Bhaskar Sunkara
speaker
1,609 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2022
last heard Dec 2022
Bhaskar Sunkara’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
done without the bill.
Even if you pass something and you're trying to make a change, like Obamacare was supposed to have a public option.
Everybody's been running on a public option in the Democratic Party for 12, 13 years.
Why don't we have a public option?
People know that if people have the choice of buying into a government plan, that might be the slow road to really having universal healthcare.
So I think a lot of it's opposition.
I don't support a public option in part because I think if we allow politicians to just say, hey, I support a public option, it's just kind of a way to signal your support for universal health care, but give us nothing.
And I think that's what we saw with Biden and a lot of other politicians that have supported public option.
I think in practice, if a public option is defined in such a way that it just means
you, you know, by default, can just opt in to a public plan.
And let's say hypothetically, you don't even have to pay for it, then it's just a backdoor to universal healthcare really quickly, because I think the vast majority of people who aren't currently covered and also a lot of employers, to be honest, would probably drop their private coverage that they knew their employees can just get a public option and maybe would only provide supplemental insurance or whatever else.
But
I think the broad overarching point of all these demands is to say that socialists need to be really connected to the day-to-day struggles of people to just improve their lives.
So if you're feeling like you're paying $400, $500 on the Obamacare market for health insurance and that's hampering your ability to do what you want to do in your life, then maybe you would support a candidate who's
for universal healthcare.
If you feel like you're struggling to find work that you can afford to pay your rent with or whatever else, maybe you'll support a candidate committed to all sorts of mechanisms to reduce housing prices or increase your power as a tenant and whatever else.
So I think it's like these day-to-day concerns
need to be connected to the more abstract and lofty vision of change.
Otherwise, our politics just becomes like this fantasy world thing that's nice ideas to think about or debate, but really won't make much of a difference in people's lives.
So I would say free college is not at the top of my list of priorities, but it definitely should be free in my vision of a just society.
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