A warning to Progressively-minded people about Sanders' health-care bill.

This is a tough fight, because we’re asking capitalist politicians to sacrifice a capitalist industry for the social good. (And, yes, it can and will be argued, for the good of the capitalist economy as a whole—but there’s a stubborn resistance to any such class disloyalty.) The only thing that will get single-payer done in any congress is a massive, in-their-face public demand that politicians of both parties are too afraid of to deny. It will be done by a popular movement, independent of both parties, that creates a political atmosphere which encourages single-payer supporting candidates from both parties (yes, there will be Republicans) to come forward, and elects a congress where even some of those who don’t want to vote for single-payer, will.

That will only happen if single-payer advocates, many of them Bernie supporters, maintain a clear and consistent demand for publicly-funded, universal and equal coverage, for the easily comprehensible, proven-effective Medicare-for-all system—no if, ands, or doo-dads. That will only happen if single-payer advocates refuse to be divided and confused with any of the complicated schemes and doo-dads whose only purpose is to maintain a stream of payments to the private health-insurance industry. That will only happen if single-payer advocates, including Democrats and Bernie supporters, speak and act independently of the Democratic Party and Bernie Sanders, and in opposition to any dilution-complication either might put forward pre-emptively. There’s a reason—and it has everything to do with political feasibility—that there is not, never was, and will not be a “public option” movement. We cannot let anyone, even Bernie Sanders, try to turn the single-payer movement into one.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/09/21/fool-me-twice-trojan-horse-democrats-pile-into-the-house-of-single-payer/