"Because here’s the thing nobody wants to say out loud: what we need is more healthcare and less insurance."
Sorry. I've been saying it out loud for decades. Insurance, aside from catastrophic, doesn't belong in healthcare, at all. I get silence and a blank face, every time. The same silence as I got when I told people back in the late 70s, early 80s that the religious right was planning, literally planning, to infiltrate government, education, etc. I overheard them with my own ears.
Maybe now people will be more open to hearing, which will maybe lead to doing something about both. Because that's the other thing I keep saying, and you are right: He's a symptom not a cause. It's the entire, sick mindset that has to be recognized and stomped out through eternal education. We must literally educate the stupid out of ourselves. On a communication and relationship level, we are dumber than dumb. But will we face the truth of ourselves and become better, or will we keep heaping blame and doing nothing?
Systemically: we don't have a healthcare system in America, we have a healthcare industry which is a cornerstone for profit in this economy. We profit off of human suffering. If we had had a single payer health care system that the republicans were attacking, everyone would be in the streets over the issue. Most people find it difficult to navigate this system, because it is intentionally incomprehensible. Except they know they are getting less for more.
There are some things, institutions, that shouldn't be for profit. Healthcare, education, fire and police departments for instance are necessary social institutions. Corporations are very good at making money : they do it by cutting services and rising prices. Nobody wants to have poor docs, fewer fire trucks, etc. when many are sick, stupidity reigns and fires rage, do they? Let's keep profits where they belong...in entertainments, sports, restaurants, bridge and so forth.
Profit-zombies ruin EVERYTHING they touch. EVERYTHING.
Look no further than those first two you listed. Sports-fans (which I am not) have been lamenting the profit-driven poisoning of what they love for decades and decades, the ruination of music has been documented ad nauseam, and the entire contemporary meme of the "toxic fandom" in movies, games of any sort beyond poker and Parker Brothers, comics, you name it, is a whole new level of cruel lie meant to deflect blame from corporate parasites.
My mother always loved to hate the people she knew in the '80s who went to "B-school", as they apparently called it; now those same people have long-since taken over everything, and the past 25 years speak for themselves (the trajectory of Boeing is a PERFECT example). I think she was more right about them than she realizes even now.
The profit-over-all incentive does not work AT ALL; in fact, it's a fundamental betrayal of the common-sense premise of 'you will be rewarded with wealth IF you make good products/perform good services'. It is the mindset of the psychopath, and it ought to be a CRIME.
Thanks for pointing out what a disaster Obama was and how his legacy has poisoned the body politic. He essentially saved a discredited neoliberalism and a discredited neoconservatism that Bush/Cheney had driven into a ditch. His legacy is that he paved the way for a buffoonish conman to sell his brand of snake oil to a demoralized public.
For me the question is no longer how do we avoid a complete collapse of healthcare, and really, of the entire economy. No, all that is already baked into the cake, thanks to two absolutely corrupt political parties. The real question is how do we prepare to take advantage of the crisis in the aftermath? I guarantee it won’t be by appealing to these two political parties.
Our best bet would be to appeal to the unionized working class to begin planning together for a general strike and a list of demands that begins with a demand to end the wars, end Citizens United, end AIPAC, and repeal Taft-Hartley. Otherwise, nothing moves: not trucks, not trains, not airplanes, not city busses, not subways, not shipping. Let’s see how long the oligarchs can handle that.
Once again Corbin is spot on. I can remember when Obamacare first passed and I criticized it and was ridiculed. I tried to tell all those attacking me that Obamacare was actually a plan based on the Heritage Foundation's plan and Romney care. That it was a far cry from a public option that Obama refused to put on the table even though when first elected, the dems held the house and senate.
The problem with incrementalism isn't the incrementalism per se. It's just way too late.
Medicare was established 70 years ago. If it had been baked right in that the age of eligibility would be incrementally lowered, we could all have been covered under a single payer system by now. Younger and healthier people added over time lowers the cost (per person). As it stands, it has incrementally gone the other way, with private insurance plans more and more necessary to supplement Medicare.
You're 100pct right! Incremental eligibility increases could have had us across the goal line already. But no, Dems leadership went 'wobbly'. Not too late, cover every child born in 2025 and every 64 year old starting today. And keep going, next year 63 and up and that years new born etc. TAKE THAT UNITEDHEALTH!
"This is what status quo Democrats don’t want to admit. Trump is a symptom, not the problem. ... In their bones, they know Trump didn’t break this. It was already broken."
An excellent, succinct, 10,000 foot frame from which to view our current predicament. How can Democrats ever get back on top if all they can offer voters is defense of broken systems, like healthcare?
The republicans had a tizzy fit when Clinton Tried to reform healthcare to a single payer system and get rid of insurance companies holding the country hostage. The insurance companies spent millions to keep things and money flowing to them. Insurance companies and their lobbyists own this country!! In all these years republicans have done NOTHING to help with this mess. So now to blame democrats for trying to help folks is mean and cruel to Americans!! They’ve never put forth one idea of their own because they don’t give a damn. Only to “own the libs”.
Bernie, Elizabeth, AOC have the goods! Let them give the American people what they want rest of Western society has had for years!!!! Get insurance companies f’d up system out of USA!
Corbin just gave examples of why Warren doesn’t have the goods. Neither do Bernie or AOC. None of these politicians is willing to consistently speak truth to power, because they are, in Bernie’s own words, afraid of being Nadered.
Democrats deserve blame, even more than the GOP, because they at least at times in their history have stood up for the working class. That betrayal over the past fifty years is why they keep losing winnable elections to GOP nimrods.
Talk is cheap. Both Bernie and AOC thought it was more ‘pragmatic’ to work from the inside and attempt to ‘work with’ Biden and Pelosi, respectively, rather than take principled stands on domestic, as well as the horrific Gaza policy. If Warren really cared about Medicare For All, she never would have run for POTUS, especially in ‘20, when Bernie actually had a shot at the nomination.
“… The issue isn’t Trump’s economy. The problem is THE economic system. The one we’ve been living under since before I was a kid. I’m 45 years old, and working-class people have been in a slow spiral my entire life.
“This is what status quo Democrats don’t want to admit. Trump is a symptom, not the problem…”
Tell it bro!!
And, at the fountainhead of our faltering economic system is the profit motive — the need to extract more value from any endeavor than one puts into it. A child should be able to see the long-term unsustainability of that model. Yet we mask it with a host of platitudes about financial “responsibility”, while masking the harm with the need for constant economic “growth”.
Clearly, we’ve hit the limit on that. It’s an existential crossroads for Western society. How bad does it have to get before we chart a new course?
You should note to people that your total subscribers number is not your paid subscribers number. I thought you had so many paid subs that you didn't need more financial support. Then I saw that you only have a few paid subscribers, so I ponied up to support you.
You're absolutely right about this, Corbin. The ACA was always a compromise built on a Republican health plan for one state (I think it was Massachusetts). It was never what we need, which is a single-payer option run by the government. The NHS in the UK used to be a shining example of what we need before the Tories almost starved it to death. But that's what we should have. Every civilized country does.
It is absolutely true that it is our entire healthcare system needs to be replaced, but it is insanely naive to believe for a second that offering a "public option" will do the trick! One would have to truly believe in magic to think that will work. Medicaid and Original Medicare were basically just that..... publicly-funded options. But over the past several decades they have been parasitized by for-profit insurers disguised as ACOs, who take taxpayer money and divert it to private for-profits, who divert ever-increasing amounts of it to their investors as profit!!!
The ONLY cure for our healthcare system is to ENTIRELY REMOVE ALL PROFIT! Nothing short of that will even come close to providing us what we need. The ideal solution is a community-based, very progressive tax-funded healthcare system administered by community-elected boards, and some of those board members then form district boards, and some of the district board members form regional boards and they, in turn, form a national board, which is NOT under the authority of the President or anyone appointed by the President or appointed by anyone the President has appointed. THAT is what we need. That would be the ideal!!
However, given the oligarchy we live in, we may have to settle for a Medicare For All system like the one introduced in the US House by Jayapal. It would be an ENORMOUS improvement over what we now have. It would at least remove almost all profit.
I am in total agreement, once again, with what you say here. The issue of building a new system—— that this is the thing that every Democrat has to understand, and operate from. Every candidate— must be clear on this— like the candidates you have mentioned. Like Zohran. People will respond. Like they have responded to Bernie and AOC when they’ve toured the country. The equivocation, the failure to be straight with people about the need for a TOTALLY NEW SYSTEM OF OPERATING BECAUSE THIS ONE IS BROKEN, is what causes apathy and demoralization in the population.
We're in the world of democratizing the economy, which includes new rules for corporations and economic statistics, but a no-brainer is also creating a public finance sector -- infrastructure bank and insurance, meaning public financing of health care. Get the damned insurance industry off the payroll (which WE pay)
I've been reading Thom Hartmann's 'The Hidden History of Neoliberalism" -omg, in the 1970's, MI
Thom's home state) required all hospitals and health insurance companies to be non-profit. He was able to give his employees (18 of them) full insurance/$30 a month to cover each one. YEAH.
Reaganism took an ax to the whole system and everything became profit based, not health based.
And it's continued w/the privatization of Medicare to Medicare Advantage stealing trillions from
Medicare. Why is Medicare paying private insurance companies? I don't understand this. I pay
a monthly premium for Medicare direct from my social security. All those from the Advantage
programs don't pay it. This is NOT right.
Medicare was forced to pay full fare for drugs from which the Veterans Adm. negotiated
bulk discounts. Biden was able to start a discount programs, but now it is cut or totally gone (?) because of the current adm.
I've also read about hedge funds owning and stripping bare hospitals and health clinics,
just as they do with businesses they purchase. This needs to stop as WI had to step in to negotiate to keep some hospitals open under new management. Universal healthcare, similar to Canada's (with no medical debt) needs to be considered. We need to study how Canada made their system work. I vaguely remember one province started a non-profit-system then others followed suit till it became nationwide.
You make some very good points, Deborah, but I feel I should correct one thing you wrote: People on Medicare Advantage plans and Medigap plans DO pay the same Medicare premium you pay. It comes out of our Social Security just as yours does. I think a lot of people go with the advantage plans because of drug coverage.
We have studied that, and the politics of it was WAY different back then.... and will NOT work now in the US!!! Please read my other comment. Incrementalism will not only not work now, but it will actually be sabotaged just like Original Medicare and Medicaid have been. Their existence has even been used to increase the profits of the private insurers!!!
"Because here’s the thing nobody wants to say out loud: what we need is more healthcare and less insurance."
Sorry. I've been saying it out loud for decades. Insurance, aside from catastrophic, doesn't belong in healthcare, at all. I get silence and a blank face, every time. The same silence as I got when I told people back in the late 70s, early 80s that the religious right was planning, literally planning, to infiltrate government, education, etc. I overheard them with my own ears.
Maybe now people will be more open to hearing, which will maybe lead to doing something about both. Because that's the other thing I keep saying, and you are right: He's a symptom not a cause. It's the entire, sick mindset that has to be recognized and stomped out through eternal education. We must literally educate the stupid out of ourselves. On a communication and relationship level, we are dumber than dumb. But will we face the truth of ourselves and become better, or will we keep heaping blame and doing nothing?
Systemically: we don't have a healthcare system in America, we have a healthcare industry which is a cornerstone for profit in this economy. We profit off of human suffering. If we had had a single payer health care system that the republicans were attacking, everyone would be in the streets over the issue. Most people find it difficult to navigate this system, because it is intentionally incomprehensible. Except they know they are getting less for more.
There are some things, institutions, that shouldn't be for profit. Healthcare, education, fire and police departments for instance are necessary social institutions. Corporations are very good at making money : they do it by cutting services and rising prices. Nobody wants to have poor docs, fewer fire trucks, etc. when many are sick, stupidity reigns and fires rage, do they? Let's keep profits where they belong...in entertainments, sports, restaurants, bridge and so forth.
Add energy to that list.
I'm not even sure it belongs there.
Profit-zombies ruin EVERYTHING they touch. EVERYTHING.
Look no further than those first two you listed. Sports-fans (which I am not) have been lamenting the profit-driven poisoning of what they love for decades and decades, the ruination of music has been documented ad nauseam, and the entire contemporary meme of the "toxic fandom" in movies, games of any sort beyond poker and Parker Brothers, comics, you name it, is a whole new level of cruel lie meant to deflect blame from corporate parasites.
My mother always loved to hate the people she knew in the '80s who went to "B-school", as they apparently called it; now those same people have long-since taken over everything, and the past 25 years speak for themselves (the trajectory of Boeing is a PERFECT example). I think she was more right about them than she realizes even now.
The profit-over-all incentive does not work AT ALL; in fact, it's a fundamental betrayal of the common-sense premise of 'you will be rewarded with wealth IF you make good products/perform good services'. It is the mindset of the psychopath, and it ought to be a CRIME.
Thanks for pointing out what a disaster Obama was and how his legacy has poisoned the body politic. He essentially saved a discredited neoliberalism and a discredited neoconservatism that Bush/Cheney had driven into a ditch. His legacy is that he paved the way for a buffoonish conman to sell his brand of snake oil to a demoralized public.
For me the question is no longer how do we avoid a complete collapse of healthcare, and really, of the entire economy. No, all that is already baked into the cake, thanks to two absolutely corrupt political parties. The real question is how do we prepare to take advantage of the crisis in the aftermath? I guarantee it won’t be by appealing to these two political parties.
Our best bet would be to appeal to the unionized working class to begin planning together for a general strike and a list of demands that begins with a demand to end the wars, end Citizens United, end AIPAC, and repeal Taft-Hartley. Otherwise, nothing moves: not trucks, not trains, not airplanes, not city busses, not subways, not shipping. Let’s see how long the oligarchs can handle that.
Once again Corbin is spot on. I can remember when Obamacare first passed and I criticized it and was ridiculed. I tried to tell all those attacking me that Obamacare was actually a plan based on the Heritage Foundation's plan and Romney care. That it was a far cry from a public option that Obama refused to put on the table even though when first elected, the dems held the house and senate.
The problem with incrementalism isn't the incrementalism per se. It's just way too late.
Medicare was established 70 years ago. If it had been baked right in that the age of eligibility would be incrementally lowered, we could all have been covered under a single payer system by now. Younger and healthier people added over time lowers the cost (per person). As it stands, it has incrementally gone the other way, with private insurance plans more and more necessary to supplement Medicare.
You're 100pct right! Incremental eligibility increases could have had us across the goal line already. But no, Dems leadership went 'wobbly'. Not too late, cover every child born in 2025 and every 64 year old starting today. And keep going, next year 63 and up and that years new born etc. TAKE THAT UNITEDHEALTH!
"This is what status quo Democrats don’t want to admit. Trump is a symptom, not the problem. ... In their bones, they know Trump didn’t break this. It was already broken."
An excellent, succinct, 10,000 foot frame from which to view our current predicament. How can Democrats ever get back on top if all they can offer voters is defense of broken systems, like healthcare?
The republicans had a tizzy fit when Clinton Tried to reform healthcare to a single payer system and get rid of insurance companies holding the country hostage. The insurance companies spent millions to keep things and money flowing to them. Insurance companies and their lobbyists own this country!! In all these years republicans have done NOTHING to help with this mess. So now to blame democrats for trying to help folks is mean and cruel to Americans!! They’ve never put forth one idea of their own because they don’t give a damn. Only to “own the libs”.
Bernie, Elizabeth, AOC have the goods! Let them give the American people what they want rest of Western society has had for years!!!! Get insurance companies f’d up system out of USA!
Corbin just gave examples of why Warren doesn’t have the goods. Neither do Bernie or AOC. None of these politicians is willing to consistently speak truth to power, because they are, in Bernie’s own words, afraid of being Nadered.
Democrats deserve blame, even more than the GOP, because they at least at times in their history have stood up for the working class. That betrayal over the past fifty years is why they keep losing winnable elections to GOP nimrods.
Bernie, in particular, but Warren and AOC too, have been talking about Improved Medicare for All for a long time.
Talk is cheap. Both Bernie and AOC thought it was more ‘pragmatic’ to work from the inside and attempt to ‘work with’ Biden and Pelosi, respectively, rather than take principled stands on domestic, as well as the horrific Gaza policy. If Warren really cared about Medicare For All, she never would have run for POTUS, especially in ‘20, when Bernie actually had a shot at the nomination.
“… The issue isn’t Trump’s economy. The problem is THE economic system. The one we’ve been living under since before I was a kid. I’m 45 years old, and working-class people have been in a slow spiral my entire life.
“This is what status quo Democrats don’t want to admit. Trump is a symptom, not the problem…”
Tell it bro!!
And, at the fountainhead of our faltering economic system is the profit motive — the need to extract more value from any endeavor than one puts into it. A child should be able to see the long-term unsustainability of that model. Yet we mask it with a host of platitudes about financial “responsibility”, while masking the harm with the need for constant economic “growth”.
Clearly, we’ve hit the limit on that. It’s an existential crossroads for Western society. How bad does it have to get before we chart a new course?
You should note to people that your total subscribers number is not your paid subscribers number. I thought you had so many paid subs that you didn't need more financial support. Then I saw that you only have a few paid subscribers, so I ponied up to support you.
That helped a lot!
You're absolutely right about this, Corbin. The ACA was always a compromise built on a Republican health plan for one state (I think it was Massachusetts). It was never what we need, which is a single-payer option run by the government. The NHS in the UK used to be a shining example of what we need before the Tories almost starved it to death. But that's what we should have. Every civilized country does.
100%
It is absolutely true that it is our entire healthcare system needs to be replaced, but it is insanely naive to believe for a second that offering a "public option" will do the trick! One would have to truly believe in magic to think that will work. Medicaid and Original Medicare were basically just that..... publicly-funded options. But over the past several decades they have been parasitized by for-profit insurers disguised as ACOs, who take taxpayer money and divert it to private for-profits, who divert ever-increasing amounts of it to their investors as profit!!!
The ONLY cure for our healthcare system is to ENTIRELY REMOVE ALL PROFIT! Nothing short of that will even come close to providing us what we need. The ideal solution is a community-based, very progressive tax-funded healthcare system administered by community-elected boards, and some of those board members then form district boards, and some of the district board members form regional boards and they, in turn, form a national board, which is NOT under the authority of the President or anyone appointed by the President or appointed by anyone the President has appointed. THAT is what we need. That would be the ideal!!
However, given the oligarchy we live in, we may have to settle for a Medicare For All system like the one introduced in the US House by Jayapal. It would be an ENORMOUS improvement over what we now have. It would at least remove almost all profit.
I am in total agreement, once again, with what you say here. The issue of building a new system—— that this is the thing that every Democrat has to understand, and operate from. Every candidate— must be clear on this— like the candidates you have mentioned. Like Zohran. People will respond. Like they have responded to Bernie and AOC when they’ve toured the country. The equivocation, the failure to be straight with people about the need for a TOTALLY NEW SYSTEM OF OPERATING BECAUSE THIS ONE IS BROKEN, is what causes apathy and demoralization in the population.
We're in the world of democratizing the economy, which includes new rules for corporations and economic statistics, but a no-brainer is also creating a public finance sector -- infrastructure bank and insurance, meaning public financing of health care. Get the damned insurance industry off the payroll (which WE pay)
I've been reading Thom Hartmann's 'The Hidden History of Neoliberalism" -omg, in the 1970's, MI
Thom's home state) required all hospitals and health insurance companies to be non-profit. He was able to give his employees (18 of them) full insurance/$30 a month to cover each one. YEAH.
Reaganism took an ax to the whole system and everything became profit based, not health based.
And it's continued w/the privatization of Medicare to Medicare Advantage stealing trillions from
Medicare. Why is Medicare paying private insurance companies? I don't understand this. I pay
a monthly premium for Medicare direct from my social security. All those from the Advantage
programs don't pay it. This is NOT right.
Medicare was forced to pay full fare for drugs from which the Veterans Adm. negotiated
bulk discounts. Biden was able to start a discount programs, but now it is cut or totally gone (?) because of the current adm.
I've also read about hedge funds owning and stripping bare hospitals and health clinics,
just as they do with businesses they purchase. This needs to stop as WI had to step in to negotiate to keep some hospitals open under new management. Universal healthcare, similar to Canada's (with no medical debt) needs to be considered. We need to study how Canada made their system work. I vaguely remember one province started a non-profit-system then others followed suit till it became nationwide.
You make some very good points, Deborah, but I feel I should correct one thing you wrote: People on Medicare Advantage plans and Medigap plans DO pay the same Medicare premium you pay. It comes out of our Social Security just as yours does. I think a lot of people go with the advantage plans because of drug coverage.
We have studied that, and the politics of it was WAY different back then.... and will NOT work now in the US!!! Please read my other comment. Incrementalism will not only not work now, but it will actually be sabotaged just like Original Medicare and Medicaid have been. Their existence has even been used to increase the profits of the private insurers!!!
Medicare for All !! Single Payer System....