I mean, I’ve yet to hear a single workable solution for healthcare reform from the republicans. So this seems just about accurate.
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You can see the cascades dividing Washington in half between the urban west, and the rural east.
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And the minority chunks here and there
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That’s called a perverse incentive. And as far as I’m concerned, it’s literally perverse, because it’s making obscene amounts of money by relying on human suffering. Just like war.
That’s some inelasticity of demand that I will morally judge the exploitation of.
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Sure.
Look at it their way (because I had to hear about it over and over from them). They’re largely unemployed, having just moved five states, and now the government is demanding they pay money they don’t have for insurance they can’t afford (until they find work) or demanding fines. This was all new at the time as well. So, from their point of view, they were being forced to pay money they didn’t have either way for something they didn’t want at the time by the big government.
They chose to pay the fines, in any case, because the fines were cheaper than the insurance. After jobs were found, the next year they got insurance.
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I love Alan Grayson! He is a glorious bastard.
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glorious or magnificent?
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Gotta fix hospital billing issues, where treatments are billed at rates at random multiples of the actual cost of providing the services - rates that customers are not allowed to review in advance.
You have to fix both at the same time, I think, as they feed on each other in a dysfunctional symbiosis (well, dysfunctional to end users, but functional to CEOs taking home big pay checks.)
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The people who voted for President Pee Pee Pants did so for two reasons as far as I can see.
First: when people are afraid for their future, the status quo (HRC) looks worse than “fuck all this shit.” Fox News and the Right Wing have done a bang-up propaganda job of making people terrified of where they stand, and the opposition party has done fuck all in making that any better.
Second: Tribalism. If you believe that “liberals are ruining the nation” as a matter of dogma and the choice you are given for president is between Trump and A Liberal, it doesn’t matter what either one of them actually says.
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With the caveat that no game is ever quite as good as it’s trailer, I’ve gotta say, NitW has a fucking grand trailer.
Supposed to have a very rust-belt-halloween vibe to it and that shit is my jam, so I’m kind of pumped.
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I don’t understand why he didn’t run 
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Do you really understand neoliberalism?
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I’m thinking the answer to that question is a resounding no…
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I get it, but if they don’t want nationalized healthcare, but also for hospitals to treat dying people who can’t pay… And it’s fundamentally wrong to trust it to capitalism here. That’s why all economies are mixed. People have different priorities. And, basically, every first world country has universal or nationalized healthcare. Because it just makes sense, if healthcare is supposed to be a human right.
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If you blur your focus you can see a dark stripe all along the eastern side of the continental divide, up to that almost black county in west central Montana. What happened up there, an unpublicized nuclear meltdown?
I think that the distrust in vaccines and modern medicine is a direct result of capitalism. This one is bipartisan, and stems from people believing that healthcare and pharmaceuticals have become subservient to capitalism and are no longer driven by outcomes but instead by profit. Solution to those on the left: take the profit motive out of the equation. Solution to those on the right: Tax breaks for the rich.
Edit: And there is certainly room for critique on whether the way we fund the sciences directs results, and whether healthcare is making people healthier. Just seems like we never get to talk about this things in a meaningful way because our media is so polluted with bullshit.
Edit: Obviously you probably know this based on my reading further on up the thread. Leaving redundant post as testament to my ADHD. /will go stand over there now
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We could point out that insurers have oligopolies or actual monopolies. We could point out a significant degree of regulatory capture.
But if I were looking for a economics term to describe the problem, I’d say something more like, “The basic assumptions of economics are completely flawed, in particular in this case, the idea that people will compete for resources at all levels of the system when cooperating is usually smarter.”
I think you’re giving an uncharitable reading to that statement. Based on the surrounding text I think it was intended more like, “Neoliberalism is all about putting more lipstick on the pig of the free market so it can keep doing it’s thing,” than “Neoliberalism is about fixing actual problems with the free market so it can keep doing it’s thing.” I might be wrong.
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You’re going all meta. All they know is one month they were fine and the next month the government demanded that they pay over $500 a month for something they didn’t want or be fined. That’s not a good way to get people on the side of the programs.
Milton Friedman. “Neoliberalism and its prospects”. Farmand 17 February 1951, pp. 89-93
Of course, the main problem with understanding neoliberalism as an economic school advocated by Hayek, Friedman et al. is that it was implemented, often not very successfully, in South America (with the CIA’s “assistance”, in Russia (after Gorbachev, before Putin), in developing nations (under the aegis of the World Bank), and so it has attracted a lot of political baggage–above and beyond leftist critique.
Because neoliberalism is, in part, an artifact of American foreign policy, the epithet became attached to Hillary Clinton, even if, viewed from the point of view of domestic economics, the critique doesn’t quite hold up-- the Republicans have been trying to systematically dismantle the federal state for some decades now, and the Democrats haven’t.
