"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.
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.
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.
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.
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!!!
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.
Every day during this shutdown, Democrats are doubling down on the wrong battle and federal workers are suffering for it. I viviodly recal the Saturday vote that resulted in the passage of Obamacare. I was at a Democratic Party volunteer training and the participants were surprised that I was disappointed. "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good," I was told. I replied, "That would be true if this was good. It isn't. All points of view were supposed to have a seat at the table. The single payer point of view was not at the table. Our folks spent the night in jail instead."
This post was so eyeopening to me. Thank you for filling in the ACA context for this shutdown. I had no idea that the expiration of subsidies just takes us back to the original ACA that the Dems beat their chests about. It is truly theater of the absurd.
The funny thing is, Obamacare is very similar to the Heritage Foundation and Nixon administration’s health insurance plan from the ‘70s. What they had in common was subsidies for private sector health insurance to the working poor, and mandates for the people to buy insurance.
If you want to go back even further, the whole idea of a country-wide health insurance system based on private sector plans dates to 1884, when conservative chancellor Otto von Bismarck got it into Prussian law because the socialists were actually about to give him a hard time electorally. One key difference between the German, French, Japanese and Swiss implementation and our Rube Goldbergian ACA is, surprise surprise, they have public options and some level of price controls
I’m of the opinion that removing the individual mandate and Medicaid expansion requirement were the critical Jenga pieces to keep the tower standing. The ACA has been crumbling ever since, and expanded subsidies will not save it - especially on the backs of us plebeian taxpayers.
The oligarchic nature of Democrats has been on display for years. In the last fifty, the 1% has extracted nearly 70 trillion from the rest of us. Nobody called that a Nanny State. The numbers speak: Trump won (if he did) becasue registered Democrats said, "NO. I'm not holding my nose again" and stayed home. I watched as the Clinton campaign stole the primary from Bernie (the tipping point for me was AZ and the closed polling stations after Hillary's people were told to vote by mail). In '20, it happened again. Why would I vote for such a party (and, yes, the party chooses the candidate)? Obama had the ability to pass single-payer in his first term before the midterms, when they rationalized that "this always happens in a midterm when people don't vote."
WE HAVE A CHANCE TO CHANGE ALL OF THIS (if Trump doesn't declare Martial Law or rig the machined with Elon)..
And Zohran Mamdani's campaign is the blueprint. I must have cried a hunbred times in watching the trifecta of AOC, Bernie and Zohran in the final rally with 13,000 devoted fans in Queens last Sunday. The way is evident (and has been since the first time I heard Bernie speak).
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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!!!
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.
Medicare for All !! Single Payer System....
Instead, Medicare has been almost completely privatized through MA, Medigap, Part D, and contracting for Parts A and B.
Every day during this shutdown, Democrats are doubling down on the wrong battle and federal workers are suffering for it. I viviodly recal the Saturday vote that resulted in the passage of Obamacare. I was at a Democratic Party volunteer training and the participants were surprised that I was disappointed. "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good," I was told. I replied, "That would be true if this was good. It isn't. All points of view were supposed to have a seat at the table. The single payer point of view was not at the table. Our folks spent the night in jail instead."
This post was so eyeopening to me. Thank you for filling in the ACA context for this shutdown. I had no idea that the expiration of subsidies just takes us back to the original ACA that the Dems beat their chests about. It is truly theater of the absurd.
The funny thing is, Obamacare is very similar to the Heritage Foundation and Nixon administration’s health insurance plan from the ‘70s. What they had in common was subsidies for private sector health insurance to the working poor, and mandates for the people to buy insurance.
If you want to go back even further, the whole idea of a country-wide health insurance system based on private sector plans dates to 1884, when conservative chancellor Otto von Bismarck got it into Prussian law because the socialists were actually about to give him a hard time electorally. One key difference between the German, French, Japanese and Swiss implementation and our Rube Goldbergian ACA is, surprise surprise, they have public options and some level of price controls
I’m of the opinion that removing the individual mandate and Medicaid expansion requirement were the critical Jenga pieces to keep the tower standing. The ACA has been crumbling ever since, and expanded subsidies will not save it - especially on the backs of us plebeian taxpayers.
You’re certainly right, I for one want a Canada- or South Korea-style system
Describe South Korea system please. That might get a hearing (this week) on the right or with he who is in Asia .
Single-payer: Government as sole basic health insurer, delivery system being mostly private-sector. See https://www.internationalinsurance.com/countries/south-korea/healthcare/
and https://www.nhis.or.kr/english/wbheaa02900m01.do
The oligarchic nature of Democrats has been on display for years. In the last fifty, the 1% has extracted nearly 70 trillion from the rest of us. Nobody called that a Nanny State. The numbers speak: Trump won (if he did) becasue registered Democrats said, "NO. I'm not holding my nose again" and stayed home. I watched as the Clinton campaign stole the primary from Bernie (the tipping point for me was AZ and the closed polling stations after Hillary's people were told to vote by mail). In '20, it happened again. Why would I vote for such a party (and, yes, the party chooses the candidate)? Obama had the ability to pass single-payer in his first term before the midterms, when they rationalized that "this always happens in a midterm when people don't vote."
WE HAVE A CHANCE TO CHANGE ALL OF THIS (if Trump doesn't declare Martial Law or rig the machined with Elon)..
And Zohran Mamdani's campaign is the blueprint. I must have cried a hunbred times in watching the trifecta of AOC, Bernie and Zohran in the final rally with 13,000 devoted fans in Queens last Sunday. The way is evident (and has been since the first time I heard Bernie speak).
I'm concerned you'll be crying a lot more - or worse, lose the capacity to do so at all - if you continue to put your faith in those three.