WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME It’s Our Choice: Medicare for All, or Endless War?

WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

It’s Our Choice: Medicare for All, or Endless War?

According to one study, even if universal health insurance didn’t bring health care prices down — an unlikely worst-case scenario — we’d need an extra $300 billion a year beyond our current spending to provide full insurance for everyone.

Where can we find it? In a giant pot of money that’s already rampant with waste and abuse: the Pentagon…  Closing 60 percent of our foreign bases would save $90 billion a year. There’d be enough left over for more than one foreign military installation in each country on earth, if we insisted.  Right now, those bases enable our endless wars. Troops rotate from Germany into the Middle East and Africa, and tens of thousands are stationed in the conflict-ridden Middle East at any given time. Yet our wars have only further destabilized the region. It’s time we brought our troops home for good — and saved $66 billion each year in the bargain…  None of this is as radical as it sounds. Today, military spending is higher than it was at the peak of the Vietnam War. Even with a $350 billion cut, it would simply return to levels from the late 1990s. Together with common-sense cuts to runaway overhead costs, and by rolling current Pentagon health care costs into a universal health plan, we easily get more than the $300 billion needed for Medicare for All.   More

New poll reveals Americans demand a pivot to restraint

The divide between the foreign policy elite in Washington, D.C. and the American public is wide and getting wider. The American people are increasingly more restrained than the establishment that is responsible for crafting U.S. national security policy in their name. Those are the two main conclusions one draws after reading the latest report from the Eurasia Group Foundation’s Mark Hannah and Caroline Gray, who commissioned a national survey to investigate the foreign policy preferences of American voters across the country. Americans are crying out for a far different, judicious and more thoughtful U.S. foreign policy. One that prioritizes military restraint and common-sense diplomatic engagement as much as administrations over the last quarter-century have prioritized ill-advised and counterproductive overreach.   More