corporate america

If the Hillary Clinton campaign had its way, supporters of Bernie Sanders - whose backing she will obviously want in November should she win the Democratic nomination - would feel that, while Clinton might not be all that they want in a president, she would at least go part of the way there. But if you followed the third debate deep enough into the night, you witnessed, in what stands as the most disingenuous moment of the Democratic race thus far, Clinton not simply disagreeing with Sanders on his Medicare For All, single-payer health insurance plan but knowingly distorting it. This was not Hillary Clinton offering a more moderate version of a solution; this was Hillary Clinton acting as part of the problem.

Clinton argued that the Sanders plan "really does transfer every bit of our health care system, including private health care, to the states to have the states run. And I think we've got to be thoughtful about how we'll afford what we proposed." She said between that and Sanders's public university free tuition plan, "We're looking at 18 to $20 trillion." Indeed, the single-payer bill Sanders introduced in 2013 called for a 2.2 percent tax on individual incomes up to $200,000 and couples up to $250,000 (and higher rates for higher brackets), a group she pledges would see no tax increases under a Clinton administration. But the reason that a recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll found 52 percent of Democrats strongly backing a Medicare For All plan and another 29 percent somewhat favoring it is that they understand that there is a payback for that tax increase. And so does Hillary Clinton.