- Apr 1, 2009
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- Whatever, just wash your hands.
Democrats already retreating from public option before DNC even starts
- Thread starter Eacaraxe
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Primarily the GOP via disinformation campaigns and underfunding education. The more educated the population, the more progressive it is. Why do you think the GOP repeatedly underfunds education? Why do you think the GOP keeps complaining about social media blocking their disinformation campaigns? Instead of punish the only party with any progressives in it at all, actually focus on undermining the party that is terrifying the general public with misinformation about " socialism" so I stop receiving facebook links to Bernie is a Nazi propaganda that the GOP floods the general population with. In some regions it is so bad that the sheer mention of socialist sends these militia types into a gun shopping binge. The GOP campaign against Bernie is a huge part of the problem for progressives in conservative regions and why we are unable to win those districts with progressive candidates.
- Apr 1, 2009
- 15,526
- 4,295
- 118
- Gender
- Whatever, just wash your hands.
I'm not sure if that is true. I've been seeing more and more evidence that education has less to do with progressive ideals then where you live does and being exposed to a more diverse population that its harder to lie about.
Let's check this for veracity.
They can't afford to pay what they're already expected to pay, but they're even less capable of affording lower costs? Yet again, Bernie's M4A plan accounts for this by increasing deductibles for lower- and middle-income families on income taxes, and the FICA increase is less to the average worker than their share of employer-sponsored insurance premiums. While also eliminating deductibles and co-pays, and eliminating the employer-sponsored health care FICA loophole. Compare this to the ACA, in which the government subsidizes private health insurance at private health insurance rates, with all-entailed baggage which I'll get to in a minute.
Is that realistically affordable or accessible to low- and middle-income Americans, who you freely admit already can't afford health care costs, when they're HDHP plans and 80% of plans on "the marketplace" are HSA-incompatible? As if any of these people can afford to to take advantage of HSA's, which you admit they cannot. They're the NINJA loans of the health care industry.
Now, let's talk about underpayment and cost to HCP's. BIR administrative costs are a half-trillion per year, 14% of the total cost of health care in the US, compared to 9% for non-BIR administrative cost and 77% clinical care by the last figures I found. There's consensus on that figure, even the kookiest pro-private insurance think tanks concede that point. 1.8-3.1% is linked to Medicare/Medicaid administrative cost. Even if that share doubled, it would still be an off-the-top 8% reduction in total costs per year -- that's the conservative estimate.
And M4A is benchmarked against current costs, meaning it is over-funded as you claim it would need to be.
No, it would do the precise opposite, because as I said up-thread it'd be structured like TRICARE. You'll notice the subtle shift in language between Obama's public option proposal and Biden's, wherein the former made government administration a cornerstone of the policy whereas the latter completely removed administrative language. Instead of a publicly-administered health care agency that would minimize BIR admin costs and eliminate profit margins under a mandate for revenue neutrality, private insurers would be contracted with the government to provide taxpayer-funded private insurance by another name.
In other words, the worst of both worlds.
I mean, we're already at the worst of both worlds, adding that pseudo-public option would be mostly a lateral step.
This is somehow even more pathetic than whining about balance in video games. It's my opponent's fault! They're doing things that win! Nevermind that my strategy is completely stupid.
The GOP repeatedly underfunds education, and liberals don't put much effort into stopping them, because an educated population is only of so much use to the ruling class. The GOP complains about social media blocking their disinformation campaigns because they are correct that large social media companies have too much power over what can be said-- irrespective of how dumb it may happen to be.
Liberals have been complicit in this. They haven't bothered to defend the honor of socialism; no, they decided to participate in the red scares, ignore (at best) the murders of socialist organizers by the FBI, demonize socialist experiments overseas, and so on. They did this. And they did it because liberal politicians would rather serve money than their voters. And of course they would; money can get them things. Voters only get them elected, and election campaigns are typically so vacuous and inconsequential that money decides who wins. That is to the benefit of the various classes of person that are involved in election campaigns: Democratic consultants love the fact that the GOP can be competitive by pumping the airwaves full of stupid bullshit, because that makes their vacuous platitudes all the more competitive in return-- because at least the vacuous platitudes aren't completely ludicrous most of the time. And why wouldn't politicians want lower standards and lavish funding?
They shrug their shoulders at Standing Rock. They display the letters BLM in their convention videos while not actually proposing to defund the police-- and while Democratic mayors suppress protests. The reason liberals lose is because they suck. And not in the good way.
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Let me just underline this. Socialism was so compelling that it spread over the entire world even against violent opposition, and Democrats suck so much that they got beaten by Trump while outspending him 2:1. Liberal politics is shit.
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Let me be clear, the lower and middle income earners ARE NOT PAYING THEIR BILLS PERIOD. " paying less than what they should be paying" =\= not paying at all, as they have currently been doing already. They are already not paying their premiums and deductibles. For any viable plan to function, it would have to include the lower and middle income earners not paying in at all, period. They do not have savings, they are not making their other bills month to month, they do not have any means to pay ANYTHING. That has to be fully understood. " less than anything" is irrelevant to that point they need to be paying 0. In fact, we need to be giving them more money just to make their other bills on top of not paying for their health insurance or they will be homeless soon if they are not homeless already.
I explained how they are currently keeping their health insurance through the ACA already, it is working like this:
1) they go to the healthcare exchange and get on blue cross/ blue shield and qualify for subsidies due to their low income.
2) They are told that their monthly premium is supposed to be $200 a month, but they do not pay those premiums, ever. Instead they differ those to their tax return.
3)when they do their taxes at the end of the year, they earned too little to pay the premiums so they NEVER pay them at all.
The end user is not paying a premium at all via this route. The end user is not paying their deductible, it is billed and never paid at all. All the end user winds up paying is the $25 copay for an office visit and the $5-$25 for their medications. That is all they paid for the entire year under the ACA loophole. That is it. Even for a guy who has metal rods in his legs like my brother.
At current costs, more hospitals are shutting down than ever and that was prior to the pandemic. We actually need to increase costs to resolve this, not keep the current costs, and then we also now have to reverse the damage done by the pandemic as well, though I think many of those hospitals most affected by this may not even make it long enough for that to happen, we also need a great deal of additional funding to be able to build many new hospitals and reopen the ones that we lost in order to try to keep up with demand as well.
It has already been pointed out that the method the ACA is using to drive out private insurers with the addition of the public option was shown to be effective in Germany and resulted in a better funded healthcare system overall.
In addition, Hospitals, clinics and other medical facilities in the US are primarily built and owned by private individuals and organizations rather than the state, in the UK, for example, they are owned by the state. This is why so many regions of the US are lacking adequate access to medical facilities at all and many still set their own rules. We would need to allocate a good deal of funding in order to actually resolve this, otherwise we still have a massive shortage of facilities.
Again, campaigning for M4A as a Presidential candidate. Just not the form and implementation of M4A Trunkage has in mind, but still close to what numerous nationalised health services operate in places like the UK.
Why? The terror of the experiments in Russia and China could hardly compare to the genocidal colonization of the United States, the imperialism of the British Empire, and all of the rest of the deaths caused by global capitalism.
How do they stop them when they have their hands tied? Progressives had ZERO say in whether or not the holy rollers in Texas claimed Moses was a founding father in textbooks because they are in the minority. Without a majority, they are not able to do anything at all. What do you expect them to do , assassinate all the conservatives so they will eventually outnumber them? Yea.. like I said, when you are outnumbered, you have to bribe, beg, borrow and steal every moderate, conservative vote you can so that you can get a tiny amount done, and you can't do much else.
1)Democrats have Moderates, conservatives and progressives
2)Republicans have conservatives and far right
3) the ONLY way liberals can do anything is if they bribe enough moderates and conservatives to help them otherwise they can't do shit.
That is all we have right now. Punishing the only party with progressives at all doesn't solve the problem here. They are doing everything they can to get people on their side, but you cannot seriously expect them to win every fight they want to win here.
I would have gone for "look what Russia and China were like before Communism", myself. I don't see Tzarist Russia surviving the Third Reich, for example (and the Communists fought the Japanese more than the Fascists in China).
Ok, that's a huge stretch. Keeping private insurance profiteers is nothing close to what you have (and would continue to have, hopefully) with the NHS in the UK.
That's also a good point, and one I've used before. But I don't mind comparing capitalism with Stalinism or Maoism; capitalism deserves to be as demonized as Stalinism is currently and how better to do it than showing how it's at least as bad?
Russia's standard of life plummeted after the turn to free-market economy.
China is currently on the path to become a superpower(if it isn't there yet.)
I think you picked bad examples.
...and then it goes into collection. How's that impact credit rating and interest rates?
Or, bear with me here, reduce overhead by eliminating two-thirds of administrative cost.
Because they pay five times what American taxpayers do in insurance payroll taxes, ten times total accounting for employers' share. Yet somehow this is a more sustainable cost to low and middle income-earners than a nominal 1% increase to FICA and elimination of the FICA cap.
Derp.
Or establish subsidized HIC's for rural and low-income areas.
There's quite a large element of private enterprise within the NHS. We have both private medical providers and private medical insurance providers operating in the UK.
I wish this wasn't the case; I'd like to get rid of it all. But pretty much nobody here would argue that their mere presence means we don't have a nationalised health service any more. We obviously do.
Where do you think the whole medical debt crisis came from? They are still not paying, will not be able to pay it and will not be able to pay ANY taxes to make up for it either way. We need to give them more money just to not be homeless right now as it is AND pay for their medical expenses 100%.
It isn't just about administrative costs, if you had read that link I posted earlier, they were showing a $200 billion shortfall even after addressing the administrative costs. The additional $20 Billion added was not going to even touch the shortfall to offset it.
The US is wealthier than Germany. We could actually fund healthcare for the lower and middle income earners entirely by the wealthy and wouldn't even put a dent in the wealthy's standard of living. Warren's plan was better than Bernie's in this regard, but we could actually go further with this than even she proposed.
Subsidizing HIC's for the number of medical facilities actually needed would still need a great deal of funding, and you can expect the money spent never to be paid back because those areas will necessarily still be operating at a loss. The taxpayers in those regions will never be able to pay back any of the expenses.
You're not the United States. And as far as I know, Kamala isn't coming anywhere close to proposing the regulations necessary to make the United States enough like the UK or Germany or Australia to have a multipayer system work anywhere near as well.
"We" referred to the British, there. Britain obviously has a nationalised health system, despite the existence of private medical insurance providers operating in the country.
Well, the proposal was for private insurers to only be allowed to operate with capped costs and guaranteed benefits, both of which would be set by the government. The public option would meanwhile be the default for newborns or the currently-unenrolled, and anybody would have the right to transfer from private to public.
I mean, the manifesto didn't go into specifics about what those caps and guaranteed benefits would be, but that's to be expected of a prospective candidate's manifesto at that stage.