Democrats already retreating from public option before DNC even starts

[Trunkage]

Snip

I just had to explain that NBC calling AOC a ‘traitor‘ for ‘nominating Sanders for president’ isn’t ‘the Left eating its own‘. The MSM and DNC are centre at best. They aren’t on the same side as AOC

I feel your pain. I don’t know what more Sanders could have done to explain his position. He’s been sidelined so much by the MSM and it’s quite clear it work... for them.

This guy sums up the problem


Ignoring people was the problem for 2016. It looks like there’s going to be a repeat

 

[crimson5pheonix]

I just had to explain that NBC calling AOC a ‘traitor‘ for ‘nominating Sanders for president’ isn’t ‘the Left eating its own‘. The MSM and DNC are centre at best. They aren’t on the same side as AOC

I feel your pain. I don’t know what more Sanders could have done to explain his position. He’s been sidelined so much by the MSM and it’s quite clear it work... for them.

This guy sums up the problem


Ignoring people was the problem for 2016. It looks like there’s going to be a repeat

The worst part of the AOC thing is she was asked by the DNC to nominate Sanders. He got enough delegates to get nominated, it happens at every convention where a candidate gets enough votes. It happened in 2016. The MSM was intentionally stupid to make her seem divisive. It was the dumbest fucking thing.

 

[crimson5pheonix]

On what planet have you spent the last four years?

Planet MSNBC

 

[Gergar12]

Planet MSNBC

Ah yes, that famous progressive news network with Morning Joe, and Claire McCaskill, and Donny Deutsch.

 

[crimson5pheonix]

Ah yes, that famous progressive news network with Morning Joe, and Claire McCaskill, and Donny Deutsch.

Oh staffed by only the best infosec ghouls and Republican faces like Meghan McCain! At least they finally took her off, though now they have Joy Reid :/

 

[Worgen]

I just had to explain that NBC calling AOC a ‘traitor‘ for ‘nominating Sanders for president’ isn’t ‘the Left eating its own‘. The MSM and DNC are centre at best. They aren’t on the same side as AOC

The worst part of the AOC thing is she was asked by the DNC to nominate Sanders. He got enough delegates to get nominated, it happens at every convention where a candidate gets enough votes. It happened in 2016. The MSM was intentionally stupid to make her seem divisive. It was the dumbest fucking thing.

This was the media fucking up.

 

[Trunkage]

This was the media fucking up.

Like that time the media were surprised that a bartender won a seat? When she has two degrees in political science? Or how we are now pretending Sanders didn’t lay out stuff for M4A? Or how they didn’t really care that Obama drone striked over a thousand people? Or paid the Mexican Army to block refugees?

Trump and I can agree on this. The media is pretty shit and just follows the vested interests

 

[Worgen]

Like that time the media were surprised that a bartender won a seat? When she has two degrees in political science? Or how we are now pretending Sanders didn’t lay out stuff for M4A? Or how they didn’t really care that Obama drone striked over a thousand people? Or paid the Mexican Army to block refugees?

Trump and I can agree on this. The media is pretty shit and just follows the vested interests

The profit motive fucked up media so much, but its still essential for holding elected officials accountable to the public.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

The profit motive fucked up media so much, but its still essential for holding elected officials accountable to the public.

The problem is that the media doesn't do that either.

They'd rather make fun of Trump for another stupid thing he said rather than report on the horrible things his administration is actually doing.

It's much easier to get clicks by writing a headline that says Trump told people to drink cleaning products (which he didn't) than it is to write an article about EPA budget cuts.

 

[Cheetodust]

On what planet have you spent the last four years? Bernie was more than willing to talk about "HoW wE gUn PaY 4 It?!?!?", he did at exorbitant length and excruciating detail. Repeatedly. And every think tank left of Heritage Foundation all agree, it's cheaper overall while actually pushing for-profit insurers out of the market and at less cost to the consumer.

It's dead simple: nominal FICA increase and remove the FICA cap, nominal income tax increase by income bracket and changing capital gains taxation to reflect income taxation, eliminate tax shelters and subsidies for private insurers. That pays entirely for M4A to the penny while still being revenue-positive for lower- and middle-income taxpayers, because lower- and middle-income taxpayers are no longer financially liable for premiums, deductibles, and copays. In other words, yes, consumers pay more in taxes, but they pay less for health care, and the savings in health care costs are more than the tax increase.

There's literally a whole-damn-ass word document on his page about it.

Blame neoliberal news outlets for refusing to report on the cost of M4A honestly and relying on dishonest scare tactics, while health care-funded propaganda machines destroyed the signal to noise ratio, by erroneously inflating "da troo cawst" of M4A with absolute bullshit figures and screaming "yer tax gun go up!" while ignoring the cost savings to consumers.

EDIT: And here's the absolute rock-bottom line on it. It's supported by 90% of Democratic voters. If Democrats are unwilling or incapable of adopting a plank supported by nine-tenths of its own party because it makes donors sad, fuck 'em. What is the point of a political party if it will not actually endorse and represent the policy positions of its own voters?

Are you surprised? Labour and Sinn Fein deal with the same bullshit all the time. "How do they plan on paying for it?" From people who never read their fully costed budgets and then that myth spreads through the media and people believe it's all vague promises with nothing to back it up because actual left wing politicians get their information in the news 3rd or 4th hand, never direct from the source.

 

[Trunkage]

The profit motive fucked up media so much, but its still essential for holding elected officials accountable to the public.

To be fair, there has never been any journalism ever that isn't hugely biased. Even the fact checkers are baised

 

[Kwak]

(Steve Mnuchin).

Shit, I meant Stephen Miller. Not sure how fascist Steven Mnuchin is. I'm sure he's an evil piece of shit too though, just in more respectable ways.

 

[Neuromancer]

Yes, a dems vs green in our near future is a Fairy tale, what is far more likely due to the constant successful division of GOP opposition is that the GOP will retain power until progressives are finally willing to do what it takes to stop them.

Ignoring the rest of your rant because it is utterly besides the point, what will rather happen instead is that the Republicans will radicalize and entrench themselves more, as has been happening since the fall of the USSR and the lack of a common enemy keeping your two party system united.

Also, let me remind you, you are the one saying

You have to be realistic about who the voters will actually elect in the districts that we have available.

in response to Revy saying that neither side is offering solutions to pressing concerns. That your solution is "we just have to not elect the GOP until the demographics shift left enough that something like Dems vs Greens happen", after such a statement, is not only hilarious, but also detached of realism. You cannot predict such a shift. The american ideological lens are too much stained with rugged individualism and government mistrust for such a shift to happen in large swathes of the population, much less the conservative population. The spectre of McCarthy and your country's utter illiteracy on anything remotely resembling left thought remain across the country. The donors bankrolling both your parties, and whose interests both parties exist to safeguard and propagate, will further keep such a shift from happening in any meaningful fashion.

You think it's more realistic and viable that eventually, hopefully, the electorate will shift enough that the conservatism that has been entrenched throughout your country will have been abandoned, than the party supposedly representing the american "left" choosing even soft-left positions. Honestly, I don't even know where to begin with this, but do tell me this one thing: Supposing that this shift happens before most of us die from old age, will it have happened before or after the ecological collapse that looms ever closer, that both your parties are complicit to?

 

[lil devils x]

Snipped for character limit

I have read everything he has available on this repeatedly, and it doesn't add up is the problem. That was why Warren's plan was better, because her's actually allows for it to be adequately paid for. Lower and middle income taxpayers are not able to handle ANY tax increase without losing their homes as it is. They already do not even pay their premiums and are already drowning in unpaid medical bills. Currently, they just do not pay them at all, that is how this works here. Those nonpayment costs are usually picked up by local taxpayers currently in order to keep their hospitals open. The lower and middle income earners would have not have to pay into it at all and be covered regardless for this to be able to work here at all because those are also the same population who pays the majority of their income to rent and doesn't pay their medical bills at all. The problem isn't just isolated to healthcare, we are being hit with the affordable housing crisis at the same time. That is why lower and middle income earners presently need to have 100% of their taxes refunded to them with no room for increases, no matter how moderate they are or they will be out on the streets. Due to the present subsidy loophole in the ACA, low income earners are currently not having to pay their premiums at all, as I outlined in this thread above already. My brother has been unemployed or underemployed for the last 5 years and he pays nothing for his insurance under the ACA even though Texas rejected the medicaid expansion through that loophole. That is how many are able to have insurance right as we speak without paying premiums at all.

My understanding of this has nothing to do with " neoliberal news". This is my field we are talking about here. There is much that needs to be adjusted for M4A to function properly . I support M4A BTW, I also fully understand it has much that still needs to be done to it for it to work as intended as do all of the other Universal healthcare plan options we have to choose from here. My end goal is to be able to have universal healthcare that works as intended, and am not naive enough to think that anything is going to be completely functional out of the box here. We have to make sure we do not force more hospitals to close in the process however, we have lost so many as it is in recent years.

Hospitals are already being forced to reduce quality of care due to underpayment. We currently have the issue that medicare does not adequately pay for all hospital costs of treatment. In our current system, hospitals are able to cover medicare and medicaid patients by charging other patients more through their insurers. IF we eliminate the hospitals recouping costs through insurers by eliminating insurance, the hospitals will necessarily go bankrupt unless more funding is allocated. People often complain about the current hospital bills being so high, but our reality is we are having more hospitals go bankrupt now than ever. We actually would have to increase what medicare is willing to pay in order to resolve this issue, this would be an increase in costs rather than a reduction. Even at my clinic, our physicians paid for many patient expenses out of their own pockets due to medicaid underpayments. We literally had to gather pools among our staff in order to pay for children's treatments for them due to how little medicaid pays. For M4A to actually work in reality, it would have to have higher payments than currently allocated in his plan, not less for it to work properly, thus resulting in a higher cost to tax payers than estimated or we would have to greatly reduce quality of care that will necessarily result in deaths. Bernie's version of M4A, is actually counting on being able to pay less than insurers do currently, even when offsetting that with the existing nonpayments, it still will not be enough to provide the necessary quality of care we need to provide. The only way to address that is to increase the funding otherwise we will have a drop in quality and access as facilities close and lose quality of staff. Warren's model was better than Bernie's, but both still need to allocate more funding than they have planned for, especially with the planned expansion of services. I expect it to cost more than either of them expected, but in the end it would be worth it to do so in order to be able to achieve the quality of care we want to achieve here.

I don't want you to get the wrong idea here, I support M4A more than the ACA, however, I see the ACA as a path to get to M4A rather than in opposition to it. Like
Satinavian pointed out eariler:

I would like to point to the German healthcare system which not only proved to be quite better funded than the NHS but which still has private options... which are slowly driven out of the market because the boundary condition are intentionally set to make the public option affordable and able to cover all necessary stuff. Of course having some kind of health insurance with a broad coverage is mandatory in Germany except for some foreign short term visitors.

Democrats already retreating from public option before DNC even starts

One Republican legislature will be enough to sabotage that plan, or one Republican President willing to go above and beyond. It’s a dumb plan and we can see across the globe that the reverse is more likely due to the corruption and deceit common among liberal politicians. Edit: seriously, look...

forums.escapistmagazine.com

The ACA would work to drive out private insurers as well once the public option is added, making the shift from private to public single payer go much more smoothly than trying to do a single dumping of 300 million people into a new system all at once. My goal here is to save as many people as we possibly can WHILE we shift as well as the end goals of having high quality healthcare with no out of pocket expenses at the time of service adequately paid for by taxes. We do not want to make the same mistakes that NHS has made when they underfund it. This likely may take putting more funding into areas where it isn't currently allocated in his plan in order to make it work, but in the end it should work with the proper tweaking. Underfunding however would be disastrous and we have to find funding from elsewhere because the lower and middle income earners cannot afford to pay for it or anything else for that matter at all right now due to the affordable housing crisis and massive, widespread underemployment.

 

[lil devils x]

Ignoring the rest of your rant because it is utterly besides the point, what will rather happen instead is that the Republicans will radicalize and entrench themselves more, as has been happening since the fall of the USSR and the lack of a common enemy keeping your two party system united.

Also, let me remind you, you are the one saying



in response to Revy saying that neither side is offering solutions to pressing concerns. That your solution is "we just have to not elect the GOP until the demographics shift left enough that something like Dems vs Greens happen", after such a statement, is not only hilarious, but also detached of realism. You cannot predict such a shift. The american ideological lens are too much stained with rugged individualism and government mistrust for such a shift to happen in large swathes of the population, much less the conservative population. The spectre of McCarthy and your country's utter illiteracy on anything remotely resembling left thought remain across the country. The donors bankrolling both your parties, and whose interests both parties exist to safeguard and propagate, will further keep such a shift from happening in any meaningful fashion.

You think it's more realistic and viable that eventually, hopefully, the electorate will shift enough that the conservatism that has been entrenched throughout your country will have been abandoned, than the party supposedly representing the american "left" choosing even soft-left positions. Honestly, I don't even know where to begin with this, but do tell me this one thing: Supposing that this shift happens before most of us die from old age, will it have happened before or after the ecological collapse that looms ever closer, that both your parties are complicit to?

Such a statement is hilarious because the ONLY way for us to have any other options right now is to change the actual electoral system in the US. Since that takes changing the constitution, it isn't going to happen. The progressives do not have a majority. Without a majority they have their hands tied. The ONLY way for the progressives to not have their hands tied is for them to recruit non progressives. Moderates are not " punished" by progressives taking their ball and going home because the moderates are wealthy. Progressives only hurt themselves and the poor by refusing to compromise. In the end, Progressives need the moderates MORE than the moderates need the progressives. That is the core of it here. We do not have a " left" with any ability to do anything in the US by itself IS the problem. Like I stated above it works like this:
1) Democrats have conservatives, moderates and progressives
2)Republicans have conservatives and far right.
3) progressives NEED the conservatives and the moderates or they will never accomplish anything at all and the Republicans will retain full control indefinitely because they have the majority.
4)Progressives must recruit moderates and conservatives in order to do anything at all by any means necessary or everything only gets worse, not better.
5) If progressives split from Dem's they lose all chances of changing anything ever and only ensure the far right retains control. Dem's will just recruit more conservatives instead and the entire country moves further to the right than it already is.
6)Yes, it has to be a 2 party system in the US because otherwise the far right has 100% control. It takes everyone else merging into an opposition party to be able to defeat them at all.

There is no such thing as " American left" that has power to do anything at all. EVEN if they attempted to rebel, the far right would crush all other factions due to all other factions being divided and everything would be even worse than it currently is. The ONLY means progressives in the US have to get anything done is to bribe moderates and conservatives to join them in individual fights, that is all we have right now. That of course is still better than the alternative. The idea that the " american left" has the power to do anything to change any of this at this time is what is delusional.

The best chance we have right now is to bribe, beg, borrow and steal to get moderates and conservatives to join with progressives to get enough to have a majority, then bribe, beg, borrow and steal to get the votes to get what we can done in the meantime. Expecting to get exactly what we want though through this process and without corporate bribes is never going to happen. What can realistically happen, however, is we save as many lives as we can in the process by extreme corporate bribes until the current political climate changes. That is the best we can hope for right now as far as I can see.

 

[Neuromancer]

There is no such thing as " American left" that has power to do anything at all. EVEN if they attempted to rebel, the far right would crush all other factions due to all other factions being divided and everything would be even worse than it currently is. The ONLY means progressives in the US have to get anything done is to bribe moderates and conservatives to join them in individual fights, that is all we have right now. That of course is still better than the alternative. The idea that the " american left" has the power to do anything to change any of this at this time is what is delusional.

Oh, but I didn't make a claim that the "american left" has any power to do anything. I was merely pointing out that the solution you brought up is not a solution at all, and if anything is detached from any reality you ask Revy to abide by.

 

[Agema]

... that says Trump told people to drink cleaning products (which he didn't)...

No indeed. Firstly, it was injecting detergent or some sort of lung lavage rather than drinking it. Secondly, he informed the public that he'd proposed to his scientific advisors that they look into it.

Which means it was merely one of most gob-smackingly stupid things a US president has ever uttered in public, rather than one of the most gob-smackingly stupid and terrifyingly irresponsible and dangerous things a US president has ever uttered in public.

 

[lil devils x]

Like that time the media were surprised that a bartender won a seat? When she has two degrees in political science? Or how we are now pretending Sanders didn’t lay out stuff for M4A? Or how they didn’t really care that Obama drone striked over a thousand people? Or paid the Mexican Army to block refugees?

Trump and I can agree on this. The media is pretty shit and just follows the vested interests

The Media helped Trump get elected. He has been their golden goose, especially for outlets such as CNN. I am not sure what the media has said/ not said about Bernie's M4A plan, but his plan for paying for it isn't going to work as planned. Warren's payment plan is much better, but both are not adequately estimating actual costs to hospitals and clinics to provide services so often when you hear hospitals discussing these concerns, it isn't because of what the media stated, it is that all the numbers are just not adding up here.

For example:

‘Medicare for All’ to cost hospitals $200 billion annually, analysis finds

Although a slice of hospitals might financially benefit from a single-payer model based on Medicare rates, 90% would face cuts totaling $200 billion each year, according to a new industry analysis.

www.hfma.org

Rural Hospitals Say ‘Medicare For All’ Would End Up 'Closing Our Doors'

Hospital administrators from Texas to Maine say adopting a single-payer government health care program that covers all Americans would force more rural hospitals to close.

www.wbur.org

That does not have much to do with what the media says or doesn't say here, it is just the number crunching of it all. I too want M4A, but we have to be realistic in that it will necessarily have to cost more than their current estimation, and they have to change how we will to pay for it, but with the proper adjustments it would definitely be an improvement when we finally get there as long as we do not expect to pay what they currently have estimated in, and have enough leeway to greatly increase costs without squeezing lower and middle income earners.

 

[lil devils x]

Oh, but I didn't make a claim that the "american left" has any power to do anything. I was merely pointing out that the solution you brought up is not a solution at all, and if anything is detached from any reality you ask Revy to abide by.

That was the point. I am trying to work with reality here. Progressives in the US are powerless unless they expect to bribe moderates and conservatives to join them by whatever means possible. That is all we have right now IS the point I was making with that, otherwise nothing will ever change. If they want to help, that is what they can expect to happen IS the issue here. The " other" option presented wasn't really an option at all, in case you missed that point I was making there.

 

[Revnak]

That was the point. I am trying to work with reality here. Progressives in the US are powerless unless they expect to bribe moderates and conservatives to join them by whatever means possible. That is all we have right now IS the point I was making with that.

So, you’re saying electoralism is worthless?
Edit: let me put this in a less obtuse way, I don’t care about how maybe someday we will stop rapidly moving right because all the Republicans are dead because by that point I could easily be dead or society as a whole could easily be facing some grim climate, economic, or nuclear apocalypse for all I know (doubtful from my perspective, but possible). I don’t care about preserving some ethical pretext or playing by some bullshit set of incorporeal rules like constitutions if it means everyone I love dies suffering because our political apparatus is so utterly insane that we must wait another half century before we address any of our problems. If this method will accomplish nothing for decades and we must continue to endure a rapid descent into hell in the meantime, the method is lacking any and all value.
In short, if you give a starving man a bag apple seeds then send him on his way, you are a bastard and perhaps a murderer.