And I do think Biden campaigned very well on we need to save the ACA. He mentioned the public option as a means to help build on top of it, but he realized the ACA was popular and made that the focus in order to keep hammering Trump on it. It was a good strategy, IMO. He didn’t particularly need to focus on the public option (though most people knew that was part of his plan).
DrDeth claims that Sanders’ plan aims to nationalize the entire health care industry (hospitals, clinics, and insurance) despite the fact that it explicitly does not, on my reading of it.
The insurance industry will be negatively affected. This is obvious, as our bloated insurance infrastructure is a sign of the failure of our healthcare system. You move to ANY form of actual single-payer, and the insurance industry will be redundant.
ETA: I, too, would like to know if the proposal is ACTUALLY crazy and unworkable (and “won’t get past McConnell” is so obvious a non-answer that it isn’t worth anybody typing it).
The problem is that the ACA is current law, and it’s hard for most people to grasp the real-life implications of GOP attacks on it - it’s just complex enough that it just sounds like the same old political white noise that always exists. There are probably more people who just know that they used to get taxed for not having insurance and now don’t have to pay the tax than are going to have their minds changed because of the GOP backdooring the repeal through a lawsuit and Trump sabotaging technical elements of it.
And I know I keep harping on the public option (which I think is the most important/ambitious aspect of it, and a good place to plant your flag as far as convincing the public), but people like when you give them really simple explanations of how things will work, and then stick to your guns. When someone says “medicare for all”, people get on a gut level what that means (they may have not actually thought through that it would mean abolishing private insurance, but that doesn’t prevent them from getting that gut understanding). Dems could also just harp on another element of the plan. When you have a slogan of just “Protect and Build on the ACA” that could mean anything, and when the follow up explanation doesn’t stick to a small handful of points, and you don’t harp on those points every chance you get, people aren’t going to get it.
Intact? Impossibly high hurdle. But sanders plan would be totally unrecognizable. The idea of outlawing private insurers is a critical part, and that couldnt pass. The part about all hospitals being socialized- that wouldnt pass and is a critical part of the plan.
Bidens plan, on the other hand would be messed with of course but still come out looking like his plan.
That is, in a nutshell, exactly what his plan does. The problem is that the drug, insurance and healthcare industries not only provide hundreds of thousands of jobs, but also are some of the biggest lobbies and the largest political contributors. The “crazy” part is assuming that not only are you gonna get a couple GOPers to cross the aisle in the Senate- but you are gonna get hundreds of Reps and 51 Senators to vote against the lobbyists and the money. Not to mention the loss of tens of thousands of jobs. Ain’t gonna happen. Totally, completely impossible.
Cite?
Already done upthread. I forget where but sometime today.
No, I am saying you cant get 220 Reps and 51 senators to vote against millions of dollars of lobby money, not to mention tens of thousands of lost jobs. Neither Dems nor Repubs would be willing to kiss off that kind of money and political pressure.
Like i said, if you waved a magic wand, the plan isnt so bad. But it can never pass congress.
That is why it is crazy. Not to mention it is a wholesale reworking of the entire medical industry at a time when the last thing we need is chaos there.
In effect it does. The only conduit for fees, except perhaps for a few super rich with private doctors- will have to come thru the government. No private insurance is allowed. Hospitals will have a choice- cater to a handfull of the 1% who are willing to pay cash for all their medical needs, or cater to the other 99% whose bills will be paid by the government on a government schedule of fees. No doubt there will be a clinic or two in Beverly Hills, etc, but more or less the entire healthcare industry will be controlled by the government who will set all fees and wages.
Not really. Other nations do have private insurance for those unwilling to wait months or that want better service. Certainly a nationwide Single payer will hurt the Insurance industry but it wont- at the stroke of pen- outlaw it entirely.
Acceptance of gay marriage seemed to slow down, and maybe even temporarily reversed, exactly when it was a major factor in electoral politics.
It was always going to win, but it might have won more quickly with different electoral tactics. It’s also troublesome making a fair statistical comparison about relative speed of the two marriage changes, given the different eras. For the safest inference, “control” and “treatment” should be almost exactly identical, except for one thing. But the different eras ensure that a wealth of background changes are at play that are guaranteed to muddy the picture.
Having said that, I want to make explicit a point I might not have made clear earlier.
Major elected officials absolutely, positively should not advocate for positions that are unpopular even within the Democratic party. But the calculus is murkier if a position is popular within the Democratic party, but not yet popular among the general public.
We have one paltry time series for gay marriage support. David Shor (who I cited again just above) seems convinced the electoral baggage there was hurtful, maybe based on his familiarity with the broader research on winning elections and other time series data. I’m not as familiar, and I’m not as convinced. I trust him more than anyone who offers strong opinion without citing data (and I appreciate the reference to gay marriage, because that’s exactly the kind of data that’s worth pointing to), but that doesn’t mean I trust every particular example he brings up.
And so, if someone says “This is popular in our party, and so we should build a campaign on it”, I might be somewhat uncomfortable with that (Median Voter Theorem…) but I’m not going to say it’s wrong.
But that wasn’t what happened this last time. Issues gained salience – even to the point of op-ed appearance in the New York Times – which were overwhelmingly unpopular even among Democrats. That’s the sort of shit that loses votes. I wouldn’t put gay marriage in the same category, even if Shor does, when the majority of Democrats finally came to the correct side of that issue.
But the insurance portion of the plan only disallows selling insurance with the same coverage as that offered by the government plan. And that allows a metric shitload of wiggle-room for the army of insurance providers that spent generations coming up with rules-lawyered ways to DENY coverage to paid-up customers to find new ways to offer some special-treatment coverages for those that want to pay for it.
Was this response designed to be insulting? Because Rudy Giuliani would reject this crap as an argument.
That article does not in any way talk about progressives in general. It is limited to voters who were for Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primaries and then voted for Trump, about 1 in 10 of their total. That’s a very small number of total voters. Maybe that was you point - that progressives are too small a population to care about their numbers. Who knows what you were thinking?
How this 2017 article about the 2016 election says anything at all about Biden is another mystery for the ages. Heck, the article doesn’t even have anything to say about your claim that moderates bailed for Obama - kinda not surprising since the analysis is about 2016.
Look, if you wanted the takeaway to be that you have nothing whatsoever to support your claims, mission accomplished. Otherwise you might try an apology and start all over again.
It’s a damn sight more evidence than any other accusations here of how progressives are a menace.
Do you want to make a claim that the 25% who didn’t vote for Obama were progressives? Does that make sense to you?
Does the data tell you that leftists/progressives are the problem? Or centrists?
Maybe you are right. Maybe there was a HUGE change between these elections and the data from one cannot be extrapolated to another. Do you want to make that case or do you want to pretend you scored some internet points?
If you have data or proof of some sort bring it or admit you got nothing.
Which is everything other than certain cosmetic surgery.
Ok, this Sanders plan thing has gone on enogh, it’s getting to be a hijack. if anyone wants to discuss it further, open a new thread, OK?
So what we’re saying then is that the US Healthcare System’s purpose is not to actually provide healthcare to Americans, but instead is a jobs program for tens of thousands of people in insurance, pharmaceuticals, & healthcare. Plus a way to make a lot of insanely rich people even richer.
In that case I declare the US Healthcare system a success.
The ‘jobs’ thing is dumb anyways. Yeah, you’d trim some fat, because having one healthcare system handle everyone is a lot more efficient than having a dozen parallel corporate bureaucracies each worried about their own profit. But the healthcare system still needs employees even if it is run by the government.
I disagree. I think people definitely got it. People were very concerned about Trump trying to get rid of banning the use of pre-existing conditions exclusions. It was all over the airwaves. Our Republican Senator tried to claim he was for the banning of pre-ex exclusions (I got mailers to that effect); Trump tried to claim his plan would ban pre-ex exclusions - seems to me that it was an issue that really hit home. And helped Biden win the Presidency.
It’s far more simple and clear IMO than getting too much in the weeds with what a Public Option actually means. Protect and Build on the ACA put Trump and the GOP on the defensive quite a bit.
The Health insurance industry would be totally out of jobs. No need for them, their employees or the companies.
About 2 million jobs.
No, were are not saying that at all.
But when you have a congressman, who if he votes yea, his state will lose 200000 jobs and he will lose hundreds of thousands in campaign contributions, how is he gonna vote? Especially as he, himself has fantastic free health insurance?