 So if you've watched this program now for a while, particularly through the 2019 Democratic Party primaries, you would know that I am hypersensitive to the issue of Medicare for All. And whenever a politician uses talking points that indicate at all that they're starting to diverge from that path of full Medicare for All where we get rid of private insurance, I am the first person to call out their bullshit because understand the health insurance industry is very, very powerful. They have virtually unlimited resources and they have a lot of politicians in their back pocket. So if you are a politician who's saying you support Medicare for All, then you have to know the expectation that comes with that policy position. Not only will you be fighting the health insurance industry, you have to fight your own party. So if you say I support Medicare for All, but maybe there's going to be a little bit of room for private insurance companies, you are not serious about Medicare for All. If you say I support Medicare for All and I want to get rid of private insurance companies, but maybe there's some room for a broader discussion within the Democratic Party about this, you don't support Medicare for All because you have stuges of the health insurance industry who are going to give their input when that's just the input of the health insurance industry. They're just the proxy. So you have to be aware of the double-speak and the terminology that they use because if they can find some way to not support Medicare for All, but get you to think that they do, then that to them is a political victory. So I've been accused of misrepresenting Kamala Harris's position on Medicare for All in saying that she does not support Medicare for All because she doesn't. But for those of you who still think she supports Medicare for All, you haven't been keeping up because back in 2019 she actually admitted, I don't support Medicare for All because as Nicole Goode kind of newsweek explains, California Senator and 2020 presidential candidate Kamala Harris is backing away from Medicare for All. Just two years after she co-sponsored the bill in the Senate, speaking at a Hamptons fundraiser to corporate executives and one-percenters, Harris explained that she has not been comfortable with the health care plan written by her 2020 competitor for Mont Senator Bernie Sanders. I think almost every member of the United States Senate who's running for president and many others has signed on to a variety of plans in the Senate and I have done the same she said at the fundraiser according to her campaign. All of them are good ideas which is why I support them and I support Medicare for All but as you may have noticed over the course of many months, I've not been comfortable with Bernie's plan, the Medicare for All plan. So she's not comfortable with Medicare for All but what she is comfortable with is more than 68,000 Americans dying every single year because they don't have health care. Yeah. So when I say that a politician is getting cold feet when it comes to Medicare for All, Elizabeth Warren being another example, I'm not just saying that because you know I'm biased and I don't like their version of Medicare for All. I'm saying that because I know when to call out their bullshit. I know when they're trying to gaslight us, right? And the fact that like I think progressives kind of messed up when we opted for Medicare for All like we should have just started with the national health program because we're already kind of pre-negotiating. So really by arriving at this decision to support Medicare for All itself, just basically socialized insurance, that is, you know, we're setting ourselves up for just like being on the very tip and if we move it all, we're going to fall off the cliff and not get Medicare for All. So like it was kind of a difficult position to support to begin with when we really should have asked for a national health system but the fact that we see any sort of wavering on Medicare for All, you have to call it out immediately. So if Elizabeth Warren says, you know, I support a public option first and then in my second term I'm going to push for Medicare for All or in the third year of my first term, excuse me, then I'm going to push for a second bill which would be Medicare for All. You have to understand what that is. That is an equivocation. So forgive me for misrepresenting Kamala Harris's position on Medicare for All and forgive me for not being naive enough to think that the person who doesn't feel comfortable with Medicare for All would drag the guy who the health insurance industry saw as their savior to the left. I mean, if you believe this, you are terribly naive. But hey, I mean, at least the people who are going to die over the next couple of years because they don't have health care is at least going to take a little bit of comfort, you know, knowing that at least the person who's vice president now who doesn't give a shit about them is a woman. Great. It's not a male victory. Look, this is very, very frustrating to me because exactly what we all expected to happen is already coming to fruition and Joe Biden hasn't even won yet. So basically my worry about the public option is that it is a Trojan horse to never get Medicare for All. Then maybe a Trojan horse isn't necessarily the correct term that I'm looking for here, but basically, you know, it's going to put us on a path against government-run health care because eventually it will be underfunded and overburdened and Republicans will point to it as an example as to why government-run health care will never work out. But look, we don't even have to worry about that because Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are already starting to waver on a public option, like the one thing that they said they wanted to do with regard to health care that would have been bold, even if there's a lot of issues with the public option. They're already saying, well, maybe we don't start with a public option. It's going to be 2009 all over again if he's elected. So Peter Sullivan of The Hill reports, in the primary earlier this year, Biden's plan for a government-run public option for health insurance was seen as the moderate choice compared with Senator Bernie Sanders, Medicare for all. But once the arena shifts away from the campaign trail to Congress, where the proposal would have to pass via a narrow margin in the Senate, and despite fierce opposition from well-funded industry groups, Biden's plan would become a daunting challenge to enact. Surveying this landscape, some Democratic congressional aides and outside health care advisors who spoke on the condition of anonymity said they expected the party would start next year with the more modest package of fixes to Obamacare that did not include a public option in an effort to get some early points on the board. In fact, House Democrats already passed such a bill in June, increasing financial assistance under the health law and undoing some of President Trump's actions but without a public option. That measure is already written and ready to go and it also includes provisions to lower drug prices, a top Democratic priority. But progressives who already think a public option does not go far enough reject that approach and say the party needs to be bold out of the gate next year, especially given the economic devastation from the coronavirus crisis, setting up a clash among Democrats. It's definitely too small because it's not regular time, it's COVID time, Representative Pramila Jayapal, a top progressive in the House said when asked about a more modest approach of fixes to Obamacare. A Senate Democratic aide though noted that if Democrats win back the Senate it will be through red or purple states and there will be plenty more moderate members in the caucus. Now, let me remind you that we are in the middle of a pandemic. We will still likely be in the middle of a pandemic if Joe Biden and Kamala Harris take power and Democrats take back the Senate. And what they're proposing is the opposite of the common sense thing that we should be doing currently. They're saying we're not even going to opt for a public option. We just have all of these executive actions lined up. Now, look, I don't think that the executive actions are a bad idea. Like if Bernie Sanders were to be elected president, he should immediately have taken executive action to undo all of the harmful things that Trump did to undermine Obamacare. But that's what you do in the short term. But you immediately after you sign those executive orders, tell Congress, give me Medicare for all, put that on my desk and I want to sign it into law. But that is going to be where they stop, right? He signs those executive actions and maybe they make a tweak to the ACA. And that's that. That's what they view as a victory. And you can already see, you know, a Democratic aid is saying, well, look, if they take back the Senate, it's going to be from a purple state. So we can't do anything too radical. It's just it is a never ending fight. And this is exactly what everyone should expect. The moment Joe Biden and Kamala Harris get elected, if we are lucky enough to defeat Donald Trump, is going to be a fight like we have never seen before. And we have to fight even harder. Because if Bernie Sanders in a perfect world were elected and he wanted Medicare for all, that still means we have to work our asses off to get him to hold strong because Lord knows all the pressure he would feel would be overwhelming, right? So you have to have the grassroots be there to fight with him. But now we're fighting against the White House and a Democratic Party. We're fighting two parties to get to the correct policy position. And if you truly believe in a public option, then you have to fight them even on this. So it's like the battle that we have, it's almost seems like insurmountable. Like there's no way we can ever get to where Canada is. Because lawmakers are just fucking scumbags. They don't give a fuck. I have health care, so I don't care. I'm rich, so it doesn't matter if I don't have health care. If I have shitty health care, I could pay for out of pocket expenses. So we're just going to say fuck it. It's a pandemic, but let's do what we did in 2009. Even if we see now how that failed, it's deeply frustrating. Now, basically what this article that I read to you points out is that, you know, there's going to be a fight, right? If Democrats take back the Senate and they are in control of government, it's going to be a battle between the progressive wing and the right wing wing of the party. And they are already trying to propose something less than what they were initially expecting. So we'll see if Joe Biden actually follows through on the public option, as he's been saying. But, you know, I mean, he said before he supports the public option, him and Obama, and they didn't even propose it. So why would we expect him to propose a public option when he's in power if, like before, he pivoted away when it came time to actually do lawmaking? I mean, it's just so frustrating. It's so deeply frustrating. Because on one hand, you have a party in Republicans who are just psychopathic. They don't even want protections for patients with preexisting conditions. And then you have a Democratic Party who isn't fighting the Republican Party sufficiently. And when it comes time for them to have a chance at actually doing healthcare reform, I mean, even before they take power, they're already giving us an indication that we're not even going to get what they were proposing, which we already thought didn't go far enough. It's like we live in a nightmare situation. And I'm ready to wake up now because this is fucking shitty. And I hate it. Like this never used to be something that's controversial within the Democratic Party. As Ro Khanna pointed out before, you know, this was part of the Democratic Party's platform back in the 1980s, until 1980, in fact, but only recently the party moved away from single-payer Medicare for all once they started taking money from private interests. So until we get money out of politics or break that a hold that the health insurance industry has on the Democratic Party, I mean, the fight is going to be just, I'm exhausted thinking about it. But seeing this is infuriating and it does have me fired up because if Joe Biden and Kamala Harris think they're going to get away with just proposing some shitty half measure that isn't even a public option, no, we're just not going to fucking take that. Absolutely not.