September 13 - Could Sanders' Medicare for All Shift Focus from Saving Obamacare?; An Advocate for Medicare for All; The Need to Restrict Trump's Power to Wage Nuclear War

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with today’s unveiling of the “Medicare for All Act of 2017” by Senator Bernie Sanders which has the support of 15 Democratic Senators but has not been embraced by the Democratic leadership in the Senate or House. The author of “The Heart of Power: Health and Politics in the Oval Office”, James Morone, a Professor of Political Science at Brown University noted for his work on health policies, joins us to discuss concerns expressed by Nancy Pelosi that Sanders’ single-payer plan shifts focus away from fighting to save the Affordable Care Act which the Republicans could still try to repeal. We also assess the uphill battle to get politically powerful insurance companies out of the healthcare business even though they contribute nothing but expensive overhead and spiraling costs under our current sickness/profit system called healthcare.

Part 2

Then we hear from an advocate of “Medicare for All”  Dr. Adam Gaffney, an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Secretary of the advocacy organization, Physicians for a National Health Program. He joins us to discuss why the advanced democracies who spend less than half of what we do on healthcare with better results, have adopted a single-payer system and how the overhead for Medicare is just 2% while the cost of overhead at health insurance companies is 14%.

Part 3

Then finally we will examine the concerns expressed by the Republican Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee which is shared among leaders of America’s closest allies, that Donald Trump may not have the “stability” to be trusted with the nuclear codes given that there is no impediment between the President and his authority to launch nuclear weapons. Jeffrey Bader, who was a special assistant for national security affairs on the National Security Council where he was the principal advisor to President Obama on Asia, joins us to discuss his article at The New York Times “Time to Restrict the President’s Power to Wage Nuclear War” and concerns about the exchange of bellicose threats between Trump and Kim Jong-un.