Who won the Sanders-Clinton healthcare debate?

[Ebsy]

Clinton by a mile and a half, simply because Sanders could not articulate how he was going to accomplish a single payer system. He said nothing to combat her remarks that it would be impossible to get through Congress or that the American people wouldn't understand why he was abandoning Obamacare.

[Ebsy]

Sanders has a very salient point long-term:  assuming his figures and plan are accurate, middle-class voters will experience an average of ~$5000 savings on health insurance in exchange for a $500 tax increase.  However, Clinton is right about the path dependency of healthcare reform and how making big structural changes at once can cause problems, especially after the system had already been overhauled less than a decade ago.  I'd lean Sanders on this one though.

Not a safe assumption, and the whole plan is premised on ignoring the >6% payroll tax increase that we all know will just be passed on through lower wages.

[Ebsy]

Also, beyond the tax increases on lower earners, I think the gigantic tax increases on the rich are a bitter pill to swallow, even for someone who generally supports higher taxes on the wealthy. I think there would be a real possibility of high earners fleeing and taking their tax dollars with them.

[Ebsy]

With that logic, why try to accomplish any political goals? I'm not a Democrat myself, but most of my libby friends prefer Sanders because he's willing to stand his ground against Wall Street and the Right instead of immediately folding into pressure and offering to "reach across the aisle" as Obama has done. This middle-of-the-road stuff isn't going to work with the base.

You're making the mistake of assuming that the Republican base and the Democratic base are basically the same. Nothing could be further from the truth.

[Ebsy]

She's basically arguing for continuity in a change election. This is why she's not really inspiring anyone.

You keep saying this, but I'm skeptical. Polling seems to show that currently, Democratic voters prefer experience over someone promising change.

[Ebsy]

The people on this board, of all people, should have the common sense to understand just what the next one to two decades is going to look like in terms of the "difficulty of [xxxx] being passed" argument. A lot of people are pointing to the fact that a public option couldn't be injected into the healthcare law when it was actually politically relevant and popular, so how is it going to be passed now? Likewise, people are pointing out that Sanders' ideas are wholly unpopular with the current government, and therefore, how is it going to be passed now?

What everybody making these arguments seems to not mention is that it is going to be downright impossible to pass anything that any Democrat proposes, unless it is a wholly-owned idea of the GOP (and even then, look at examples like ACA). We have 100-year lows in the House and in state chambers across the country. Reapportionment has killed us for a generation, possibly. The Senate at best will probably tie after the 2016 election. Do people think that because Clinton talks about reaching across the aisle (like Obama did and does) that she is going to get a better reception? The person who arguably draws more lightning and anger than any other public official in the country?

Nothing, legislatively-speaking, is going to get done by anybody - for a decade at least. Those who say specifically that Sanders ideas are silly because they'll never get passed need to be saying the same thing about Clinton's ideas. Whether there's a lot of daylight in between the two or not is rather irrelevant; they're both in the same hemisphere of politics. That means any of those ideas are non-starters for the GOP congress and state legislatures. Vote for who you like and where your ideology falls: it's all that is really going to matter from the perspective of Democratic legislation for the next decade.

I'm interested in you actually defending his healthcare plan, which to me look like a vertiable dumpster fire.