The truth of it is the entire American economy is a corporate welfare state. We, as citizen entities, are just a domestic commodity.
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Can’t tell if trolling, but dude would he to give up a Senate seat and run for the house instead for that…
Not trolling. Me being impulsive + ignorant. Big difference.
You know what? I’m okay with that. If someone spent $250k and 12 years training to become a doctor and save lives, I’m really okay with them having the Ferrari and the summer home in the Hamptons. Nurses do shit on a daily basis that you couldn’t get me to do if you held a literal gun to my head. Providing any kind of medical care is insanely demanding on every level- physical, mental, spiritual- and whatever they get paid for doing it, it isn’t enough.
My ex works for a company that makes medical equipment. They developed the artificial heart. They build insulin pumps that keep diabetic people walking around instead of hooked up to dialysis. They invented a device that reduces surgeries from a 12" incision to a pair of 1" incisions and cuts healing time by 3/4. Whatever they charge, it’s pretty likely worth it.
Drug companies are scamming us. There’s some major shit there that needs to change. But at the end of the day, vaccines work. Antibiotics and chemotherapy work. Despite their many, many flaws, they are producing drugs that save and improve lives.
Insurance companies, on the other hand, don’t provide a service. They don’t create products. They don’t develop new drugs or technologies or procedures or do anything to actually help people. Literally all they do is ration care and skim a profit from standing between doctors and patients and burying everyone around them in administrative costs for reams of paperwork. Fuck em.
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Stick around- We’ll all be there soon!
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I honestly have no faith anymore in getting out of this without a civil war. Historically, this kind of wealth inequality, this kind of polarization, this kind of technological shift- Well, there’s only a couple places that kind of situation can go.
Your argument is the exact same one that has been used on everything from the Protestant Reformation to the American Revolution to ending slavery to women’s rights to reforming healthcare.
Bernie supporters by and large have a very good understanding of how politics work: Shooting black teenagers dead in the street for shoplifting, transvaginal ultrasounds for rape victims who want an abortion, denying queer couples their marriage license, and Donald motherfucking Trump being elected president are exactly how politics work in this country.
The difference is that we deem those workings to be unacceptable, and understand that the people who benefit from those problems are not going to be the ones to solve them.
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While it was called the “doc fix”, really that money went to hospitals, labs, pharma, etc. It would have had little impact on actual doctor salaries except perhaps doctor-owned clinics who liked to make extra cash by gouging the government.
Mind you, what it actually did was avoid the limits on rate increases year to year that were set in law designed to keep costs from spiraling out of control. Had they not passed the doc fix every year, Medicare would have spent about a couple trillion dollars less than it actually did.
Worse, Medicare rate schedules are used as a soft floor for hospitals when negotiating rates with private insurers so those rate increases rippled through to private insurance costs as well.
If you want a reason why your healthcare today is so expensive… the doc fix is at the top of the list.
You plan to boycott the insurance system and you believe that I will too if I “stick around”?
I’m already boycotting the insurance system by virtue of not being able to actually afford insurance, while technically making too much money to get it for free.
I’m rather quite certain that if we don’t do something drastic, then you and most of the people here will be joining me with just as much choice in the matter as I have.
That’s not a boycott. As I said above, a failed boycott won’t open up any new risk for you. People who give up the insurance they do have are making themselves more vulnerable. The system needs to be changed, but not to the detriment of other working class people.
Forgive me if I have a more optomistic outlook. I don’t think that’s true.
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Try again. Try harder.
Eh, I was unclear, obviously. I was talking about the mechanics of politics, the nitty-gritty of how the political process works, and not about the broad kind of policy stuff or political ideals or the rest that you’re talking about in your reply…
Things like so many Bernie enthusiasts apparently having no idea how the Democratic primaries worked, or imaging they’re some kind of a first phase of the election instead of an intra-party arrangement, or having no clue about the superdelegates and what they meant, or (due to all the above things) insisting that Sanders was going to come back and win when it was obvious to anyone who understood the workings of the process that he was never going to catch up with Clinton, and so on.
Or, hell, the really basic understanding of how the general election and the electoral college work, and why pushing for Sanders or Warren or whomever to run as a third-party fantasy liberal savior candidate, or writing in Bernie’s name, would be not just stupid and useless, but actively counterproductive and helping Trump.
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You are ignoring everything that @Sagoli and @CarlMud are saying to you about their views of health care and their ability to just “drop” coverage at a whim.
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Is there any similar fund for people who’d rather see a third party in office? Because I’d like to donate equal amounts to both.
And let’s not forget folks like myself who live in a state in which dropping health coverage out of protest wouldn’t only put me at enormous risk, but would prevent me from filing my taxes, getting a loan, driving a car, opening a bank account, etc. I’m absolutely required to have insurance to live here.
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