Excuse me. You seem to have mistaken me for some kind of Nixon supporter. I am not, and never have been, a fan of Mr. Nixon. I think he was loathsome and creepy. Nonetheless, he did in deed support something that I myself favor. Merely because I approved of one thing he attempted does not mean I support anything else or anything else he did.
^ This.
^ And this.
Isn’t this what has been used to vilify anyone on this board who supported Trump based on tax policies or abortion or any other single issue item?
I’m pretty sure I read that a vote for Trump was a vote for bigotry and racism, regardless of the single issue reason that one would vote for him.
You know, everything is not equivalent to everything else. :rolleyes:
You know, lots of things are equivalent to other things. :rolleyes::rolleyes:
Not by me - I prefer a more nuanced approach to reality.
So you are saying it’s possible to agree with someone on one issue while simultaneously disagreeing with the rest of their positions?
Lots =/= everything. :rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:
Well, I can do that - it seems may other people can not.
Wanna know who else has been strongly in favor of single payer?
That’s right, Trump’s ghostwriter! Let’s put him in charge.
Read the part of my post you quoted and think about that for a moment, if you can. Those are accurate statements and as simple a truth as truth gets around here – I should have it bronzed. The government has had many opportunities over the years to institute price controls in medicine like other countries have, and it has pointedly not done so. It’s not likely to happen now either. Possible, but unlikely.
And we are not talking about two different things, just two different perceptions. You are willing to absolve hospitals of any blame for kicking out patients for example, even though hospitals are businesses (not just businesses, conglomerates), and you want some brokered agreement between those same businesses and that same government to fix the mess we’re in, when they’ve been colluding for years to create it. There is a reason why people are conflating lack of insurance with lack of doctor visits all over the place, like I said, I mean there’s got to be, but you are seeing moustache-twirling villains at work where I’m seeing…insurance. A system created by the people and used by the people to gain access and mitigate risk when they are sick or injured, because such a thing is needed.
What we do have is a government that is weaker than the hugely profitable health care industry that we’re supposing it can regulate, but stronger than the insurance industry that it tried to utilize as a means to lower health care costs. (ACA.) And sure enough we’re not seeing lower health care costs - we are seeing more expensive insurance. This would be a great time to acknowledge a problem bigger than Blue Cross/Blue Shield, but you and others, for reasons I cannot fathom, are putting a lot of effort into not doing that.
Because Blue Cross/Blue Shield are no more than transactional middlemen, parasites if you will, who exist for no reason other to make a profit.
Let me ask: Would you buy food this way? By purchasing the right, by means of a monthly payment, to then purchase specific types of food at specific, possibly discounted but who knows?, dollar amounts… which then may or may not be approved by the company from whom you are buying your food plan?
What other goods and services do you want to see provided as the American health insurance industry “provides” health insurance?
So one of his very first actions was to issue an executive order that says (in the words of The New York Times; I can’t find the actual text of the order on the WhiteHouse.gov website), “gave federal agencies wide latitude to change, delay or waive provisions of the law that they deemed overly costly for insurers, drug makers, doctors, patients or states.” So how can this possibly work? There may be aspects of the law that make things costly for insurers or doctors, while lowering costs for patients or states. There may be aspects of the law that increase costs for states, while lowering costs for insurers. To me, this exemplifies his lack of knowledge and experience and how it affect how he will govern. It’s easy for him to say that he’s going to repeat the ACA and replace it with something better. But it’s much harder to actually go through the process of defining a better law.
Mario Cuomo once said, “You campaign in poetry but you govern in prose.”
Don’t get me wrong; the ACA is a flawed law and could be improved. The question is whether the Trump administration can negotiate a better approach.
Well, of course they could! ACA is a misbegotten hybrid of conflicting principles. Trump has promised health care for everybody, this has been clarified to mean “health care access for everybody”. So, rest assured, as long as you can afford to live, you will be permitted to do so!
Problem?
Sounds like he gave his cabinet the authority to shut down the ACA, doesn’t it? Aren’t they the ones who run the “federal agencies”?
What if a turkey dinner cost more than my paycheck and a gallon of milk was $34.99? You tell me.
Yes, they do. And what does that have to do with what I said?
Do you think the person you quoted would vote Nixon? Fuck no. Because that would be stupid. Just like the disgustingly single-minded tunnel-vision gun fetishists who decided that everything else was less important than their ability to jerk off to the latest and greatest in murder weapons. The point is not “Nixon had this one great idea, so we should ignore everything else and vote for him”, it’s “Even Nixon had this idea, and he sucked ass in almost all other regards.”
The Republicans are going to use Trump to get rid of the ACA, which he’ll be all too happy to take credit for. They will then see how it goes. If it goes south, they will blame Trump for it.
This will allow them to pull back the good parts and push the bad parts, to make it very clear how evil it is, so it MUST be repealed ASAP!