I love the narrative that the longest independant on the senate, which by itself is an amazing accomplishment that speaks of his record, is one of the most effective members of the senate to pass progressive amendments is a hack that doesn't know anything that he is doing.
He wants single payer because he wants the state to be able to negotiate drug prices because they're absurdly expensive. They can be up to 1000% more expensive compared to Canada. The privatized system is still insanely expensive for the state, in which the USA pays the most per capita on health care and doesn't have the benefits for the people. As head of the veteran health stuff in the senate he passed the most progressive health aid system for the veterans, which I believe is completely government ran.
I will say this, in his website he cites Chile as a country that's gonna start offering free college this year but it has been an absolute disaster. The country was incredibly mobilized in 2011 and up to 2013 for quality affordable college and the new government promised it because they are corrupt populists (still better than the right mind you) and tried to pass the law in like a month after assuming command. It went on for a year because the budget was horribly mismanaged, they had a horrible new tax plan that affected medium/large enterprises that slowed business to a crawl and at the end of the day they got free tuition for 200.000 students I believe.
On the other side of the coin, I wish hillary would stop being disingenuous and stop lying about NY gun epidemic, singling Vermont as a key problem. 1% of the guns that come out of state are from Vermont and is a non issue and even a super delegate for Clinton called her out and said "election times makes people exaggerate and misrepresent issues".
Piece by piece:
Paragraph 1: I think you're misunderstanding Vermont here. It's an incredibly small, rural state with a largely homogeneous population. That region of the country is hardcore independent territory. Maine has had plenty of indy runs, as has Vermont. It's a thing there because elections in that region can play out more like local elections instead of say, a Senate run in Texas. His amendments are basically riders that we criticize politicians for doing, and I don't want to be a hypocrite and only criticize the right for it. It's shady, and it's not a sign of good responsible governance. (Hillary actually passed more of them per year in the Senate too, but like I said, I don't care for that at all).
Paragraph 2: The onus for these comparisons is to argue why health care scales linearly in terms of cost per person. If it does, then great! The US's larger population can pay for larger costs. But if it doesn't, then we've got more problems. That's why that poster is asking for more comparisons to population rich countries. Canada has about a tenth of the population of the US, while Germany has almost 3 times that (still only a fourth of US population though). And Bernie should stay FARRRRR away from any VA comparisons if he wants to sway people. I don't know how much coverage it's getting outside the country, but the VA's brand of health care is widely blasted here for being long, painful, needlessly complicated, and just poor in general. It's not a good line of argument for him to make (which is why I rarely hear him bring it up).
Paragraph 3: These are interesting details that I didn't know about Chile. Honestly though, his biggest problem on colleges is that states are largely in charge of education, not the feds. There's just no precedent at all for Bernie saying "Tuition at the University of Mississippi is now free!" unless two things happen: 1) he offers to foot the bill for each enrolled student, which leads to universities just massively inflating the bill he'll pay, so he moves to 2) a federal mandate setting tuition price controls for every states' public universities. Option 1 isn't going to work, and Option 2 is a political battle on-par with a few ACAs. No way does that ever happen.
Paragraph 4: This is more noticeable to people not from New York, I think. People I know from NY generally blame their rural neighbors for guns getting into the state, even if data might show otherwise (I'm unsure if it does, though). And Bernie's record on guns is going to draw a ton of attack from most people. He's a leftist, so every GOP voter thinks he's out for their guns, and his voting record of immunizing the gun manufacturers from legal trouble is poison on the left. He's a man without a country on this issue.
I just assume I can ignore links to the Huffington Post. In the same way I'm not going to watch your YouTube video news.
Also, no one said anything about primarying anyone. But I can't see it doing anything but marginalising yourself, because the Clintons keep track. And now he's on a list somewhere.
Meanwhile, I have no idea why random comparisons to Obama are made. Little Marco is a Senator, what of it? Barack Obama was able to articulate policy. He was intellectually curious about it. He didn't skim-read a history textbook about the 80s to swat for foreign policy debates. He indicated he would govern in prose, even as he used soaring rhetoric to fuel his campaign.
It's amazing to me how little people really know about Obama. He was really well-informed for a young Senator, and he had a lot of great, well-explained positions. It wasn't just "Yes we can!" until he won.