Every day it becomes more and more obvious that
A) The Republicans desperately, desperately, desperately wanted to run against Bernie Sanders.
B) The left-wing folks who have taken standard Democratic Party policies and labeled them as "socialism" have done harm to the party. The extent of that harm remains to be seen.
It's infuriating that after Biden spent the entire primary enduring withering attacks from Sanders/Warren over his refusal to adopt the policies they had labeled as "socialism", now many people believe that he's one of them and a socialist. The entire point of the Biden candidacy was that he was a way for the party to reject the "socialism" of Bernie Sanders.
Stop calling universal health care "socialism." You are playing right into Republicans' hands.
Here we go again, Democrats should let Republican behavior dictate what they say and do. This is why we have Trump and why this country is in the sh**tter because Republicans have been calling Dems communists and socialists for decades. And guess what the end result is? It's not driving people away from the Dems because MUH SOCIALISM (the perception of being too centrist, on the other hand) but increasing favorable views on socialism.
Stop the pearl clutching over this because this whining is exactly what's allowed the GOP to control the narrative.
Yeah, I mean...if he honestly thinks the reason we don't have UHC is because of Republicans...lol
You believe Democrats are the reason we don't have universal healthcare?
Uh, given even the concept of a public option was shot down by Democrats when we had a filibuster-proof majority - along with the fact that it was Democrats who insisted (and seemingly still do!) on keeping the filibuster intact even when in the majority - and that even today it is the Democrats in positions of influence/power who maintain that Obamacare "needs to be improved" or "revised" rather than supporting universal coverage? Objectively, emphatically, unarguably yes.
There's this thing called majority government. No Republican is ever going to support universal coverage no matter what. Whether it is passed or not fundamentally comes down to what the Democratic Party is willing to do when it has control over the reins of power.
I agree with the rest of your post, but one might not actually actually need to dismantle the filibuster to get universal healthcare. Lowering the Medicare eligibility age to 0 could be done through budget reconciliation and should have been threatened as a response to filibustering a public option. Additionally, there are lots of executive actions a president could take to incentive lobbyists (and, by extension, their friends in Congress) to pass bills, if they were so inclined (but all too often, Congress is just an excuse for presidents to avoid taking such action anyway).
