They All Have Blood on Their Hands

As I post this, America is about to endure one of the worst months in its history as we approach the peak of the coronavirus pandemic. According to those within the President's circle along with other epidemiologists, we may suffer as many as 100,000 or more deaths in the next month or so.

While we ponder this grim prediction, it's only natural to wonder if at least some of this loss of life was avoidable. Of course, the President didn't cause the coronavirus, but he did spend a couple of months downplaying and denying it before suddenly pivoting to calling it a pandemic.

This roughly two month delay before acknowledging the pandemic is clearly shown in this video, Trump's Coronavirus Calendar.

The Boston Globe recently wrote this scathing editorial on the President's performance thus far, A president unfit for a pandemic which I urge the reader to look through. But for now, these excerpts:

Timing is everything in pandemic response: It can make the difference between a contained local outbreak that endures a few weeks and an uncontrollable contagion that afflicts millions. The Trump administration has made critical errors over the past two months, choosing early on to develop its own diagnostic test, which failed, instead of adopting the World Health Organization’s test — a move that kneecapped the US coronavirus response and, by most public health experts’ estimation, will cost thousands if not hundreds of thousands of American lives. Rather than making the expected federal effort to mobilize rapidly to distribute needed gowns, masks, and ventilators to ill-equipped hospitals and to the doctors and nurses around the country who are left unprotected treating a burgeoning number of patients, the administration has instead been caught outbidding individual states...trying to purchase medical supplies. 

The months the administration wasted with prevarication about the threat and its subsequent missteps will amount to exponentially more COVID-19 cases than were necessary. In other words, the president has blood on his hands.

But other than this two month delay, we need to dig further.

To hearken back to Nixon and the Watergate years, there was the question: What did the president know? And when did he know it? When the "smoking gun" tape emerged, Nixon was busted and soon had to resign.

More recently, there was Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US, an intelligence briefing delivered to President George W. Bush 36 days before the September 11 attacks. So Bush did know about the threat ahead of time? Could he have stopped the attacks if he had pursued this further? This is unknowable. After all, there wasn't a time or place given for the threatened attacks. What's important is that he didn't even try. Ironically, in a 2016 presidential debate, candidate Donald Trump attacked Jeb Bush blaming his brother George W. Bush for 9/11 saying "George Bush had the chance [to prevent 9/11] and he didn't listen to the advice of his C.I.A."

This is ironic because U.S. intelligence reports from January and February warned about a likely pandemic.

U.S. intelligence agencies were issuing ominous, classified warnings in January and February about the global danger posed by the coronavirus while President Trump and lawmakers played down the threat and failed to take action that might have slowed the spread of the pathogen, according to U.S. officials familiar with spy agency reporting. 

Taken together, the reports and warnings painted an early picture of a virus that showed the characteristics of a globe-encircling pandemic that could require governments to take swift actions to contain it. But despite that constant flow of reporting, Trump continued publicly and privately to play down the threat the virus posed to Americans.

To make things worse, for the last 2 years, he slashed government agencies responsible for handling the coronavirus outbreak.

So Trump knew about the impending coronavirus pandemic from intelligence briefings going back to January. To put a bow on this, we return to the Trump's Coronavirus Calendar shown above and refer to his remarks on March 17. Trump didn't want us to believe that he was clueless about the impending pandemic, so he included this remark: "This is a pandemic. I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic. All you had to do is look at other countries."

Blood on his hands? I know how I feel but I will leave it to the reader to decide if this is hyperbole.

But there are a host of other suspects that appear to also have blood on their hands.

Richard Burr and Kelly Loeffler

Facing particularly stark questions Friday morning are two GOP senators, Richard Burr of North Carolina and Kelly Loeffler of Georgia. New disclosures show both of them dumped between hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars worth of stock early in the coronavirus outbreak.

They did so even as they were offering public assurances about the government’s ability to deal with the situation — and even as one of them, Burr, was offering some much more dire comments privately. Burr, as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, also reportedly received daily briefings about the threat.

They could have been heroes and sounded the alarm. Instead, they cashed in.

Alarm, Denial, Blame: The Pro-Trump Media’s Coronavirus Distortion

Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh et al. Did Trump's deceptions feed off of right-wing media or was it the other way around? Both is a safe guess But hey, this is America and they are protected by the First Amendment. But free speech is not absolute. There is the oft used example that you can't yell fire in a crowded theater. Your free speech should not be able to inflict direct harm of others. But they enabled Trump in his denial of the dangers of the impending pandemic which has and will most certainly result in many avoidable deaths. Furthermore, there is the endless skepticism about the virtues of the social distancing (even today) that even Trump's personnel are pleading for to keep the fatalities to a minimum. Instead they are more in favor of keeping businesses open. I think it would be safe to say that a great majority of those Americans who don't favor the social distancing orders follow Rush Limbaugh and/or Fox News. But having said all of this, I do not favor that they be censored. But they do deserve wide condemnation for their actions. Which leads us to...

All of the Republican governors who have been holdouts in calling for shelter in place orders. Florida Governor DeSantis is a notable offender holding out for a long time in a populous state with a large elderly population. When he finally gave in and announced state shelter in place orders, he inexplicably granted an exemption for church goers to assemble. I guess it's part of Republican ideology not to interfere in people's lives. But the longer they take to issue shelter in place orders, the more likely needless deaths will occur. It's easy to feel bulletproof if you live in rural America where cows outnumber people. But the virus has been reported in every state. If their luck runs out, these areas which often have many uninsured and few hospitals or doctors for that matter may be hit especially hard.

In his own category for what might be called batshit crazy with blood on his hands is Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro who has called the virus a “little flu,” is the sole major world leader continuing to question the merits of lockdown measures to fight the pandemic. Trumpian behavior on steroids if you ask me.

So finally, the question some may ask is why are we dealing with what happened in the past when we have this huge challenge in front of us with none other than Trump to lead us through it? A fair question. 

When we are hopefully past this and into the election season, there will be time to discuss where we are and how we got there. But with the passage of time, memories can fade and a flurry of revisionist history will try to make everything that happened seem to be OK. But it wasn't. And we can't forget that. I will conclude with the closing line of the Boston Globe editorial.

...come November, there must be a reckoning for the lives lost, and for the vast, avoidable suffering about to ensue under the president’s watch.

Post Script 

Dear Readers, At about the time I completed this blog posting, this blockbuster investigative article was published by the Washington Post.

Denial and dysfunction plagued U.S. government as coronavirus raged

Like a few other articles now coming out, journalists are trying to determine what happened during those 70 days between when the coronavirus was first discovered in China and the beginning of when Trump decided to take up the fight against the pandemic in earnest.

For those who want to have a deeper understanding of those first two months after the virus was first spotted in China, please take the time to read this article. But it is a lengthy read so as a service to the reader, I will offer this simplified synopsis.  

There are several threads to this story. One was that China was not cooperative with sharing information on the viral outbreak, including the refusal to share viral samples that would enable researchers to try and develop drugs to attack the virus. Secondly, it was a fatal mistake to exclusively rely on the CDC to be responsible for producing all of the mass testing that would be required if the pandemic arrived here.. It was a job that they were not really designed to do and they ultimately failed which lost us a lot of time.

But the main thread was about a good guy who tried to help unlike the list of bad guys in the blog posting above. HHS Secretary Alex Azar saw very quickly the virus outbreak in China could pose a catastrophic threat to America  So he did everything he could to meet this threat head on. Spoiler alert: He failed. It wasn’t for lack of effort. There’s only so much that a Cabinet level official can do on his own, especially, when massive amounts of money are needed. But worst of all, he had a frustrating time getting his boss to pay attention to him when he was trying to sound the alarm. The article describes a President who was more preoccupied with impeachment, campaign rallies and golf.

Eventually, things got bad enough so Trump could not ignore the situation anymore. But then Azar received the final insult.

...Azar, who once ran the response, has since been sidelined, with his agency disempowered in decision-making and his performance pilloried by a range of White House officials, including [Jared] Kushner.

Can We Talk About Bernie and Joe?

During the weekend of the South Carolina primary, the landscape of the Democratic race for the party's nomination took a transformational turn. Although Joe Biden after embarrassing performances in Iowa and New Hampshire did win South Carolina to keep him in the race, Bernie Sanders was still favored to win the nomination at that time.

In addition to Sanders having a sizable polling lead in California with its rich delegate haul on Super Tuesday only three days after South Carolina, Biden's campaign was just about broke and therefore had no presence in any of the Super Tuesday states. Biden neither campaigned there nor had any significant number of ads on the air. Along with the other moderates he had to compete against in Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar, there was also Mike Bloomberg who belatedly entered the race when it looked like Biden's hopes were slipping away.

The Democratic establishment did not want to see their nomination go to Sanders who is not even a member of the Democratic Party. So they did an intervention. Magically, the day before Super Tuesday, both Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg dropped out of the race to endorse Biden. The path had been cleared of moderates except for Mike Bloomberg who understandably stayed in the race to see what the results of his hundreds of millions worth of ads would achieve. In addition, Sanders' progressive competitor, Elizabeth Warren stayed in the race so he did not receive the same benefit of the thinning out of his competition.

Biden, spurred on by his victory in South Carolina and the dropping out of most of his moderate competitors caught fire and won 8 state primary races. Sanders did win California but Biden most unexpectedly emerged with a lead in delegates and that all important momentum. Bloomberg and then Warren dropped out after Super Tuesday setting up a one on one battle between Sanders and Biden for the nomination.

So let's talk about Bernie.

Bernie is a candidate who is addressing the grievances of those who think that the top economic 1% along with corporations, the health insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry, etc. are screwing us. He is calling for a revolution to enable the common voter to regain control of government instead of those other guys. Biden by comparison, just wants to return to the days before Trump came along.

Although, I am a progressive who admires Sanders, there are two long term strategic decisions that he got very wrong if he was ever to have ambitions for the presidency.

One, he should have joined the Democratic Party long ago. Although he prides himself as having that Independent label, his ideology has always fit within the Democratic Party albeit in its very liberal wing. He truly passes the duck test in that he figuratively looks, swims, and quacks like a Democrat. Why not just call himself a Democrat and be done with it?

Although the Democratic Party allowed him to compete for their nomination, a great number of party regulars do not accept him as one of their own. If it's a choice between established party regulars supporting Sanders or one of their own, Sanders is going to lose every time! This has proven to be a sizable impediment to his chances of gaining the Democratic Party nomination in both 2016 and this year, 2020.

Second, he needed to lose the 'democratic socialist' label long ago. As I argued in a previous posting, Invasion of the Socialists!, Sanders is NOT a socialist but is instead, an FDR Democrat or alternatively, a social democrat who admires the extensive safety net programs of Scandinavia and other European countries. If you listen to his standard stump speech, he is clearly channeling FDR and not advocating for government takeover of all private industry - with the exception of Medicare for All which would replace private health insurance with public insurance. But all of the Democratic candidates were in favor of greatly expanding Medicare in one form or another.

Every time somebody calls Sanders a socialist, I try to correct that person to say he is NOT a socialist but a social democrat. "But that's what he calls himself!" is the reply. How do you argue with that? Not only do the Republicans shove the pejorative socialist label down his throat, but also many of his Democratic opponents. Interestingly, I don't recall Elizabeth Warren who had similar progressive policies being constantly labeled a socialist.

Speaking of Elizabeth Warren, how did she go from being the leading candidate to going down in flames? I think she made a fatal mistake in trying to give a detailed answer to how Medicare for All would be paid for. The professor in her thought that coming out with detailed estimates would satisfy her critics. But then her figures were criticized. Interestingly, nobody else was really pressed to come out with figures. The correct response to those who argued that Medicare for All was not affordable would have been to point out that Canada along with every other industrialized country can afford universal health coverage for its people. If they can all afford it, certainly America with all of its wealth also can. Case closed!

In addition, every female candidate has to deal with sexism on some level. It is most notable that many male personality characteristics exhibited by females in a presidential race would be frowned upon. For example, even those who love Bernie will acknowledge that he has a gruff and grumpy demeanor about him. But ask yourself, how far would a gruff and grumpy female get in a political campaign? 

However, there is a more prosaic argument that with Bernie and Elizabeth occupying the same progressive lane, one of them had to lose. As a progressive, I backed Bernie in 2016 when he was 74 but was hoping he would bow out to Elizabeth in 2020 at age 70 instead of running again at age 78. But that didn't happen. When both of these good friends were doing well early on, there was the nagging question of how they would eventually settle the score between them. It can be argued that Bernie won because he kept a lot of his supporters from the 2016 election.

When it comes to Joe, it's first and foremost about electability.

This was put forth most bluntly by Joe's wife, Jill Biden.

So yes, you know, your candidate might be better on, I don’t know, healthcare than Joe is, but you’ve got to look at who’s going to win this election, and maybe you have to swallow a little bit and say, 'Okay, I personally like so and so better,' but your bottom line has to be that we have to beat Trump," Biden said.

Indeed, there are many voters who have said they would favor someone most likely to beat Trump over someone who best aligns with their views. But the message is in my view, weak. It says in effect, don't vote for whom you like best but who you think most others will vote for!

As for electability, yes Biden had a strong performance in South Carolina and on Super Tuesday. But do we now get amnesia over his weak performances in the previous weeks? Alexandra Petri has this humorous take in her Washington Post op-ed I just remembered Joe Biden is fine.

This is a little awkward, but better late than never! I suddenly remembered that Joe Biden is a dynamite candidate, something I had forgotten over the past few months of watching Joe Biden campaign. Joe Biden is the best hope of the party and its logical standard-bearer! I am embarrassed that I forgot this for so long. I am here with Joe Biden now!

A much more serious treatment is Michelle Cottle's New York Times op-ed The Resurrection of Joe Biden.

No matter how super Mr. Biden’s Super Tuesday, it did not magically erase all the factors that kept his campaign becalmed for so long. Joe is still Joe, with all his charms and foibles. And even as his team prepares for external threats, they also recognize that a key part of their job going forward is to protect the candidate from himself.

But most cringeworthy is this video showing a comparison of Biden back in 2012 on top of his game taking it to Paul Ryan in their VP debate and his more recent stumbling and bumbling on the campaign trail. Calling it cognitive decline may be going a bit too far. But he will definitely have to raise his game to keep from falling behind again!

At the time of this posting, Biden has a number of things going for him. He is ahead in delegates and as mentioned before, has that all important momentum. His poll numbers in Florida with one of the larger delegate counts ahead in the race show him with a massive lead there. He is undeniably the favorite to win the nomination at this time.

But Bernie is above all, a fighter! With the two men going at it one on one, it's going to get rough. And there is nowhere to hide, especially on the debate stage where more at length responses will be required instead of the quick timed responses because of what was a crowded stage. To take the fight analogy further, Joe is ahead on points and wants to nurse his lead until the final bell at convention time. As we get later on in the fight, Bernie may only have one way to win. So you know that Bernie will be swinging for a knockout!

America – The Land of Alternative Facts

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

This quote from Daniel Patrick Moynihan has been cited often but makes a vital point that is so often overlooked. Not everything is a matter of opinion. Some statements are factually based while others are not. To present both as having equal validity is flat out dishonest.

One of the most egregious examples of dishonesty was White House Counselor Kellyanne Conway arguing on Meet the Press that Press Secretary Sean Spicer's falsehoods at his first news conference were actually "alternative facts" as seen in this video link. Host Chuck Todd did his job by arguing that alternative facts are little more than falsehoods, but it's safe to say that she gained some converts into agreeing with her deception.

We have many diametrically opposing viewpoints on factual matters circulating everywhere. How do they come about? Allow me to provide a fictional example to help explain this phenomenon.

Imagine a large windowless room with a gathering of people. Somebody is curious about what is going on outside. So a couple of people volunteer to step outside and then come back inside and report to the group.

Person 1 reports that there is beautiful blue sky and sunshine out there.

Person 2 says that it's dark outside.

What to make of this? The laziest way is to just say that both are right and that each person is entitled to his own opinion. At this point, hopefully critical thinking takes over. Both can't be right on a factual matter like this. Somebody has to be wrong. The only way to settle this is to go outside and see for yourself!

But all too often, critical thinking skips town and disappears for long stretches of time. What can happen to the gathering of people in our example?

Some will say that if Person 1 says something, that's money in the bank! No need to look outside.

Others will say the same thing about Person 2.

Taken to its extreme, the two sides may argue and ridicule each other for being so stupid to believe in the Person they don't believe. The bond between Person 1 and Person 2 to each of their followers can be quite strong. Perhaps there is a relationship among friends, or relatives, or fellow members of the same political party. Unless critical thinking takes over, the two sides are at a permanent impasse.

While disagreeing on the weather outside may be harmless (with perhaps the exception of whether climate change is real), when the truth becomes optional, democracies can suffer tremendously. It has been said that democracy only functions well with an informed electorate. For those leaders who have totalitarian ambitions, undercutting the truth is one of the first steps in that direction.

There are many examples throughout history, but to list a few, Hitler had Joseph Goebbels and the former Soviet Union had Pravda which unsurprisingly translates to English as 'truth'. The US does not have the equivalent in state sponsored media, but there are many in right-wing media such as Rush Limbaugh along with Fox News personalities Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham to dispense their versions of the truth to their adoring fans. More insidious is Sinclair Broadcast Group which has not only gobbled up a huge number of television stations but is forcing its local anchors to read pro-Trump scripted messages.

Of course, the President is a major part of muddling the truth calling the mainstream media the "enemy of the people".

War reporting has never been more dangerous, as correspondents are increasingly treated not as neutral observers but legitimate targets. Now there are signs that Donald Trump and his Republican supporters are taking a similar attitude to political journalists, casting them as enemy combatants and fair game for character assassination.

The US president’s allies are reportedly carrying out “oppo research” – usually reserved for rival politicians – to compile dossiers on individual reporters in an attempt to discredit them. It is the latest front in Trump’s war on the media, which he has identified as a bigger adversary even than political challengers in next year’s election.

There are widely diverging versions of truth regarding Trump himself. His detractors like George Conway, (husband of Kellyanne of 'alternative facts' fame) have called him a sociopath. On the other hand, a majority of Republicans actually believe that Trump is a better president than Lincoln with others believing that he was sent to us by God. 

Of course, there is a tremendous amount of misinformation spread on social media and elsewhere. When the lies overwhelm the truth, trying to sort out the truth can become overwhelming which of course is the point of it all. There is an interesting quotaion, “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”  But ironically, we don't know the truth on who originated it.

Ultimately, for the sake of our democracy we need to agree on basic facts. For example 2+2=4 whether one is a Democrat or Republican or whatever. When the government can convince people of false facts, like 2+2=5 as in George Orwell's 1984, we are in deep trouble!

In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?

In the spirit of the New Year, I would like to conclude with an excerpt from Ring out, wild bells by Alfred Lord Tennyson.

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,         

The flying cloud, the frosty light:

The year is dying in the night;

Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,

Ring, happy bells, across the snow:

The year is going, let him go; 

Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Although this was penned in the 19th century. it couldn't be more appropriate for the present times. If I could only have one wish for 2020, it would be that in this all important presidential election year, the true wins out over the false!

The War on Democratic Party Progressives

Not too long ago, it was all about how Elizabeth Warren was constantly surging upward in the polls. But lately, the law of gravity has caught up with her. Many feel that her Medicare for All plan may well be a loser in a general election even though she has made some adjustments to tack to the center on this issue.

When in the early going she was struggling along, few took her seriously. But when she started gaining momentum, many started to imagine her as the Democratic nominee. And they didn't like what they saw.

Who are 'they'? In addition to many of the moderate Democrats, there are certainly Wall Street and big corporations along with the health insurance industry. And the idea of higher taxes on the wealthiest is obviously not a hit with the wealthy.

While the Democratic field should be shrinking, we now have two new moderates entering the race in Michael Bloomberg and Deval Patrick, sensing that if Joe Biden continues to have difficulties in his campaign, perhaps one of them could assume the role of standard bearer for the moderates.

Indeed in this presidential election along with the previous one, the Democratic Party has been searching for its identity between whether it wants to represent the progressive ideals of major structural change or incremental change promoted by its moderates.

Being a die hard progressive who favors Warren and/or Sanders, I am not a neutral observer. But hopefully the reader can trust me to at least try and provide an even-handed analysis of how each side sees things.

Progressives feel the system is broken where the top 1% have had it all their way both politically and economically. Income and wealth disparity have become so pernicious to our society that drastic changes in how the rich are taxed are the only way to make meaningful change. Obamacare was a wonderful improvement when it came along reducing the number of US uninsured from about 50 million to 30 million. But how much further improvement can be realized by a system that relies on a for-profit insurance industry? As the thinking goes, if for-profit insurance is not part of the solution, it is part of the problem! While more affluent workers may have satisfactory insurance plans, those on the bottom of the economic food chain often have what are little more than junk policies with high premiums, deductibles, and out-of-pocket costs that have resulted in a wholesale number of lawsuits by healthcare providers collecting on bills for their services. Is everybody happy with their private insurance? Not really.

But more than anything else, progressives love Bernie and Elizabeth because they feel the other moderate candidates are just too sympathetic to big money and big business to step on any toes to make any meaningful changes.

On the other hand...

Taking the party too far left is a prescription for disaster. Blowing things up is too scary for too many people. Taking away everybody's private health insurance is a non-starter for many. Free public college is a fantasy for many (even if some countries already offer it.)  And while the Republicans will label anything the Democrats propose as socialism, the label may prove more effective with a more leftist Democrat getting the nomination.

While trying not to favor either argument here, I believe the moderates are getting the better of the messaging right now. Of course, Fox News stands ready to bash any and all Democrats. But in my perception, the major liberal outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and MSNBC tend to favor establishment moderate Democrats over those on the progressive left.

The darlings of the media pundits nowadays are the so-called Never Trumpers such as Joe Scarborough, Steve Schmidt and Jennifer Rubin among others who have left the Republican Party over Trump and his Republican enablers in Congress. I am a huge fan of their work but when it comes to their recommendations on Democratic candidates, one should take what they say with a grain of salt. Although they have pledged to never vote for Trump, they are by ideology, conservatives after all. Asking them to reluctantly vote for a Democrat while holding their noses is one thing. Voting for a Democrat on the far left for them may well be a bridge too far!

Steve Schmidt had this to say about Bernie Sanders' chances against Trump in a general election: "In America, a sociopath beats a socialist seven days a week and twice on Sundays."

And just for good measure, President Obama looms over this divided primary.  Normally, somebody in his position would maintain his neutrality but the idea of Bernie Sanders winning the nomination was apparently too much for him and he was reported as saying that he would do what he could to stop Sanders if it appeared that he would get the nomination. Other than that, he just expressed his fear of the party moving too far left with either Sanders or Warren.

When you listen to the average voter — even ones who aren’t stalwart Democrats, but who are more independent or are low-information voters — they don’t feel that things are working well, but they’re also nervous about changes that might take away what little they have.

But before we get too worked up over all of this, a reminder — it's early! The first primary is still a couple of months away.

Since the progressive candidates in Warren and Sanders are advocating major change over the incremental change of their opponents, the onus is on them to sell their positions and convince most of the Democratic electorate if they are to have a chance at the nomination.

And if their progressive vision is accepted by enough of the Democratic Party, which of them will be the eventual standard bearer for the progressives? That's a question for another day!

Should the US Get Rid of Private Health Insurance?

The most important issue facing the Democratic Party in this election campaign is healthcare reform. The US spends far more per capita on healthcare — on average, twice as much as other wealthy nations. Worse yet, among these nations, only the US lacks universal healthcare coverage with the total number of uninsured estimated to be about 30 million people.

With just about all of the Democratic candidates advocating some sort of universal coverage at a lower price, the devil is in the details! 

Some want to keep our private insurance system and improve upon it. 

Some want to convert to all public insurance.

The rest are advocating a combination of both.

The choice of which path to take is a source of major controversy with the moderates fearing that if the party nominates someone from what they feel is the crazy far-left (See: Sanders, Bernie and Warren, Elizabeth) advocating taking away all private health insurance, reelection will be delivered on a silver platter to Donald Trump.

Maybe we need to take a dispassionate look at both public and private insurance to sort this all out. As we will see, they are quite different!

Public insurance (such as Medicare in the US for those 65 and over) is the government acting as one giant insurance agency handling all claims and payments — hence the term single payer. This is provided as a service to its citizens with no profit motive. The estimated overhead costs for Medicare in the US is around 2-3%.

Private insurance in contrast is a for-profit business. Like any for-profit business, the primary reason for its existence is to make as much profit as possible for its shareholders. This by itself creates a conflict of interest with its policyholders in that there is an incentive to deny as many claims as possible to maximize profit. The estimated overhead costs vary among insurers but around 15% on average appears to be in the ballpark. Indeed, it was deemed necessary that the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) include its so-called 80/20 Rule to limit private insurance overhead on the policies it offers to no more than 20%.

With the US standardizing on private health insurance and everybody else standardizing on public insurance (or heavily regulated private insurance), this alone would explain a lot of the difference in our per capita healthcare costs.

But there's more! The administrative costs of doctors and hospitals dealing with the labyrinth of individual private insurance companies can be astonishingly high!  Moreover, a giant public insurer like Medicare in the US can better negotiate prices with healthcare givers giving better control over costs. But because of a sweetheart deal for Big Pharma, US Medicare cannot presently negotiate prescription drug prices. An improved version of Medicare can certainly address this problem.

This leads us to a very important conclusion: Because of the way each is inherently structured — public and private insurance cannot compete head to head!!

Let's put this another way. If I am selling a product for my livelihood, I have to include some profit in the selling price. But if my competition is selling the same product at their cost — I cannot compete against that!

So this pokes a giant hole in the plans that propose a mix of public and private insurance.

In effect, this is a political straddle being used by some of the candidates. To keep only private insurance will clearly be seen as not progressive by Democratic voters. But to take away all private insurance and convert it to public insurance is seen by many as too far crazy left. So the 'safe' moderate position is to keep private insurance for those who want it and offer a so-called public option to buy into Medicare for those who want that. But for reasons explained above, this would also effectively put private health insurance out of business.

It should be noted that when the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) was first legislated, many wanted a public option to be included. But the private insurance industry fought this with all of their might knowing that there is no way they could compete with public insurance. So the public option for the ACA was killed. It is certain that the mixed plans with public and private insurance will meet the same fierce resistance from the private insurance industry as the plans that seek to eliminate private insurance outright.

So by process of elimination, the only straightforward way to both dramatically cut healthcare costs while providing for universal coverage (like the rest of the industrialized world) is a pure public insurance system. One can object that it may be politically toxic but if we are really serious about reforming American healthcare, this is our only effective choice. Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg was right when he said at the most recent debate that whether a far-left or moderate plan was offered by the Democrats, it would be equally smeared by Republicans as being crazy socialist. But can the Republicans really make an issue of Democratic attempts to improve healthcare when their alternatives have been little more than taking away Obamacare with nothing to replace it? Not surprisingly, the number of uninsured is going up again.

But in the interest of completeness, I have to address at least some of the prominent objections.

Won't expanding public insurance to all require an increase in taxes? Yes, but if the savings in health insurance premiums more than offsets the added taxes, that's a net win for the taxpayer! If the other countries with public insurance have much lower healthcare costs than we do, this is more than ample proof that their system works! In fairness, other countries have their flaws and sometimes frustrations with their healthcare systems. Despite that, it's hard to imagine any other country that already has universal coverage wishing they could adopt the American system the way it is now.

What about those who are happy with their private insurance obtained through their employers? We would have to demonstrate to those people that the public plan would be at least as good as what they have - which in most cases we should be able to do.

That aside, there are many disadvantages to our peculiar linking of health insurance and those we work for. Here are some:

Lose your job, lose your health insurance. In addition, there are far too many Americans who hold on to jobs they may actually hate because they don't want to lose their health insurance.

Companies can change insurance companies from year to year. Your present doctors may not be available in the new insurance plan offered.

Health insurance from an employer is not really free. It's part of the total compensation package. If the employer no longer had to pay for health insurance, at least some of that money may be available as additional salary.

Health insurance also has to be built into the price of the product or service that an employer offers to the marketplace. For example, Ford estimates their total healthcare costs for 2020 will top $1 billion. Surely this has to put Ford along with other US manufacturers at a price disadvantage compared to cars assembled outside the US where there is public insurance. This in turn creates an additional incentive to move manufacturing away from the US — as if we need one.

Finally, it is interesting to note that more and more US companies are already bypassing private insurance for their employees, instead choosing to self-insure and use the insurers only as administrators.

Although private insurers appear to be little more than unnecessary middlemen in all of this, one can expect them to fight to the death to keep their share of the healthcare dollars they have been skimming from the top all of these years. Admittedly, making changes in the short run may well be impossible in the present political climate. But if we play the long game and if our new (hopefully) Democratic president uses the bully pulpit effectively to persuade the public, there is hope for someday in the future. Let's just hope it all happens in our lifetimes!