SandersCare thrives while TrumpCare dies

After seven years of Republican promises to repeal and replace ObamaCare, the single-payer healthcare system proposed for decades by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is gaining steam, while all GOP plans are buried in the graveyard of bad ideas.

All in all, September was a fabulous month for Sanders and all progressives, and an epically disastrous month for President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), whose brand-defining healthcare policy was defeated by a Republican Senate and whose party is now embroiled in the most divisive civil war since Lincoln, who would vote Democratic if he were here today. 

The resistance to Trump, led by grassroots patriots who want to take America from the politics of Trump, is in the ascendancy.  By contrast, as September ends, a poll from Quinnipiac shows that 56 percent of Americans believe Trump is unfit to be president, while recent polls show that Sanders is the most popular political leader in America.

Notice that Trump has given up even trying to falsely state how popular he is! Trump is reduced to attacking the Senate Republican leader, the Senate Republican statesman who served with valor in the Vietnam War, the National Football League, the free press, the widening and deepening investigation of Russian attacks against America, and his own secretary of Health and Human Services, who is a disgrace to the office he holds, as Trump is.

{mosads}In the greatest disgrace of all, while Puerto Ricans endure horrible suffering, instead of better preparing for the hurricane, Trump spent precious time attacking football players when he should have been mobilizing the full force and power of America to come to the rescue in Puerto Rico.

Meanwhile Bernie Sanders plugged on, as he has for many decades, relentlessly pursuing and promoting a health care system that would give every single American the ability to buy quality care at an affordable price.

Sanders is the conscience of the Democratic Party, while Trump is in the process of dividing and destroying the Republican Party. Grass-roots patriots now mobilize to defeat Roy Moore, a far extremist who was nominated to represent Alabama in the Senate, and elect Doug Jones, who once successfully prosecuted Ku Klux Klan members who bombed a house of worship in Alabama.

By the end of the week Steve Bannon, who may have more power in the Republican Party than Trump or McConnell, was mobilizing to find more rightist candidates to attack and defeat more incumbent Republican senators in 2018 and pressure them to retire and not run again, a course now chosen by the widely respected Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.).

We are ending an astounding week in an astounding month that leaves Trump heading toward a failed presidency, and leaving Sanders advancing what will someday become a program that goes down in history alongside the creation of Social Security and Medicare. 

SandersCare begins with the public option and reaches its ultimate plateau with the establishment of a “Medicare for all” system. SandersCare is based on a simple and powerful vision, that every single American, without one single exception, should have the choice of paying lower premiums and receiving quality healthcare bought from an insurance seller that is not 100 percent motivated by private profit at the customer’s expense.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who sponsored the latest highly unpopular and failed version of repealing and replacing ObamaCare, charged that the defeat of the Graham-Cassidy bill would lead to the creation of what Sanders proposed for the future of healthcare in America.

Graham is right, though not for the reason he stated. SandersCare is destined, in some form, to become the law of the land, which would place America alongside democratic nations in every corner of the world.

Graham-CassidyCare, TrumpCare, McConnellCare, and RyanCare were all based on the horrifically faulty proposition that Americans should have no choice of where to buy health insurance except from insurers who are totally motivated by private profit. In a TrumpCare system, 100 percent of policies must be bought by 100 percent of customers 100 percent of the time by insurers who are 100 percent motivated by private profit.

While TrumpCare in all its forms would lead to millions of Americans losing their insurance, SandersCare in all its forms creates the possibility that, for the first time in American history, 100 percent of Americans could someday be insured because they would have the choice of buying policies from a seller motivated by improving their healthcare, and only improving their healthcare, 100 percent of the time. 

While TrumpCare is politically dead and buried, SandersCare is the wave of the future, which is good news for every American who cares about their health.

Budowsky was an aide to former Sens. Lloyd Bentsen and Bill Alexander, then chief deputy majority whip of the House. He holds an LL.M. in international financial law from the London School of Economics. He can be read on The Hill’s Contributors blog and reached at brentbbi@webtv.net.