I've seen some conservatives with a hard-on for this idea and I don't understand how they don't see what a terrible idea it is. 50% of 2/3 of the country is not 2/3 of the country; either side making fundamental changes to the fabric of the country's law with only a razor thin margin of voter support is begging for civil unrest. Right now I think secession is a stupid idea because California benefits massively from being in the US and the US benefits massively from having California in it, but if Republicans start trying to embed their bullshit into the Constitution itself I would back secession 100% in a heartbeat. If California goes, it'll start a domino effect as well.
Ultimately, I think it breaks down to liberals saying "we need to take better care of our citizens" and conservatives saying "our citizens take care of themselves." The rest depends on how you frame the discussion. CIty of Baltimore? Yeah, help people out. City of Mayberry? Nah, people keep to their own. For me, when it comes to things like abortion, economics and reigning in corporations that by any measure of history are a monopoly, yeah...liberal. On the whole, I think there are too many of us that are poor, exploited and lied to by enormously powerful interests. It's got little to do with being a victim and more to do with nothing reigning in specific organizations like the surveillance state or corporations that have grown too big to fail (or to fucking pay taxes: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/09/business/economy/corporate-tax-report.html). The also think the liberal side is backed up a lot more by data. When it comes to things like fiscal responsibility, controlling immigration and a hard-nosed foreign policy, I'm conservative. Save the money, punish criminality and don't get pushed around...those are tenets of a conservative platform I can get behind. Also, whenever possible, stay the fuck out of people's lives. This is a lot more narrative-driven and it's easier to inspire passion that way. So, establish a safety net, help when necessary and abstain when it's not. However, I think both sides are delusional: they are beholden to corporate and business interests and neither party is willing to stand up against their own donors. That for me is the crux of the issue. No one has the leadership (or the balls) to tell the corporations to back the fuck down. When I look for leadership in either party, it simply isn't there.
Our country has always been ran by the rich. Its extraordinary when someone can go outside that paradigm and do something different, when someone does that we call them whatever, heroic etc, when in reality we all wish it was much more common.
This isn't even a political question, it's just rank dishonesty and an insult to the intelligence of anyone listening.
Speaking of that, they just had a protest this week over this issue, which begs the question, what the fuck do you do for people that are upset over a problem that doesn't even exist? The MSM liberals keep saying the protests are working. Are they? Really? I have to think most people are looking at this shit and just wondering what the fuck is wrong with these people. I swear, if the dems weren't running against mad man Trump in 2020 they would be totally fucked. They also demanded equal rights... naturally exactly what rights they were missing was left out.
So this just showed up in my Twitter feed. https://twitter.com/AP/status/841381571743604736 All I've heard from Republicans is how great this new health care plan will be. I hope someone smarter than me can explain how great 14 million Americans losing their coverage is. I hope someone can also explain how this isn't anything but a tax break for the wealthy that are currently subsidizing a tax credit for poorer Americans so they can buy health insurance.
Here's the full report. Absolutely savages the AHCA's effect on coverage. Republicans knew this was coming, which is why they've been attacking the CBO lately. https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/f...7-2018/costestimate/americanhealthcareact.pdf edit: interesting tidbit here Can't say this bothers me personally, but given how old the Republican base is, this could be disastrous for them electorally.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-pres...der-comprehensive-plan-reorganizing-executive tl;dr: destroy the federal government.
Only in Government can you continue to run a budget deficit, amassing more debt without a plan to pay down or eliminate the debt. Outside of Government, companies and households for that matter that do this go out of business/bankrupt. Only when you have a never-ending source of funding like tax revenue can you suck so bad at operations that this is allowed to go on. Now that you have a business person running the country, you are going to see some form of efficiency. Furthermore, this order doesn't have the necessary detail to determine whether or not the federal government will be destroyed. Perhaps you could wait to see what details come from it before you determine that it is a net negative. In truth, if we are following the Governing documents of our nations, many of the functions currently handled by the Feds should be handled at the state level or are being overlapped by both a state and federal agency....which is of course redundant. My hope here, as naive as it sounds, is that I see my state tax bill go up to support these state run agencies and see my federal tax bill go down. Though I do realize it is laughable, I still do hope.
You're right, it is naive. Here's what's going to happen: Unless you're incredibly wealthy, there won't be a meaningful change to your federal tax liability. It may go up a little, it may go down a little, but not a huge amount in either direction. Military budget will go up, deficit will go up. Cuts will be prioritized not based on cost savings, but on ideological opposition to the "administrative state" as Bannon calls it. Expect big cuts to FTC, FCC, SEC, EPA, Dept Labor, Dept Energy, Dept Education, and similar. Dept State will be gutted in favor of Dept Defense and Dept Homeland Security.
You're being unnecessarily negative at this point. There is no way that happens. If those programs are cut in favor of just increasing DoD and DHS and federal taxes don't go down, you will see an outright tax revolt. He may be dumb but not that dumb.
Federal taxes might go down, but the bulk of the cuts will go to the wealthy, and they'll be paid for by increasing the deficit, not by equivalent cuts to spending. All of the federal money is in three banana stands: Defense, Social Security, Medicare. One he's proposing to increase, the other two are his elderly base's sacred cows. This EO is not about cost savings, it's about opposition to the mission of these agencies and departments.
I'm completely in favor of that EO. At least it's an attempt to cut spending. Under Obama the government piled on another ten trillion in debt. That is fucking insane. And every time the republicans tried to push for a way to stop the bleeding the democrats cried about them holding the country hostage. Ideally, taxes would go up on the rich and he would cut, not increase defense spending, but this is at least better than what Obama was doing. The last two presidents fucked up big time in managing the debt. At least Trump is trying. I'm sure people will pout about the cuts, but we just can't continue to run it up the way we have the last 16 years.
It seems like your defense budget is a key reason why the US has never seriously considered a single payer health care system. And while many developed nations single payer systems are a mess and in need of reform, they generally do what they are supposed to and citizen's don't end up in crippling debt when stricken by cancer, heart disease, etc. Whereas in America, instead you have a military larger and more expensive than the next 16 nations below it (that figure may be off but I'm in the ballpark). Without getting into the details of how it's done and whether its right from a moral standpoint, I think it's fair to say that the US ultimately uses its massive military to protect the interests of the developed world. It seems like for the average American this is a shit deal, and I don't understand why more people aren't pissed off about it as these days it seems to be the only thing that both Democrats and Republicans can agree on.
That logic doesn't compute. We can spend on healthcare OR defense? So, every other country on Earth that has single-payer is "under-spending" on defense? I'm calling bullshit on that one. https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statis...onalHealthExpendData/Downloads/highlights.pdf $3.2 Trillion on healthcare in 2015. This is 17% of our entire fucking economy. http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/defense_spending $798 billion on defense in 2015, including the VA and foreign aid. This is .04% of our economy. Not insignificant, but hardly comparable to 17%. US GDP in 2015 (in billions): 18,036,648.00 http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD If we had single-payer for US citizens for let's conservatively estimate 50% of one's lifetime healthcare needs like chronic illnesses, surgeries, the dramatic stuff and pregnancies. So instead of Medicaid applying to the under 18 and the over 65, a chunk of it applies to everyone. We get tremendous benefits, like a cheaper labor force, the largest insurance pool to negotiate down the costs, avoiding the ugly shit-show that is insurance companies dicking people over/instituting ludicrous bureaucracy/people choosing between death or bankruptcy. Insurance would still be needed to cover the run of the mill shit, like the flu, dental and eye coverage and you could keep the choice of using private insurance, but they get the benefit of paying the same rates as Medicaid. They also get standardized coding, which would eliminate the wasteful bureaucracy that is dealing with insurance fuckery. We are happier, insulated against bankruptcy by cancer and largely, more competitive as a society. Insurance companies are happier because they don't deal with the six-figure shit, can trim the fat and get some actual standardization. I sincerely can't understand the argument that our current system is in anyway better than a single-payer system. Health isn't an elastic good, so the marketplace doesn't do shit to provide efficiencies for it. If the cost for my asthma meds doubled, and my choice is pay the 2x price or die, that's not really a choice, is it? Right now, that's the choice my insurance company is giving me and it would be really great if our government would collectively get it's shit together and offer some protection. Every dollar I fork over to a pharmaceutical company that measures profits in the billions is a delay in me buying my next car, house, etc. and growing the fucking economy...costing us jobs. It also adds to my costs to my employer. I'm fine making a good salary, but if I'm hourly and on the bubble it fucks me out of a job. This is what an absence of leadership looks like, folks. No one to talk Goddamned common sense.
I question the assumptions underlying what you're saying. I don't think a transition would be unpleasant, if anything it provides government options vs. private options with the likelihood the latter would eventually dissipate. The overall goal is to reduce cost and insurance company fuckery, who would be upset by having to pay less and doing less work to get care? Why do you assume the American tax burden is "correct" and the European model is unsustainable? I use counter-points like Australia and Canada being a lot closer to how the American economy could function, but Russia and Brazil being closer to the direction we're heading. I think the Europeans see a much smaller return on investment for military spending than we do, and their population finds it less tolerable to participate in foreign wars. We pick up the slack, so to speak, because we see a much larger return and because our politicians don't lose their jobs over it. I think ultimately, the challenge is stopping an entity from moving funds from one country to another to avoid taxes, as opposed to the taxes in one place being prohibitive versus another.
It stands to reason that if a single payer system were to be put in place, it would basically just be an expansion of Medicaid/Medicare. According to the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, 67% of primary care physicians already accept Medicaid, with 93% accepting Medicare. Link. I did some additional looking and the reason why the numbers were lower was because Medicaid paid out less than Medicare. If Medicaid and Medicare were folded into one entity and providers were told to do everything either by the Medicaid or Medicare standard, this would lower costs and speed up reimbursements at the minimum. It's reasonable to me that the government could increase reimbursements while paying the same amount based on everything being simplified.
Meanwhile, in Europe, hijabs can now be disallowed at work... And we were so concerned about birth control https://www.theguardian.com/law/201...from-wearing-headscarves-european-court-rules
They're not worried about them, they're worried about nationalism strangling the continent. And this was for show to placate those circles.
Holland votes tomorrow and might elect this guy. People think Trump is anti-Muslim. Well, this guy wants to literally ban mosques and the Quran. I don't think he'll win, but the fact that he really has a chance in Holland is crazy. I think Clutch is right that there would be some growing pains in a transition, but if it gets us where we need to be it's well worth the price. I have no idea how the medical insurance companies managed to con so many Americans into thinking a public option/single payer is inferior. I mean, the data just flat out demonstrates it works better. In the Cruz/Bernie debate Cruz was pointing out how Bernie's health care plan would cost 2.5 trillion. Yeah, that's a lot of money. It's not so much when you're already spending 4 trillion though. I would get the whole 'don't want to be dependent on the government' side of it if people weren't currently dependent on people completely incentivized to provide less care the more you need it. The worst part of all this is that it seems even most of the democrat politicians don't support public health care, even though the majority of the base wants it. The whole thing pisses me off because any analysis of the success/cost of free market vs public health care couldn't be clearer as to which works better. It's fucking incredible that health care bills are the #1 cause of bankruptcy, even for those who have insurance plans, and people still think public health care is a bad idea. Sigh.