In response to https://captainstack.medium.com/washington-legislature-kills-universal-healthcare-bill-2ae7b804da34
“SJM.8006 is not a long bill. It is not complicated. It costs no money. It has no risk of legal challenge.”
In other words, it was not a universal health care bill. So whether it passed or failed, everything would stay the same. They need to try again with a bill that will do something and not waste our time with these trivial items. Resolutions are cheap and unimportant, bills are challenging and meaningful.
I volunteered as a lobbyist for many environmental issues in Washington state for the better part of a decade. My parents and all 4 of my grandparents live there. I am deeply invested in the outcome of these proposals.
If you want to pass a bill in the legislature, it must have substance. According to OP‘s article, this bill did not set up a universal health care system. Creating universal insurance plans is hard work; it requires a lot of consideration about how such a system will be designed, and there are many ways to do it.
The United States also needs to bring down the cost of health care, and reduce the number of uninsured people to zero as soon as possible. This bill would have done neither. It is good that the legislature will focus on bills that will impact people’s lives instead of trivial nonsense like this. A real single-payer healthcare bill (which seems to be the only thing we talk about in the United States) that is thought out and will probably be at least 1000 pages long will be proposed or, at minimum, address the issues Washington State faces realistically. Washington is the most advanced state in the nation on this issue because it has a public option for health insurance, similar to Germany and Austria’s universal healthcare systems. The easy, realistic way for Washington state to get to Universal health insurance is to close the Medicaid gap by using their existing public option. At that point, Washington state will have universal healthcare because everyone will be insured. It might not be the British model, but the British model is not the only system of universal healthcare.
Focus on SB.5335, as OP mentions, or build a bill that gives free access to the already existing public option to people who don’t have health insurance through their employers or Medicare or Medicaid. That will achieve universal health care.