Someone has to be the grownup in the room who points out that without pay-fors, Bernie’s Medicare for All plan is a legislative snipe hunt, and that immediately impactful things in the healthcare milieu – like funding the ACA – need addressing in the short term.
It is important. Most of these politicians are reading the direction the wind is going and offering token support for something growing in popularity, similar to gay marriage.
However, none of this means the mentioned politicians will support it when it counts in the near future, or ever.
The problem is there is so much money to lose here and it isn’t like democrats turn away the money bags from these industries.
No, the problem right now is that the current plan includes no details on how it will be paid for. Those are the details that wrecked single-payer in Vermont and California.
It’s the same bullshit Sanders sold during the election.
The fact that he doesn’t have a plan which specifically details how exactly it will be paid for, means it’s a bunch of fucking nonsense. This kind of shit should not be getting support from anyone.
It’s not that the idea of universal healthcare is bad.
It’s that real problems have to have real solutions, not a bunch of feel good garbage. It’s the kind of idiots babble about when they’re high.
Also, the immediate response to anything Bernie said in the primaries about free healthcare and free tuition was “how are you going to pay for it?” It’s the next logical question whenever it gets brought up at all.
It’s kind of questionable judgment that he wouldn’t even attempt to answer that in this bill. In fact, I had just assumed that there would be some token cost-offset measure in there because it seems like such an obvious thing you need to include after months and months of being asked about it.
I mean, I get it, it’s symbolic and not meant to go anywhere. But even if it’s meant to fail, you could throw some things in there that would allow you to strategically say next year “The Democrats are making an effort in good faith to fix healthcare. What are the Republicans doing?”
Will we ever get to the point where slashing the military budget so it’s only as big as, say, that of the next two largest countries combined, is not political death to even suggest?
Or, my alternative Universal Health Care Plan: expand the military until we have 300 million soldiers in it. Voila – total coverage and ultimate national security!
I’ve always thought that a good way to get infrastructure improvements done in our current political climate would be to put the military to work on it. You tell red areas that we’re increasing our readiness by expanding the defense budget, and you tell blue areas that bridges and such are being built by the best-trained corps in the world. Something for everyone. Same thing could work for healthcare…open up free army clinics around the country, and there’s your universal coverage.
Eh, yes and no.
Candidate Sanders should have had some type of plan to back up his wild suggestions because he was running for POTUS and his campaign staff should have put together a decent abstract or three.
Senator Sanders doesn’t really have the same need or expectation to do that - no one expects a new proposal to have all that stuff. It just needs to have stated goal and maybe a vague framework behind it. After being introduced, it goes to committee, and THAT’S when the sausage gets made.
Committees have permanent staffs of (hopefully) well-informed or expert specialists that try and think through all the ramifications. They will work with the sponsors and the committee members and suggest changes, point our inconsistencies, and come up with schemes for paying for the thing.
When the legislation is at some reasonable point of completion, the committee can (and hopefully will) hold hearings on the subject and further hash out all of the problem areas as well as to sound out support for some of the more controversial aspects of it. Then they’ll repeat the process a few times. Finally, the end product should be something that answers all the questions. Or it’ll die in committee because it’s fundamentally unworkable.
tl;dr: Presidential candidates have detailed plans; legislation can be much more vague in the beginning.
Woof, Jeff Flake. Woof.
Worked for Rome!
Guessing the Sinema campaign is thinking about putting some internal polls out measuring against Kelli Ward and not Jeff Flake.
It’s just as important that someone shows the goal to motivate people instead of trying to shove brussel sprouts down the base’s throat.
The “brussels sprouts” she’s shoving down the base’s throats is a delicate House negotiation on funding CSRs and pumping more resources into the ACA. Right now it could go either way, and she’s not going to take things off the rails by showing strong support for a plan that’s currently at pipe dream status while she’s telling Republicans that funding the ACA is the only smart alternative for 2018. Pelosi’s comments were simply that shoring up Obamacare was her chief legislative focus.
For some of us not living inside your bubble, that’s not brussel sprouts. That’s a little more like “vitally important”. Thanks.
Is this actually a thing? Asking for a friend…
(j/k)
I’ve got some emails I can forward you, hold on a sec.
I’m just saying, if I could get ahold of a new model, that would be great.
I mean my friend. I mean if my friend could get ahold of a…
God damn it.
Your friend wants to get a hold of your model?
Hey man, whatever happens between consenting adults is ok in my book.
Is this the Ted Cruz thread now?
Incomplete (IMO) article in Vox (from a poly sci prof at U.of Denver.) Interesting piece of history though, i.e. the Republican party in the '60s. That’s how long ago Republicans became the White People party and led to the shit we’re in now.
Conservatives in the GOP read the 1960 election results differently. Nixon had done surprisingly well in the deeply Democratic South, winning Florida, Tennessee, and Virginia and coming within a few points of Kennedy in the Carolinas. Sen. Barry Goldwater argued that Nixon lost because he hadn’t campaigned aggressively in the South and because he had signed on to Nelson Rockefeller’s liberal civil rights plank in the Republican platform.
For Goldwater and others, the key to the party’s future lay among conservative white Southerners, who had long considered themselves Democrats but were open to Republican appeals taking an anti-civil rights stance. As Goldwater famously argued in 1961, “We’re not going to get the Negro vote as a bloc in 1964 and 1968, so we ought to go hunting where the ducks are.” Robert Novak reported on a convention of state party chairs in 1963:
A good many, perhaps a majority of the party’s leaders, envisioned substantial political gold to be mined in the racial crisis by becoming in fact, though not in name, the White Man’s Party. “Remember,” one astute party worker said quietly over the breakfast table at Denver one morning, “this isn’t South Africa. The white man outnumbers the Negro 9 to 1 in this country.”
The party ultimately invested far more resources in “Operation Dixie” than in its big-city campaign, and Republican successes in the 1962 midterms in Southern states suggested to party leaders that they were onto something. These decisions would essentially set the course for the next half-century of party polarization, inviting the most conservative voters — white Southerners — into the more conservative of the two parties.
Unless the balance of the Senate changes, it will die in committee simply because the Republican majority will shoot it down regardless of its specifics.