She's not wrong - Bernie doesn't seem to want to build on any of the accomplishments of the last 8 years, and seems content on conceding the idea that Obamacare is a failure.
Uh, it is. Assuming you ignore the fact that it was a colossal political misstep (Democrats are now legislatively locked out of governing for a generation in large part due to the controversy of it, fueled by the fact that it was such a damn private sector-inspired Frankenstein monster that it couldn't be explained properly to the public), there is still the fact that it has left at least two out of three of the previously uninsured without insurance and that the cost of healthcare is higher than ever ("you're only being price-gouged at two times the rate of inflation instead of three times the rate of inflation - you're welcome!"). I would be absolutely fine with losing our ability to govern for 30 years
if we had actually fixed the problem. Instead, we put a bandage on a tumor because our party is filled with cowards who think a half-ass solution will only generate half as much outrage and misunderstanding.
It's disingenuous to criticize Sanders for wanting a Medicaid-for-all program that "leaves it up to the states" while defending Obamacare, when Obamacare itself
was designed to vest its biggest and most tangible changes with respect to lowering the rate of uninsured in the states as well. From working within the existing parameters of Medicaid and Medicare, to signing off on state-based healthcare exchanges, Obamacare's real-world, specific mechanics were very much state-based. Sure, some loose parameters are governed by federal requirements, but those were never designed to be the bulk of the benefit in terms of lowering the rate of uninsured.
It's also worth noting that we'll never
really know how much of an impact Obamacare had on lowering the rate of uninsured, because a) it was passed and implemented during a time in which many millions of people lost their jobs, and b) the rate of uninsured from 2010-2014 almost certainly increased solely because employers were scared and unsure of providing additional insurance options with such a large and misunderstood piece of legislation coming down the pipeline.
There are also studies that suggest roughly half of those uninsured in 2009 but who are insured today obtained insurance through employer-sponsored healthcare plans. This means that in net terms, the bill likely added
just a few million people to the rolls who didn't have health insurance prior and who had also been chronically without health insurance. The numbers that claim "15 to 20 million people" are very misleading when you break down
how each group obtained insurance, whether or not they had insurance at some point in the recent past, and so forth.
Flawed as all get-out, doesn't address the bulk of the long-term cost problems, pushes even more public and private money into private insurance companies' pockets, merely shifts around where the actual costs regarding healthcare are paid by consumers, left potentially tens of millions of people without insurance because of its shoddy design and insistence upon state boundaries, and if this were 25 years ago, the bulk of Democrats in this thread defending this garbage as the harbinger of real progress would have been attacking this private-sector, pro-GOP idea exactly for what it is.
