Chelsea Clinton: Sanders wants to dismantle Obamacare

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Access to insurance, whether public or private, is not access to healthcare. Neither candidate has a plan with a meaningful guarantee of care for all.  That would be a better line of attack than whatever this is supposed to be.

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Even the liberal New Republic is asking why Clinton and Sanders aren't campaigning on a public option.

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Even the liberal New Republic is asking why Clinton and Sanders aren't campaigning on a public option.

The New Republic is a trash magazine gliding on prestige it no longer deserves. Hughes has turned it into a massive dumpster fire and is walking away with his millions, uncaring about the institution he destroyed.

Can't disagree with you there, but the piece raises an interesting point. Many of us were expecting that this would be a highly salient issue for Democrats in 2016, yet no candidate is talking about it. It certainly seems like it would be a great tack for Clinton (and one that I'd take some comfort in) unless she's too concerned about how private insurers would react.

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How many Democratic seat losses in 2010 are left unexplained once you account for the slow recovery, backlash against the stimulus and bank bailouts, abandonment of the 50 state strategy, the ongoing realignment in the South, racist and xenophobic sentiment toward Obama, and retirements and poor recruitment among Democratic candidates (owing largely to the aforementioned factors)?

I agree with some of Griffin's policy-based critique of the ACA, although calling it a "failure" is extremely overblown given the effect on insurance rates and cost growth, which are definitely worth something. (For one, I'd have been uninsured during grad school if not for the law - and just about everyone I know in their early twenties would have gone uninsured at some point, even if only for a few months.) But the supposed political cost of the bill, I've never been able to see. I just wish that the Obama administration had been as ambitious about pushing a larger stimulus.