News Reporter: Wonkbook: Why Bernie Sanders might have picked the wrong year for a revolution

Thursday, 19 May 2016

Wonkbook: Why Bernie Sanders might have picked the wrong year for a revolution

The latest economic and domestic policy from Wonkblog

U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders waves after delivering a speech on "Democratic Socialism in America," to students at Georgetown University's Gaston Hall in Washington November 19, 2015. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

Bernie Sanders waves after delivering a speech at Georgetown University on Nov. 19, 2015. (Carlos Barria/Reuters)

By Max Ehrenfreund

Maybe the revolution got started just a little too late.

For decades, Bernie Sanders has been advocating for national health insurance. During his improbable ascent to national prominence over the past year, his desire to provide every American with publicly funded insurance has defined his Democratic presidential primary contest with Hillary Clinton. Although he campaigned on other issues as well — Wall Street, free college and the war in Iraq — his most ambitious goal has been replacing today's patchwork health-insurance system with one run by the government.

And although health care may have helped take Sanders further than anyone expected, he continues to lag badly with delegates, and the chances of him winning the nomination are increasingly slim.

One interesting question is why health care didn't help him more. Americans are interested in alternatives to the current system. Many would be willing to replace it with something similar to what Sanders has proposed, also known as a single-payer program. Seventy-three percent of Democrats in a Gallup poll said they would favor replacing President Obama's Affordable Care Act reforms with "a federally funded health-care program providing insurance for all Americans." Even 41 percent of Republicans said they would prefer a single-payer system to the existing one.

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There are clear reasons for Americans' dissatisfaction with the system Obama established. Twenty-nine million people remain uninsured, more than 1 in 10 people, many of them in states that have not expanded Medicaid under the law. A lmost half of the uninsured say they still can't afford coverage.

"You can't really imagine a less well functioning system than the U.S. one," said Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale University. "From a progressive political standpoint, you've got a major policy disaster here."

But if American health care is a policy disaster, the progressive candidate who says he has a fix doesn't seem likely to win. Here are four reasons that health care may not have been a winning issue for Sanders this year.

Read the rest on Wonkblog.