That’s just not how it works. Medicare overpays for care already, despite it’s mass. There’s only so much you can move that needle when you have under 50% share of the market. Setting up a new agency to be the public option, or just piggy-backing on Medicare won’t change the fundamental problem, which is that health insurers and hospitals both benefit from higher price of care. In order to reverse that equation, you have to eliminate private health insurance.
ETA: And when the public option ends up costing an arm-and-a-leg, opponents will say “Look - you said this would reduce costs and instead it increased them! The Invisible Hand has spoken!”
Unfortunately that doesn’t matter much if it’s not also wildly popular with a supermajority in the senate, which quite often doesn’t match the will of the people. Coverage for pre-existing conditions has been extremely popular, even among Republicans, but the GOP has still been working to dismantle that in the courts for years.
If you really want to move the needle you need to look at all of the stuff in the background that also effects healthcare costs, including clinician salaries (which need to cover HIGH malpractice insurance costs - so better add healthcare tort reform and malpractice insurance regulation to the list of to do items) AND we need to correct for healthcare profession tuition costs. I believe Warren either has the plans or has the capacity to develop plans to address these additional factors. I don’t think any of the remaining candidates do.
others have said it, but at the very least i hope she stays in case sanders or biden gets can’t physically make it through the primary.
like you say, there’s also the possibility she can pick biden apart a bit while leaving sanders to focus on trump and the republicans. [eta: assuming that sanders supporters can stop trying to tear her down for simply existing. ]
she has my vote regardless. i feel she’s the best communicator of the bunch, and the best one to navigate policy to actually get things done.
Or the voters. You can blame the DNC all you like for promoting their preferred candidate(s) and for encouraging non-viable candidates to drop out, but at the end of the day democratic party voters rejected Sanders in 2016, and so far aren’t turning out for him in 2020 the way he had hoped. It is fine to be frustrated, or to think that those voters are making a bad choice, but don’t disregard the fact that they made a choice or that it was their right to do so just because you don’t agree with them.
If Sanders wins a majority of votes at the convention under the rules that were put in place at his request(demand) last cycle, the DNC will allow him to be the candidate – and the same with Biden. Now if there is no ability to reach a majority vote by the pledged delegates alone, then yes the DNC will essentially choose. And all signs point that they would much prefer Biden. But Sanders has to fail to win first. They can’t and won’t call it for Biden if Sanders wins outright.
That said: I think it is clear Biden has the edge in a contested convention, but if Sanders has a strong plurality of the delegates but can’t quite make a majority I think there is a reasonable chance the super-delegates would pick Sanders. Or they would force some match making deal for a presidential/VP combo that would mollify enough people to get someone nominated.
my assumption is that it will create a two-tier healthsystem. the public option will be cash poor, and constantly threatened by republicans ( and some democrats. ) even if starts off well, it will quickly wither without the proper dollars.
no one who can afford the public market, therefore, will use the public option. that will lead to further justifications for cuts, raising income thresholds, adding job requirements, and therefore still leaving a notable number of people uninsured.
prices will continue to go up.
another dozen years later, with millions of people still filing for bankruptcy due to costs, with people still doing go-fund-mes ( thanks america ), with people still dying – we’ll be right back here again.
only with a bigger deficit than before, and less will.
It depends on what the public option is. Is the government actually going to try to run competitive (though not scammy) healthcare? If so then I think the public option would over the long run basically drive the private insurers out of business. All things being equal, just not taking a profit means everything can be cheaper, and it’s not like the government is a small player that can be muscled out.
But I expect a public option in the US to be carefully crafted to not upset the big private insurers.
I’m not sure if you have real familiarity with malpractice insurance, and if you do forgive me for speculating about something you know about. But it struck me that you assume that the high cost of malpractice insurance stems from the high cost of malpractice. A few quick internet searches found me articles on ending anti-trust exemptions for malpractice insurers. It seems they run monopolies in many areas.
I don’t really trust that insurance is priced the way an economics 101 class would tell us the market prices things. The solution might be for the government should get into offering medical malpractice insurance as well.
This doesn’t make much sense imo. If she suspends her campaign now, she could just as easily receive the nomination at the convention should Biden or Sanders’ health fail. Hell, she could completely drop out and still receive the nomination at the convention. Anyone could. In fact, staying in and getting next to no delegates might even make her less likely to receive a brokered nomination since she might be perceived as a weaker candidate than someone who didn’t bork a ton of primaries.
While no one would defend all of the attacks on Warren - there are certainly some ugly ones - I feel there are very legitimate critiques about her as a candidate and tactician. Her position in the race at this point only creates confusion for progressives and all but assures Biden’s nomination. That alone should give her supporters pause as to whether she represents progressive values or not.
I was thinking about 2016 and how Bernie voters felt the DNC had screwed them, pulled strings for Hillary, and that’s why she won. At the end of the day it’s still the voters who decide, Bernie was strong enough to give Hillary a challenge, but a lot of DEM voters are just GOP-lite voters. Plus an awful lot of voters don’t think too deeply about the issues, they are buying into the horse-race-mentality the media promotes, or voting based on personal quirks like “I can really relate to him/her on a personal level.” Democracy dies in the darkness.
Biden surpassed expectations everywhere, won a number of states that were projected to be hard for him to appeal to, got the most votes, and won the most delegates. Even in California where Sanders has – to his strong credit – put together an extremely strong campaign and especially reached out to the large latinx population and turned around a state that voted for Clinton over him 4 years ago Biden did a lot better than projected. So yeah, Biden didn’t sweep the board and it isn’t over until its over, but suggesting that yesterday anything other than a very good day for Biden and a moderately bad one for Sanders is just not inline with reality (and of course, a very bad day for Bloomberg and Warren). If Sanders had lost California after the effort he put into it, then it would literally by time to just call the race.
I know it is annoying when “exceeding expectations” is held up as an accomplishment even when you loose, but overall Biden absolutely won the day if not the battle both on expectations and outcome.
Plus it should hardly come as a surprise that candidates who spent a lifetime working within the Democratic political machine (i.e. Hillary & Biden) can harness the power of that machine toward their own campaigns more easily than an outsider like Bernie.
Dismissing people who didn’t vote for your preferred candidate as either stupid or closet Republicans is not a good way to either build a coalition or analyze the situation.
I have a passing familiarity with malpractice insurance (I work in healthcare higher education), but you are making an assumption that I meant the insurance costs stems from the high (legal) cost of malpractice. The two are tied together at least somewhat from a risk perspective, but I merely meant to say that regulation of malpractice insurance (and the whole insurance industry, in general) is sorely needed. I agree with you that in many areas there is a monopoly of sorts for this coverage. I would welcome a government option or additional regulation. The insurance market needs the same scrutiny that Liz gave banks.
Heh. I’m not dismissing them, I’m describing who they are, and accepting them as such. My mom is a non-Bernie voter, she can’t understand why I like Bernie, calls him “too radical”, she really is a Republican of a different era-- the party moved right and left her behind and now she votes for Democrats.
And face it, we’re talking about the USA – there’s no shortage of stupidity here, among any political party.
So not dropping out in synch with Buttigeig and Klobuchar is somehow supporting Biden? We’re talking about Elizabeth “and yet, she persisted” Warren. Not gonna happen.
Among other things, Graham says that black voters believe that Biden is their best bet to defeat President Donald Trump, and they don’t trust white voters to actually back a more progressive candidate such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) or Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).
“I like [Warren and Sanders], but I don’t see them winning, because I think they’re too progressive for a lot of white people in his country,” one South Carolina voter tells Graham. “I don’t think white people generally vote in a way that will benefit them if it also benefits Black people.”
I don’t really get what you’re saying… it has nothing to do with Pete or Amy. At this point Warren has virtually no path to a victory except through a brokered convention. And if she is splitting the progressive vote by staying in the race, that helps Biden. Is there any good reason she’s staying in? Pride? It makes no sense except to curry favor with the establishment.
I really would like her to support the progressive cause rather than the centrist one, especially because I think Biden is a weak candidate v Trump. To that end, I’d like her to suspend her campaign now, which would most likely help Bernie. Short of that, I hope that she convinces her earned delegates to support Bernie at the convention, but I will not be surprised if she throws her support to Biden.
You do know that (thanks to Sanders!) The superdelegates have much less power now and are basically tickets to the convention? And that news organizations are not reporting superdelegates in their delegate totals? Basically superdelegates only vote if no candidate wins the first vote either by having an outright majority of pledged delegates or by winning over enough pledged delegates representing candidates who have dropped out. At that point yes, you could ask for doing a plurality vote or having only pledged delegates vote again for a majority, but in any case you are talking about a case where no candidate is a clear preference. And honestly if it comes to the convention and Sanders is leading by a significant margin but can’t hit 50% I really doubt that the superdelegates will overturn that and pick Biden. Not because they like Sanders but because overriding a clear favorite – which is different from promoting their own preference – is not a good position for electability.
