh please, please let that be it!
:)