Now, there's a winning campaign strategy. Vote for me, I'll bring your financial life to it's knees.
I sure hope the Democrats nominate either Hillary or Bernie Sanders.
Let's not forget that Sanders' signature reform, single payer health coverage financed by general taxation, has real appeal to both middle class voters and business owners. Since WW2, tax policy has encouraged most Americans to get their health coverage as a perk of their employment. And it's become both objectively and unpredictably expensive. It makes up a third or more of the value of the compensation package of many working Americans, and has become so expensive that employers in industries where the competitive environment allows them to do so either drop coverage or keep raising the share the employees must pay out of their own pockets. It's a broken system, and ObamaCare is too weak and poorly crafted a reform to fix it.
It also leads to the outsourcing of jobs overseas. In America, the cost of health coverage stands out like a sore thumb in a company's bottom line, and affects every decision made whether to hire or replace employees. In most developed countries with single payor, health coverage is not dependent on employment but rather is financed through taxation that spreads the burden to all. That puts foreign employers at a key competitive advantage as compared with U.S. employers.
While there's no question that single payor will "raise taxes", it is also quite obvious that for many working Americans and and their employers, it will, from the standpoints of current cost and predictability of future costs, be a boon. The financial case for single payor is, IMO, pretty solid. The problems with single payor have to do with the things that will be lost if we jettison the current system financed by private insurance, expensive and inefficient as it is - access to providers, quality of care, rationing of care, and incentives for innovation.