I don't disagree with getting progressives elected to Congress, but if you have, I'm sorry to be so redundant, but if you have a critical mass of progressives in Congress who can do something because of narrow majorities like hold up a must pass bill into a fifteen dollar minimum wage is in it, or get rid of Richie Neal as the head of the Ways and Means Committee, as a condition for voting for Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the House. And you have that power with your minority and you don't use it.

It starts to wear on people. It starts to make people cynical about the return on the investment of fighting so hard to get more progressives in office. One last part is that, you know, she does say it's harder to do the outside strategy because of it. But I do think that what she misses and what I would love to hear her talk more about is the opportunities, the opportunities for disruption that she could facilitate, like using her incredible reach and call us to call for protests at the Capitol, to call for protests at people's homes or offices or whatever is deemed appropriate to apply the kind of outside pressure that used to be her emphasis by her own admission in this interview before she joined DSA.

All right. I'm done.

I mean, I think there is a kind of skepticism that even a public pressure model would be insufficient to a little less.

A purely electoral model of organizing would be purely insufficient to actually overcome the insurance industry, to overcome the driving force of private profit and capital. That is obviously the only impediment to Medicare for all.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's right. I mean, so we brought this up with Representative Condit to we all understand the extent to which, yes, it's the lobbying and the anti the campaign ads they're going to run against you and all. But and as he talks about that, to which he talks about the right wing effort to unseat her, how her race was like one of the most expensive in the country for no reason other than the right hates her so much.

And yes, that's part of it. But part of it is the amount of money these people take straight from these industries, which is why I'm heartened by by some of the stuff I saw Ryan Grim had posted about National Nurses. United wrote up basically their plan to get Medicare for all. And it has some good ideas, including it kind of divest from the health care industry campaign where they're going to pressure, you know, the representatives. They need to flip to not take any money from these industries.

Why? This isn't a thing that we've done already. We've done it around fossil fuels and stuff. It's kind of it's a great idea. And but when I read it, I thought to myself, like, why the dickens haven't we done this already? We'll get more.

It's also more than and I think that's very worthy. But it's also more than just getting these members of Congress to do the baseline of not being corrupt and not taking the money, because as well, there's also a pressure to.

Nevertheless, even if you're not taking money from that big health insurers, there is a pressure to still not piss them off so that they don't end up running millions of dollars worth of ads in your district.

I think that's right. But AOC kind of made our argument in that last paragraph I read. Right, because Aoki's own argument is, yes, there's pressure from these lobbying campaigns. But despite all of that, the New Deal polls, well, still and she didn't say it about Medicare for all but Medicare for all polls. Well, still, it's not like they were just like not doing anti Medicare for all ads for the last year. I forget the stat, but I believe like twenty eighteen or two thousand 19, whatever the year was leading up until the election, one of those years was the most that had ever been spent on anti universal health care ads.

We come from different walks of life, but we agree on one important thing. We don't want to be forced into a one size fits all government insurance system.

The politicians may call it Medicare for all Medicare buy in or the public option, but they mean the same thing.

Higher taxes or higher premiums, lower quality care politicians and bureaucrats taking control of our health care. We can't afford one size fits all plans. We need to fix what's broken. Let's start over. They gear up.

These ads were out there. I mean, did you watch the debates and see this pharmaceutical ads popping up all over the place like there was a full court press against Bernie and what he meant to their industry, the threat that he posed to their industry? And despite all of that, and perhaps because we are in the middle of a global pandemic during which, yes, I guess I haven't said it in a few episodes, 15 million people at minimum lost their employer based health care.

People still ride with Medicare for all I know, and they're giving out the vaccines for free.

And everyone agrees that's that's how it should work, right?

Nobody. Stebbings like we're a nobody here. Why are. Health insurance companies making a profit here. Why is this going on insured people? I mean, the health insurance companies 100 percent profit off of this. It's not actually. I mean, there's a whole other conversation we should have about how these things are getting paid for and how much this is just all a bit like the COBRA stuff is just to pay out to these industries. And there are cheaper ways that we could be doing all of this.

But that's another episode if you'd like to hear more. Remember, you can subscribe at Patrón dot com slash Bad Faith podcast for five dollars a month to get our full back catalog of episodes with some sweet, sweet stuff, including this one including including including and especially this one, if you like it. If you didn't like this, weather's better to keep the faith. Keep the faith.