Cast out of government, the Democratic Party is up for grabs. And single-payer healthcare has become one of the key fronts in the battle to define the party's future.
Take the special election in Georgia's sixth congressional district, where Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff recently found himself in hot water with progressives for his failure to endorse single-payer. “I think we should be focused on incremental progress based upon the body of law on the books,” Ossoff explained, “rather than going back to square one and proceeding from a starting point of ideological purity.”
This sparked a wave of skepticism of Ossoff among a segment of the left. When asked whether Ossoff is a progressive, Sen. Bernie Sanders flatly answered, “I don't know.” Sanders's aides pointed to Ossoff's silence on single-payer as one reason for progressives to be lukewarm toward his candidacy.
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