Let's go with the one highlighted by Thomas J. Adams and Cedric Johnson in a brilliant article:
If this catastrophe makes one thing clear it's that at this moment the most meaningful divide in US political life is between those actively working toward single-payer health care and those unwilling to embrace it.
This real catastrophe we are living through has made it glaringly obvious that healthcare as a human right, not a commodity or perk of employment--universal, single-payer, free at point of service--is, ethically and politically, a minimal, indispensable demand. It's a policy that was settled decades ago in every other advanced country in the world. It's a program against which there are no arguments except the need to preserve the profit-making prerogative of private health-insurance companies. Even the "How are you going to pay for it" argument has now evaporated in the light of a $4.5 trillion bailout!
It's also a program that would virtually guarantee an election victory for any candidate or party that embraced it and really fought for it fiercely. It's a program that Donald Trump and the Republicans could not stop--if there were an opposition party with a leadership and an allied media that enthusiastically explained and promoted it, that would ferociously demand of any opponent: Name the person who should be afraid to go the hospital to treat their coronavirus or their cancer. Name the parents who should be afraid to take their child to the doctor because they can't afford it--for a single day, for lack of a single nickel. And if you don't name your own child or yourself, then sit right the f*ck down.
I have zero tolerance for any more evasive bullshit about this issue. Every argument and hesitation against single-payer is an excuse and a hypocrisy. Opposing it at this point is gratuitous cruelty to the people on behalf of the insurance companies. As far as I'm concerned, any and all of the candidates and parties who don't support it--and certainly Joe Biden and the Democratic party, which have made a point of setting themselves against it--deserve no leftist's political support or vote. Anyone who urges voting for a candidate or party that does not support this, and will not challenge that party or candidate directly, constantly, and as pointedly as suggested above, is a silent shill and has no claim to be acting as a critical leftist.
But can you be a determined Biden vote-getter and do that? I do not think so. You will necessarily be speaking positively for Biden and the Democrats when you should be speaking critically to and about them.
Really, this is the time! Concoct for me the more propitious crisis/opportunity we should wait for. This--healthcare as a human right, single-payer, universal coverage, free at point of service--is as clear a moral and political imperative as ending Jim Crow or opposing the Iraq War. Those who do not support it loudly and insistently right now will look back at this moment in their political lives with eternal regret.
That's a deal-breaker for me. One of them.
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