Salon article hits on disingenuous questioning of Medicare for all by certain candidates:
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it’s a terrible idea.
it will create two kinds of insurance: insurance for white collar workers, and insurance for the poor. and you can guess right quick how well that will go.
medicare for all only works when the pool of people is large enough. if you have two pools, public and private, with all wealthy people in the private plan, the public plan be starved for funds. the low funding and the the lower starting “healthiness” of people using the public “option” will lead to worse outcomes for it. people will point to those outcomes as proof that public insurance can’t work in america, and goodbye public option.
the public private split is wanting to have the cake and eat it too at best. and a delibrate attempt to kill public healthcare at worst.
we’re all citizens. we all contribute to this country. often those contributions aren’t measurable by income. we all deserve the same healthcare regardless.
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I haven’t really seen fit to waste energy learning about Pete Buttigieg in any depth, but my initial vague approval seems to ebb every time I read about him.
I can buy that someone would believe in good faith that it’s better to improve a shitty system than to fail to implement an ideal system. But that’s not the same as pretending the current arrangement is a good thing which people want the “choice” to keep. That’s deeply disingenuous – it attacks reality and sabotages other candidates’ good-faith arguments – and if Pete Buttigieg as the supposed intellectual candidate comes out with that kind of bullshit, he deserves to be dismissed, including by “centrists”. (Again, I don’t know the details of what he has said)
The other thing is his political trajectory; in high school he apparently won an essay contest by lionizing Bernie Sanders, but by the start of his political career (i.e. now) he’s already much less progressive than a bunch of older candidates, including Bernie Sanders himself. Wherever you put him on the political spectrum right now, he’s almost certainly just passing through on his journey rightwards.
(disclosure: I can’t pretend it didn’t affect my opinion when I discovered his husband took his last name. wtf)
Taking hiring recommendations from Zuckerberg pretty much crosses out my remaining interest. If it were just letters of recommendation from people who’d applied, OK, although why would Zuckerberg be writing those?, but in any case, the linked article says Z’erg sent him a list of recommendations. That’s the difference between “should I let these Facebook people work for me?” and “who does Facebook think I should hire?”.
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I agree with everything else you said, but I’m confused about this. What’s wrong with taking husband’s last name?
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Yeah, there’s this effort to pin Warren in a corner and say taxes will go up. Yes, they will. They will go up less than you are currently paying for healthcare. Like someone is offering to sell you a $20 bill for $5 and you are quibbling over whether the cost will be called a “tax” or not.
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Yes - but there is perceived jeaopardy here if your employer does not hand over the cost of the prior health care benefit as compensation - because then you just face the tax increase.
The other disearnest part of this discussion is the assertion - how will we pay for this, ohmy, ohmy, peemypants!!
The truth is WE ARE ALREADY GOD DAMN PAYING FOR THIS RIGHT NOW in high insurance premiums for lousy coverage, high medical fees with no insurance coverage, time and productivity lost fighting with insurance companies for benefits they are supposed to be paying, and immoral profits made off our misfortune.
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Really?
In 2019, Buttigieg professed himself “troubled” by former President Obama’s decision to commute the sentence of Chelsea Manning, the Iraq War whistleblower, days before leaving office in 2017; Buttigieg also gave a mixed evaluation of Edward Snowden’s disclosure of classified information, saying that “we’ve learned things about abuses and that one way or another that needed to come out” but that “the way for that to come out is through Congressional oversight, not through a breach of classified information.”[96]
While running for Indiana State Treasurer in 2010, Buttigieg once described his record as fiscally conservative.[25]
Buttigieg is a committed supporter of Israel, breaking from the increasing trend in the Democratic Party to support Palestinians and the Palestinian cause
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Um, pardon? This is Warren’s exact standard response to the taxes question in every debate and interview where she asked. She’s been very clear on this point. Only Sanders what now?
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It’s possible it could work. Canada and the UK both have some private insurance mixed in. The private’s cover things the provincial system doesn’t, like orthodontics, pets, and other things. That said, I don’t support trying to introduce a “public option” to the US. It would instantly get corrupted and defunded by the Corporatists who would then point at it and cry “See? We told you it would be bad!”
Medicare For All is the only viable path to saving US healthcare, in this Canadian ex-pat’s opinion.
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This is actually my worry about this strategy. I could see employers saying “your compensation (meaning take-home pay) is exactly the same as it was before” while pocketing whatever employee contribution had been made to health insurance. You would think that would not work, but as a small employer, I can testify that most employees look at the number on the check and not much beyond that. We have had employees take high deductible insurance and then refuse to fund the HSA that goes with it, because if they did it would be almost as much as the other options. Works fine until you have to use the insurance. But that calculus just does not compute for paycheck to paycheck workers.
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Exactly, also in Italy is the same.
Most insurances and even the Poste Italiane (that is by law a corporation but is totally controlled by the government that has 70% of the shares) has an accident insurance that will cover the extra expenses one will have if get hurt or maimed.
When Lehman Brothers got bankrupt the government could have been choos to step in and use it to create a public insurance company, sell all the not health-relate activities and become a public insurance option.
Sorry, but we all watched her refuse to directly say it during the debate.
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I spent a long time trying, and failing, to summarise the giant iceberg of gay politics at issue here. Instead, let me turn the question around and ask, what would be a good reason to do that? And how do you decide who takes their spouse’s name?
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it seems a personal decision and entirely unrelated to a candidate’s run for the presidency. ( and i dont favor mayor pete at all. )
for all we know, his husband never got along with his family. for all we know, they wanted one family name to share with their kids. maybe they lost a bet.
it’s really not our business.
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Exactly, the public option route creates medicaid for all, not medicare for all, and medicaid is definitely a living example of what kind of acceptance rates and funding a “fallback” public option gets.
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Hitting on how to pay for it and Warren vs Sanders on their position:
Warren is trapped by her proclivity with “plans”. If she can’t show a plan for this as well, it by default means she’s not committed to it. If she does come up with a plan for it, its bound to be easy to fault.
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Typically there’s no reason to do it, but sometimes a person severely dislikes his own last name. For example that person’s family may be homophobic or otherwise hateful and he want to distance himself from them. The last name may be also tied to memories of past abuse and trauma.
Edit: I’m not speculating what’s the reason here (as @gatto said, it’s none of our business), just giving possible reasons that people do it in general.
This, very much. Interpersonal decisions are just that. I know couples where the husband took the wife’s name, where they jointly hyphenated their names, where she hyphenated hers but he did not, and where she kept her name. And where she took his name because “would I rather have the name of the man I chose, or the name of the man my mother chose?” Is there a hierarchy of “correctness” in these situations? Or is each an expression of the desires of the people involved and no one else’s concern? I choose the latter.
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