Progressives Push For Medicare Expansion As Medicare For All Loses Steam

The push for Medicare For All has sputtered out, but that doesn't mean that the fight is over. Progressives in Congress are now working on a new proposal that would lower the age of Medicare from 65 to 60, and it would also add coverage for vision, dental, and hearing. While this is better than what we have now, it is far from enough to solve America's gross healthcare crisis. Farron Cousins discusses this.

Don't forget to like, comment, and share! And subscribe to stay connected!

Connect with Farron on Twitter

*This transcript was auto-generated. Please excuse any typos.

Progressives in Congress have kind of at this point, I guess you don't want to say they've given up on pushing for Medicare for all, but they've kind of given up on it and they're trying new tactics what's happening right now is you have the congressional progressive caucus that is now trying to put forth a proposal into a legislative package that would lower the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 60. And it would also expand Medicare to also cover vision dental and hearing things that are currently not completely covered by Medicare. So this proposal would provide government funded healthcare for a couple million people across the country. It would expand coverage for everyone who's already on Medicare. It is a good thing. And according to the members of the congressional progressive caucus, they've been meeting with the white house, the white house seems to like this, you know, they're not opposed to it.

They say they're concerned. They may not be able to get enough votes, you know, for this thing to pass in a legislative session, because probably what's going to happen is this is going to be tacked onto a budget bill in the near future. They haven't said specifically which legislative package they're going to put it on, but smart money seems to suggest, yes, this seems like the kind of thing that would go on a budget bill because a budget bill would deal with Medicare. Anyway, go ahead and wrap it in together. It all makes sense. Here's a problem. White house already put forth a budget proposal. Not that long ago that did not include this Medicare

Expansion. So even though the talks have been going on

And the white house says, oh no, yeah, we're totally open to this. And then they put forth their proposal and they didn't have it. So that's a little weird, I'm sorry. It wasn't a budget proposal was the, uh, um, American families act, sorry, either way. They had the opportunity to put it in there and they didn't do it. So things are a little iffy right now, but things are a little iffy with the entire American healthcare system. And of course with

Congress itself

A year ago, all of the talk was about Medicare for all right. That's what we thought we were marching towards. That's what we thought the ultimate goal was. We thought in some way, shape or form, we were going to end up with Medicare for all Joe Biden as the democratic nominee, kind of soured that a little bit because he talked about expanding the affordable care act, uh, rather than giving us Medicare for all. However, he hasn't expanded the affordable care act yet either. So you know, there's that, but we need something. We need some kind of movement on this issue to know that somebody out there, somebody up there in still cares somebody still working on it. And another problem that we have right now too, and this is a problem by the way that I've addressed in the past. But I think a lot of folks on the left are ignoring at their own peril. The polls shifted, the poll shifted last October, a Kaiser family foundation survey found that a majority of people in this country no longer supported Medicare for all. Well, I take it back. They supported it. But what they preferred instead was an expansion of the affordable care act. That window to get Medicare for all may have shut and it may have shut for good.

So

That's why we're seeing these progressive say, okay, so what can we do instead? What if we lower the age? What if we expand, you know, how many things this covers? What if we do all of these things that desperately need to be done. And unfortunately, instead of giving it to everybody, we're only expanding it to a few more million people. It's not great. It certainly doesn't solve America's healthcare crisis, but hell at least it's something at this point, because if you lower the age once maybe, maybe you can lower it again and lower it again in the future. And then you lower it again and again and again. And if that's what it takes to get us to Medicare for all, then that's what we have to do. You know, a lot of people think that, Hey, we've got to do this one shot like a bandaid, rip it right off, then boom, we wake up the next morning. We all have Medicare for all. It's not going to happen like that