AP Photo Senior Hillary Clinton adviser Karen Finney accused Bernie Sanders's campaign, which once pledged to be issue-based, of paying closer attention to poll numbers and attacking Clinton. |

My latest Counter Propa article explains why Democrats are blaming the wrong person for Trump’s attempt at repealing the Affordable Care Act.

I’ve been told I speak too often about Hillary Clinton.

Let it go, they say.

It’s over, she lost.

Bernie endorsed Clinton.

Let’s unite and defeat Trump.

There’s only one problem.

When people like Claire McCaskill label Bernie Sanders as “too liberal” and “extreme” to be president, don’t complain when a Republican who’s too conservative and extreme becomes president.

The only reason Democrats are obsessed with Russian hacking (NSA has only “moderate confidence” in the narrative, by the way) is because Clinton lost to Trump.

Democrats lost because they failed to push for bold answers to grandiose questions. Trump offered ideas and gave answers; something centrist Democrats never viewed as pragmatic. Trump won the election.

Trump’s attempt to repeal the ACA is a direct result of Democratic hubris.

Liberals did their best to destroy a truly progressive, grass roots movement. In the process, these liberals lost to Trump, after everyone in the media and politics assured voters Clinton had already won the election. Now the Affordable Care Act is being slowly dismantled by a Republican alternative that’s the antithesis of Bernie’s plan.

America could have been debating the merits of single payer healthcare had Democrats not cheated Bernie Sanders in 2016. Instead of reaching for the lofty goal of insuring all Americans under Bernie’s Medicare for All plan, Clinton and others viewed single payer to be unrealistic. Because of this lack of vision, and because the DNC tilted the scales in favor of Hillary Clinton, we now have Trump’s Obamacare repeal.

If Democrats knew people would die from Obamacare repeal, why did they cheat Bernie Sanders?

Does this make the DNC complicit in murder?

If you need to spend more time bemoaning the evils of Trump’s healthcare replacement, and the dangers of Obamacare repeal, just read the latest Slate article. If you remember how Democrats attacked Bernie Sanders and his goal of single payer, keep reading. Then, take a moment to read a CBS News article titled Hillary Clinton: Single-payer health care will “never, ever” happen:

“I want you to understand why I am fighting so hard for the Affordable Care Act,” she said at Grand View University after hearing from a woman who spoke about her daughter receiving cancer treatment thanks to the health care law. “I don’t want it repealed, I don’t want us to be thrown back into a terrible, terrible national debate. I don’t want us to end up in gridlock. People can’t wait!” She added, “People who have health emergencies can’t wait for us to have a theoretical debate about some better idea that will never, ever come to pass.” “That’s what our campaign is about, it is thinking big,” Sanders said at a primary debate earlier this month. Accomplishing goals like implementing single-payer health care (or “Medicare for all”) is dependent on reducing the influence of big corporations, he argued. “Nothing real will get [done] unless we have a political revolution where millions of people finally stand up.”

Clinton and most Democrats, by failing to reach for the stars and push for single payer, not only paved the way for Obamacare repeal, but also extinguished the flame of progressive hopes. Like Bernie Sanders said, “Nothing real will get [done] unless we have a political revolution where millions of people finally stand up.”

The most insidious element of Clinton’s attacks on Bernie’s single payer was perpetuating the falsehood that people would actually lose coverage under single payer.

Then, Clinton promptly spent $1.2 billion losing to Trump.

Of course, it was the Democratic paradigm in 2016 to destroy the hopes of progressives on every issue, from banning fracking to breaking up Too Big to Fail Banks.

Clinton’s public relations firms also echoed the same message, as illustrated by Ezra Klein in a Vox piece titled Bernie Sanders’s single-payer plan isn’t a plan at all:

In the absence of these kinds of specifics, Sanders has offered a puppies-and-rainbowsapproach to single-payer — he promises his plan will cover everything while costing the average family almost nothing. This is what Republicans fear liberals truly believe: that they can deliver expansive, unlimited benefits to the vast majority of Americans by stacking increasingly implausible, and economically harmful, taxes on the rich. Sanders is proving them right.

Clinton’s no-fly zone in Syria, weapons deals scandals, and other failed aspects of her candidacy were never fact-checked or scrutinized in the same manner as Bernie’s single payer plan.

Not be outdone, of course, is a Daily Beast article titled Bernie Sanders’s Single-Payer Health Care Plan Failed in Vermont:

Even with the Vermont debacle in the rearview mirror and Friedman’s own projections that Sanders’s “Medicare for All” would cost north of $14 trillion over 10 years, the politics of single-payer are still working for Sanders. The latest Kaiser poll showed 81 percent of Democrats favor a “Medicare for All” proposal, while 60 percent of independents favor it, too. Clinton has dismissed Sanders’s proposal as unrealistic and a danger to the reforms that have already been enacted through the Affordable Care Act.

Oh, how giddy all the naysayers were about dismantling Bernie’s single payer utopian dream. Even acknowledging the popularity of single payer never stopped pundits from tearing apart the goal; a strategy that resulted in Trump and ACA repeal.

As for Obamacare, just read what CNN quoted Bill Clinton saying last October:

Bill Clinton calls Obamacare ‘the craziest thing in the world,’ later tries to walk it back “So you’ve got this crazy system where all of a sudden 25 million more people have health care and then the people who are out there busting it, sometimes 60 hours a week, wind up with their premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half. It’s the craziest thing in the world,” Clinton said.

When Hillary states single payer will “never” happen and Bill calls Obamacare “crazy” – and people still vote for Clinton—don’t complain about Trump.

I highlighted in 2015 during one of my first H. A. Goodman YouTube segments why Clinton would lose to Trump:

Don’t blame Trump for advocating Republican policies; he’s a Republican. Blame establishment Democrats for cheating Bernie, when he would have easily defeated Trump and won the Electoral College. Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan haven’t voted Republican since the 1980’s. All the moral outrage and indignation over Trump’s cheap attempt at replacing Obamacare should be leveled at the “I’m With Her” crowd that called Bernie voters unrealistic. This is the result of their hubris, cheating, and inability to push for single payer, or imagine a world where fracking is banned and Too Big To Fail Banks are broken apart.

H. A. Goodman is the creator of Counter Propa and the thoughts above are inspired by his new publication. Follow Counter Propa on Twitter and Facebook