By Dave Lindorff
This is Bernie’s moment!
Nature, globalization, Trump perfidy and idiocy, Democratic gutlessness and the sheer insanity of the US health “system” have come together to present Bernie Sanders with the perfect answer to the question: How to defeat the entrenched neoliberal Establishment controlling the Democratic Party and their figurehead candidate of choice Joe Biden, and win the party’s presidential nomination, and how to go on to win the presidential race against incumbent Donald Trump.
With the COVID-19 coronavirus now entrenched and spreading rapidly across the whole US, and with scientists warning that the epidemic could spread at a rate that will double the number of cases of the fatal disease every week, we could be seeing over 100,000 cases (the number in China now) within seven weeks! and over a million cases by summer.
This is a story that is going to be dominating the news for the rest of this election as schools and universities shut down across the country. Already old people are being urged to stay in their homes as much as possible because of the high mortality rate being seen among the elderly. Soon factories will be closing, restaurants will be going bust, traffic will become impossibly snarled in cities as trains and buses are no longer used. The US will be total chaos in no time.
Worse yet, we have no way of treating the 80 million Americans who either have no insurance or Medicaid access, or whose insurance has such high deductibles they would have to pay full costs in cash to see a doctor, an urgent care center of a hospital ER. And the average lower income American has zero cash on hand and if he or she has a job is living from paycheck to paycheck, or trying to.
And here we have candidate Bernie Sanders who can say, any time, to a national audience: “Okay America. Now it is clear! We need to immediately expand Medicare to cover everyone. Either we do that or by next year at this time we’ll have hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions, dying of coronavirus! And this virus doesn’t care how much money you have. It doesn’t care what car you drive or how many houses you own. If you are over 60, or have a weak heart or damaged lungs, maybe from smoking or because you just got over the flu, you are vulnerable to getting a fatal case of this disease. So even if you can pay for your health care, or have it covered by insurance, someone who can’t get care is going to be handling your food, or delivering your package, or handing you a receipt at Nieman Marcus. You want that person to be getting medical care, not coming to work sick, unexamined and untreated!”
It’s a winning campaign theme! This is something Sanders has been talking about for years. He knows how the Medicare-for-All system works…
For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, six-time Project Censored Award-winning alternative news site, please go to: https://thiscantbehappening.net/bernie-you-need-to-call-for-immediate-expansion-of-medicare-to-all-americans-to-combat-the-coronavirus-pandemic/