What Biden said is that he would block a Bernie Sanders style medicare-for-all plan, not that he would block "universal health care".
The scenario he was asked about involved a bill ready to sign. Vetoing that bill in that moment, when that's the choice you have and the Biden alternative is not, is in fact vetoing universal health care. (Just as much as, if Bernie had been against ACA because it wasn't M4A, that would have been being against at least some degree of improvement in some aspects of the situation. And yet, even though Biden's the one who's flat-out against the alternative that isn't his, and Bernie's the one who supported an alternative that wasn't his, Biden's supporters claim that Bernie is the one who lets idealogical purity get in the way of whatever practical improvements are available. Exactly the opposite of reality. Why is that? If Biden's so much better, why can't he be defended without that kind of behavior?)
Biden favors expanding health care through building on Obamacare.
...which was never even possibly going to be, or even meant to be, universal. It was invented by Republicans to protect the insurance industry, which lives by costing as much as possible while providing as little actual coverage as possible. (And even if there were a way to make it universal, it would still be wildly more expensive, but I digress.)
And even
that much is acting as if we had any real reason to believe he'd ever even follow through with what he's now claiming is his plan. He's spent his career fighting
against the peasants in various ways and spent the last few years dribbling about how great it is to work together with the Republicans because they're good people who are just about to have their "Come to Jesus" moment any year now and it would be just great to have one of them as VP. Suddenly claiming to have a universal health care plan now after he's seen how popular the idea has gotten is... not in character.
One reason he prefers this method is because he thinks he can get health care to a large number of people faster than a Sander's plan of tearing down the existing system to implement medicare for all.
The fact that it couldn't, and would even go the opposite way in reality (especially in the specific scenario he was responding to, with a bill for one of them sitting on the Oval Office desk ready to go), is so utterly clear that the idea that he even believes it himself reads rather low on the plausibility meter. If all that money keeps flowing through the middlemen's hands, they'll keep using it to keep buying themselves the freedom to keep things going the direction they have been. There are only two ways for that to end:
cut out the middlemen (which in all other contexts everybody agrees is a good thing), and/or fix the country's system of Roman-esque legal bribery (which would be good for other issues too, not just this one). Biden is in favor of neither, which equals being in favor of keeping things just as crappy as they already are.
Sounds to me like he has at least some concerns for people's well-being.
He might. But if so, it has a strange scope, applying to some issues (which I can't name at the moment but they might be out there) but not health care, or lending & debt, or the crime bill, or desegregation, or the main victims of the general direction of our economy, or anybody who happens to be too much younger than him (just off the top of my head).
And I'll also agree with what I expect you would say about Trump, that he doesn't appear to have any such feeling for almost anybody at all. However, I'm more interested in what they would do than why they would do it, so a sincerely empathetic & sympathetic person who coincidentally/mistakenly favors heartless-looking actions that are more likely to harm people is worse than a raving psychotic monster who coincidentally/mistakenly favors actions that are
less likely to harm people. And at the very least, the comparison is not nearly as straightforward & obvious as it would have needed to be in order for the "ELECTABLE!!!!!" argument to have ever had a speck of validity.
60,000 troops died in Vietnam. If you were alive in the U.S. at the time, you knew somebody who didn't make it back. A schoolmate, a relative, a friend, the child of a friend, but somebody. The corona virus in on track to kill between (let's say) between 100,000 and 1,500,000 people in this country. Everyone will know a couple to maybe a dozen (or more) people who die of it. It makes it a lot harder to pull off the Trumpian "I did a really good job. Who are you going to believe, me or your lying, dead mother/grandmother/loved one?"
Even if the numbers do get that bad (and if they don't, it will only make those who said they would look bad), there is great power in people's ability to modify new facts and an old established narrative to fit together. Anybody who thinks Trump is handling this well (or even just non-catastrophically) right now would simply be able to claim later that he kept it
down to those low numbers and they would have been worse otherwise. Trump himself has already started to set that version of the story up for the future. The fact that mostly the same people believed him when he said it would be no big deal and didn't mind his deliberately avoiding taking any action about it can just quietly vanish from their brains. And this version can even be embellished with claims that the predictions were something like a half-million or two million or whatever instead of the actual low-six-digit estimates that are actually being circulated in the present.
Or not.
Possibly.
No particular prediction from me on that one
