Howard Dean: Democrats' key to winning the midterms

[marmar]

Democrats’ key to winning the midterms
The party's healthcare affordability agenda could lower prices and put the Senate in play

By Howard Dean
Former Vermont governor and DNC chair
Published July 16, 2026 6:45AM (EDT)


(Salon) American voters desperately want relief from rising prices — especially the increasingly unaffordable cost of healthcare. Democrats have a plan for that.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren recently introduced the Break Up Big Medicine Act with Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., a bill that would split up the huge conglomerates that have made the current healthcare system so expensive and frustrating to navigate. Businessman Mark Cuban recently quipped that breaking up these near-monopolies could bring costs down by 40%.

If Democrats run on this healthcare affordability agenda, we stand a good chance of flipping not just the House, but the Senate too.

Insurers like UnitedHealth or Cigna don’t just sell coverage. They’ve consolidated power over virtually every part of our healthcare system, operating hospitals, clinics and pharmacy networks. And they use that control to generate billions in profits — by pushing patients toward care at the facilities they control. ...................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/07/16/democrats-key-to-winning-the-midterms/

[GPV]

1. So great to hear from Dr. Dean!

[lees1975]

2. When have Democrats not been running on an affordable health care agenda?

Providing affordable health care for Americans is one of those things that Republicans absolutely cannot stand, because it is far easier to profiteer off of pain and suffering, and fear of losing one's life, than it is to try and make people pay ridiculously high prices for groceries or automobiles.

The fact that Americans pay twice as much for health care as people anywhere else is a testimony to the inhumanity of greedy corporate Republican party leadership. Is is one of the biggest evils they promote, the idea that health care is a commodity off which money can be made instead of it being a basic human right. The fact that Canada has a more efficient, and medically superior health care system than the United States is a damning testimony to Republican inhumanity.

Add to that the cost of financing health care as another profiteering manipulation to transfer wealth from the pockets of working Americans to the wealthy, and you have a trifecta of cruelty and greed.

If Democrats will stay committed to a single payer health insurance system, and step into make the ridiculously confusing tangle of hospital care with insurance coverage, which makes the medical care most Americans get grievously and criminally inefficient and ineffective, and keep promising to find a workable solution that has success like almost all of the rest of the developed world has, then they can win with that. But they need to KEEP THAT PROMISE WHEN THEY GET ELECTED and NOT BACK DOWN like they usually do.

[QueerDuck]

3. Actually... passing legislation isn't a matter of willpower; it's a matter of raw math.

To pass a single-payer system or a public option, you need 60 votes in the Senate to beat a filibuster. In 2009, Democrats had to drop the public option not because they "backed down," but because conservative Democrats like Joe Lieberman refused to vote for it, and we couldn't pass the ACA without his 60th vote.

Blaming the entire party for 'backing down' when they simply don't have a filibuster-proof majority ignores how a bill actually becomes a law.

It's just a sad (but frustrating) fact of life that governing requires 60 votes in the Senate to clear a filibuster. When majorities are razor-thin, a single holdout can derail an entire bill. Passing the most progressive bill that can mathematically get 218 votes in the House and 60 votes in the Senate isn't 'backing down' ... and characterizing it like that, just to smear Democrats, serves no good purpose.

What you're looking at is is the literal definition of constitutional governance. Incremental progress beats a pristine wish list that can't pass every single time.