The Gray Area with Sean Illing12 Aug 2019

Matt Bruenig’s case for single-payer health care

The Democratic primary has been unexpectedly dominated by a single question: Will you abolish private health insurance? Wrapped in that question are dozens more. Why, if private health insurance is such a mess, do polls show most Americans want to keep it? What lessons should we take from the failure of past efforts at health reform? What does it mean to say “if you like your health insurance plan, you can keep it?” Matt Bruenig, the founder of the People’s Policy Project, is firmly in support of true single-payer. No compromise, no chaser. He’s frustrated by those, like me, who try to work around the public’s resistance to disruptive change, who treat past failures and current polls as predictions about the future. And, in turn, I’m often frustrated by Matt’s tendency, mirrored by many on the left, to treat people with similar goals but different theories of reform as villains and shills. In this podcast, Matt and I hash it out. The questions here are deep ones. When are political constraints real, and when are they invented by the people asserting their existence? If you already believe the political system is broken and corrupt, how can you entrust it to take over American health care? Can you cleave policy from politics? What would the ideal health care system look like, and why? Book recommendations: A Theory of Justice by John Rawls What Is Property? by P. J. Proudhon The Progressive Assault on Laissez Fair by Barbara H. Fried Ezra’s recommended reading: One Nation, Uninsured by Jill Quadagno Remedy and Reaction by Paul Starr It's the Institutions, Stupid! by Sven Steinmo, Jon Watts Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(766)

How Democracies Die

The year is young, but Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die is going to be one of its most important books. It will be read as a commentary on Donald Trump, which is fair enough, b...

29 Jan 20181h 15min

How to oppose Trump without becoming more like him

Krista Tippett is the host of the award-winning radio show and podcast On Being. In 2014, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama. For good reason. She's created, over ...

22 Jan 20181h 13min

You will love this conversation with Jaron Lanier, but I can’t describe it

Oftentimes it’s easy for me to describe these conversations. This one is on Trump and Russia. That one is on health care. But not this time. I want you to listen to this conversation, because Jaron La...

15 Jan 20181h 39min

The most clarifying conversation I’ve had on Trump and Russia

What really happened between the Trump campaign and the Russian government? The investigation into that question has rocked American politics. The FBI director was fired over it. The attorney general ...

8 Jan 20181h 16min

Pod Save America’s Jon Favreau on Trump’s first year, the GOP’s “rot,” and the left’s failures

Jon Favreau was President Obama’s chief speechwriter. In those days, he was a frequent critic of the political media, frustrated, as many in the Obama administration were, with its focus on conflict, ...

2 Jan 20181h 2min

The inside story of Doug Jones’s win in Alabama

“The day before the Washington Post story came out, we were behind by one point, 46 to 45,” says Joe Trippi. “And the day before the election, we were ahead in our own survey by two points. We ended u...

25 Des 20171h 3min

What life is like in North Korea

The most important story in the world right now is how real the chance of war with North Korea is — and how cataclysmic such a war would be. Part of the reason the risk of war is so real is that our u...

18 Des 201750min

"An orgy of serious policy discussion" with Paul Krugman

On October 24, 2016, in the final days of the presidential election, Paul Krugman, the Nobel-prize winning economist and New York Times columnist, tweeted, "When this election is finally over, I'm pla...

11 Des 20171h 36min