Dizzying Intellect

I watched the debate between Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz yesterday, or at least as much of it as I could take.  I admit to having a distinct bias because I freaking love Bernie about as much as I have ever loved a politician, and just looking at Ted Cruz makes me want to punch something, preferably him.  On top of that, they were debating the fate of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which has direct bearing on my life, not because I rely on the healthcare marketplace for my insurance, but because Michele works as a Navigator and if the repeal fanatics get their way she will be magically unemployed and we will be magically and hopefully temporarily poor.
Also, because of the connection with this particular process through Michele, I have heard stories about how many people have been helped, and also a good number of stories about how the system remains broken, which is something that both Sanders and Cruz seemed to agree upon and a fact which the boots on the ground are also painfully aware. The ACA, despite the fact that the first word is Affordable, has not managed to make health insurance that way.
From that common ground, Sanders and Cruz went on for well over an hour espousing the relative merits of their particular solutions: Bernie is for a single payer system, a plan he calls Medicare for all, which would guarantee coverage of some sort for every single American citizen. He is unabashedly socialist in his critique of the capitalist profit-mongering of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. Mostly I'm with him, but I also just filed my taxes so I'm aware that such a massive program run by the government would probably be expensive, ponderous and probably vexing in the extreme.  Cruz also came out with guns blazing at the insurance and pharma industries, which was a little surprising as I sort of had him pegged as the type of politician who had sold his soul to industries like that, but Cruz's solution (thin on details as far as I could tell) was some version of the usual free market utopianism that is popular among Republicans. This assumption that market forces and competition are the answer to any bloated and dysfunctional system may not be entirely unfounded, but it has not worked out well because greed remains a persistent human sin.
So the choices swung back and forth: the government needs to fix it, the corporations need to fix it, the only thing that was common ground remained that it is profoundly broken.  I would recommend watching it, but to tell you the truth, it will probably ruin your day, so here's this instead:

Both glasses are poisoned, and that is a fact.  There is no simple solution to something as complicated as healthcare in this country.  My feeling is that there needs to be some sort of compromise, we need to get used to the fact that if we want to avoid the tragedy of people in this country dying or ending up buried in debt because of inadequate and/or prohibitively expensive care we're going to have to work together.

I think that the market is not entirely a bad influence on the healthcare industry.  The promise of economic benefits does encourage innovation.  Competition does encourage efficiency and competency.  However, never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line, and never trust a corporation to do the right thing just because it's the right thing. I think Bernie's single payer system might actually serve best as one available choice among others, allowing the government to have real regulatory clout in the marketplace and actual skin in the game.  It works okay with Medicare, though it could use a little polishing up and perhaps a few more teeth.

Notice how Vezzini's downfall is in not realizing that he can't actually win this particular battle of wits.  The only way Wesley wins the contest is by changing the rules, basically cheating.  His "resistance to iocaine powder" is the only reason that he is not dead as well.  I have this feeling that a lot of our greatest challenges require us to change the rules that we are currently playing by. Idealogues are getting in the way of real progress in some very challenging areas from healthcare to environmental protection to gun safety. The problem is they have money, and they have bully pulpits and they will continue to rant and rave about how smart they are while people are dying. 

There were a few moments where I thought both Bernie and Ted realized that, they didn't ever seem to let it get traction and go anywhere, if that seed ever takes root though, hope can grow again.