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But if you take that away, Bernie doesn’t really have anything to offer.
A good bit of Bernie’s vote was a pure anti-Hillary vote. Mine was part of that, I agreed with a lot of Bernie’s policies, but I thought he would be a bad president, but at least he would win the election and stop Trump and my biggest priority was stopping Trump.
Keep in mind that Medicare pays out 7 times more then it brings in. Now, most of that is end of life care, so Medicare for all might be slightly cheaper, but on the other hand you for several decades before Medicare kicks in as well
Hey Harris people, what’s to like about her that outweighs the whole prosecutor thing? Serious question, meant in good faith.
She did a great job at the debates, and gave Bidden a beat down while still giving him a way out.
At least that was the verdict of the 538 podcast and Pod Save America.
Honestly, I didn’t stay up late enough to watch the debates.
She’s not old, she’s not out of touch, she’s more left than moderate, she’s capable of winning. She’s a minority and a woman, so a victory represents more barriers coming done. She’s not my first choice — I’m for Warren — but she’s a good second choice.
I’m not a Harris person. The prosecutor thing isn’t that big of a deal for me, though some of her anti-LGBT stances as Cali AG are a bit concerning, though I don’t think she’d hold progress back.
She’s talked about stacking the court, which is a litmus test for me, I won’t support a candidate who I don’t think would stack the court if given the chance. I think she’s sufficiently progressive (center of the party- enough not to overly piss off bothsiders or leftists), though I like Warren better here. She seems competent, though I worry about her bravery some.
In all, I’d be ok with her if she won the primary, though I’d prefer Warren, and having a black women replace Trump would be an awesome FU to Trump’s base, who I want to see as miserable as possible the rest of their lives- I’ll never forgive them for giving us Trump.
This is well said, kudos!
So make the Medicare tax 7%. It’s still WAY cheaper than my private insurance.
But again, you aren’t paying as you use it, are you? You are paying into it for decades, and then using it. So, if you are employed for 45 years, and use Medicare 10 years or so. Maybe 15.
So, the math is about 10 years of service paid for by 45 years of service. Since it’s about 1/7 of the actual cost, we would increase the base cost to 10.15% (for the employer and the employee each, so 20.30% total) per year. But that is not a fair equation, because you work for 40 or so years to get 15 years of service. So, every 2.7 years of work pays for one year of Medicare. If that is the case, would be paying 27.41% of our salary for healthcare (plus our employer would also be paying about 27.41% as well).
In addition, we want medicare to cover us after we are retired, so that means we’ll need to either pay into retirement, or we’ll need to pay more while working to cover our retirement.
Now, my math doesn’t take into account that the cost of services for a young person is less than an old person, and that end of life care is incredibly expansive. So, maybe the prices will change.
Medicare for all will probably not reduce the cost of health care. It might arrest the cost of healthcare, but I doubt the group impacted (doctors, hospitals, medical device manufacturers, Big Pharmy) will not fight to keep the status quo when it comes to payments they receive.
On funding, given that every western democracy manages to pay for universal health care with varying levels of government-provided insurance, I don’t think you can reasonably argue that we can’t pay for it or afford it.
On costs, given that 1) the ACA, flawed as it is, had a salutary effect on slowing the growth of costs, and 2) Medicare pays lower fees than traditional insurance because of bargaining power, and 3) even wealthy European countries have lower per capital health care costs than we do, I don’t know why anyone would think costs couldn’t be lower. I’m aware that doctors etc will oppose that, but I don’t know why that would necessarily be the determining factor. And, in any event, if you bend the cost growth curve enough, effectively the question of whether you’ve lowered them becomes meaningless.
Oh, I think we can do it, and I think we can afford it. I just don’t think we should assume massive cost savings. There will be a lot of lobbying against reducing the costs and some of it will be effective.
I think that if you’re supporting pretty much any of the candidates in a race for president these days, you’re going to have to be willing to look beyond some past baggage and hope the candidate you like has grown and evolved.
I mean, there’s a reason we went 48 years between electing a sitting US Senator to the presidency between Kennedy and Obama. Being a senator means you’re going to have to be present to vote on things for your caucus, and even a vote to filibuster (or end cloture) on a controversial, contested bill can be used against you. It turns out it gets lots easier to duck your record if you’re a governor and have state legislatures to blame shit on.
And with that said, Kamala Harris has perhaps the two absolute WORST jobs for a future presidential nominee on her resume: state’s prosecutor/DA and senator. Neither job is super great for higher political ambition. Both jobs involve often having to make the least shitty choice of multiple available shitty choices, frequently with incomplete information. And a DA – pre 2010s-ish and the rising awareness of a need for criminal justice reform as a crisis situation – was typically elected and expected to be pretty much an asshole and it is a role Harris played well.
For me it always comes back to this with Democratic candidates: I personally think a sign of great intelligence and intellectual curiosity is an ability to realize past mistakes and a willingness to grow and change when presented with new information. I think that’s a quality possessed by many of this current crop of candidates, including (in limited ways) Grampy Joe. The lack of that quality, the “I know what I know” bullshit is what drove me nuts the most about Dubya and now Trump.
I think it’s perfectly fair to grill a candidate about their past actions in public office and their voting records. I think it’s also perfectly fair to judge that a candidate has evolved and changed on a position if that candidate is willing to honestly articulate that.
Really appreciate the responses, all.
If our costs remained at the “2x the average” point they are today but everyone in the country was covered, that would be a win. Any cost reductions from there would be a bonus.
If we even only manage to bring cost growth down to CPI, that’s basically a reduction in future costs.
Thanks for asking. And thanks everyone for the responses from me too. I’m apparently in the same boat as Adam since the prosecutor stuff really bugged me and I wrote her off because of that. Not that I wouldn’t vote for her vs Trump or Biden, because I totally would. It’s just that Warren is so perfect a fit for me that she has my support forevah.
That being said, would peppy smartypants grandma/aunt firebrand Warren be more electable than NowThis videos of “destroying” people in committee hearings Harris? Because mostly what I knew about Harris before this point were provided by videos like that where she was being really rude to some toady. Kind of the opposite of a Buttigieg personality there.
Warren’s just as capable of destroying folks as Harris.
But she’s so much nicer when she does it?
Maybe it’s just some internal bias operating here, but more likely it’s just the stuff I’ve been exposed to. I’ll try to imagine Harris being real nice to her kids* and maybe a dog or something too for a while until I start to see her as a super nice lady too.
* I have no idea if she has kids or not.
Buttigieg’s South Bend police stuff strikes me as a ticking time bomb. When he took office, he demoted the black police chief and replaced him with a white police chief. In his 8 years in office, there have been numerous racist incidents involving the police, and he doesn’t seem to have done anything to improve that situation. 8 years is a long time.
