Why did Chris Matthews say Bernie Sanders' win in Nevada is like the Nazi conquest of France?

[Carbonman]

@mcsnee

A public option is sensible. Seeking to eliminate private insurance–which is, as I understand it, Bernie’s goal–simply isn’t.

Yes, it is. A significant portion of the world does really well without private insurance. I live in such a country.
Ask anyone living in a country with nationalized healthcare (basically M4A) if they’d prefer their system to be watered down with a private option. Guaranteed the answer will be a resounding NO.

@mcsnee

It’s also not having to fund the vast majority of the development of new drugs, because the U.S.'s for-profit healthcare system covers that expense.

A huge portion of new drug development in America is tweaking existing medications so the manufacturers can charge more for basically the same product - insulin for example. There is a huge amount of useful and original drug development being done around the world. The US doesn’t have a monopoly on research.

[LDoBe]

Okay, so now we’re moving the goalposts fron “M4A is infeasible” to “Even if M4A is completely doable, it’d be bad for corporations that make 10,000% ROI on most commercial drugs, so we shouldn’t do it.”

Gotcha

[bookish1303]

MSNBC went the way of the dinosaur once they publicly decided to forgive Joy Reid for the bizarre narrative of her homophobic tweets and comments being the result of “hacking.” Perhaps even before that. I’m amazed that Matthews is still on the air in the first place. They followed along with the other cable news channels and made “entertainment” their primary goal, but in doing so moved their politics to the center to maintain “balance.” Truly depressing.

[Wanderfound]

@bookish1303

Perhaps even before that

[L0ki]

@mcsnee

Medical professional training is another big problem. Even without insane student loans, medical school and internship is an intensive commitment–seven to eleven years of post-college education. The UK’s NHS, for example, faces chronic medical-professional shortages as a result. Being able to earn a lot of money at a job is an incentive that Bernie’s proposal does not explain how to replace.

Pay is not the reason for a shortage of NHS medical staff. Shitty hours, crap working conditions and the general problems of having to deal with (shudders) patients while also not getting the social status that used to go with medicine are the main issues.

No one decides to go to medical school with dreams of sitting in a small room in some dreary village/small city in front of a computer, seeing a constant stream of whinging patients in ca. 10 minute slots from 8am to whenever the clinic finally shuts, typing symptoms into the screen and prescribing what the computer tells you.

Unfortunately, that is what the majority of medical practice is. It pays quite nicely but it’s not the stuff dreams are made of.

[gatto]

@mcsnee

without the support of the other two branches of government to boot

the judiciary is (theoretically) non-partisan. they have no support either to give or take away.

the legislature is an issue. there’s a lot - as 45 has shown - the president can do without them. long term, the democrats do need to swing some senate seats their way.

working on “fair fight” stacey abrams is doing, warren’s plans on political money reform, working on federal standards for state elections, and sanders push for actual working class issues all could help change that.

nobody ( i hope ) expects m4a to happen in a day, even if (once?) sanders gets elected.

[gatto]

@L0ki

Shitty hours, crap working conditions and the general problems of having to deal with (shudders) patients while also not getting the social status

ive never understood dentists. where do they come from? ( i’m being half serious here. ) it’s not pay. there’s tons more ways to get wealthy than to be a dentist. even in the us of health-care-so-expensive-you-could-retire-off-the-cost-of-a-single-surgery a.

[Wanderfound]

A thread to remind folks of the healthcare status quo:

Michelle DuBarry

Before we knew the outcome, I sat at his bedside, his tiny stitched-together body hooked to a million incessantly beeping machines, straining to recall what our deductibles were. I worried I wouldn’t be able to keep working during what could be a long hospital stay.

I googled FMLA and learned I wouldn’t qualify b/c I hadn’t been at my job for a year. If I lost my job we would both be without insurance. Without my income, there was no way we could afford $1K/month COBRA.

Within a week of his death, before we had even received a bill, the hospital put a lien on our house to make sure we wouldn’t skip out on the PICU bill.

My husband who was also injured in the crash, was refused treatment by his primary care doc b/c she didn’t accept payment from auto insurance and his health insurer wouldn’t pay til we exhausted our auto insurance.

Have you ever had to call around to find a doctor that can handle your specific insurance situation? Have you done it in the days after your toddler has died, when you haven’t even figured out a way to talk about it, when your husband is injured and urgently needs a Rx refill?

We ended up with around $5K in out-of-pocket expenses and our health insurer paid $175K. Eventually, we’d receive a settlement from the at-fault driver. For a minute, we thought we might be OK financially.

Then our health ins. co. came after our pain and suffering settlement. They demanded reimbursement for the $175K they were out. Turns out they were legally entitled to do that. In an instant, our modest settlement - meant to compensate for the loss of our son - was reduced to $0

(Side Note: It took me 8 yrs but in 2019 I initiated and passed a bill making this practice illegal in OR. It remains legal in many states.)

Through all this, my husband and I both were suffering from PTSD. We had jobs, a mortgage. All of it hung in the balance. In a humane system, we could grieve without having to navigate an insurance juggernaut, without worrying about being thrust into debt and poverty.

Despite Obamacare and “good” union insurance, we were nearly bankrupted by a 27-hour hospital stay.

Every one of us lives in a body that is going to fail. Sometimes it happens suddenly, catastrophically. Do you want to fight with insurers when this happens? Do you want to sort through a mountain of bills when you lose someone you love, when your grief is raw?

There is no compromise on healthcare that doesn’t leave millions of people unacceptably vulnerable to corporations trying to profit from sick and injured people.

I believe change is coming. I am ready to fight for other families, for #MedicareForAll, and to elect @BernieSanders president. Sending solidarity and love to all who are suffering under this awful system.

[L0ki]

Sadists, the lot of them. It’s the only explanation.

[LDoBe]

It’s not my problem to solve in the end. But if we’re going to rely on the republican support for literally anything then you ought to prepare to be disappointed.

So much power has been concentrated in the executive since 9/11 that I think there’s a good chance a president can just make something like M4A happen really. Bernie is both smarter than trump and willing to use a legal team that won’t get him impeached. As long as we have the executive abusing power we may as well vote for a benevolent dictator rather than the dictator that promises to fuck up everyone’s lives so he and his buddies can get rich.

[gatto]

@mcsnee

That’s a different problem from new drug research

most of the articles i found on this are about 10 years old ( probably a funding issue i’d guess )

Drugs developed by Uncle Sam, PhD, play an outsized role in medicine

but it seems, like this la times article summarizes, that a lot of the funding for research - even at private companies - comes from public dollars

other articles show a roughly 1/3 equal breakdown between pharma, biotech, and university ( with public funding going to all three ) producing new drugs, the novel drugs mostly from the biotech and university realm.

capitalism tends towards rent ( money over time ) rather than pay once solutions. but that’s probably a separate argument for public funding, setting up x prizes when needed, and the like.

anyway, all seems heavily off topic to chris matthems attacking sanders with ad hominem derogatory remarks.

it’s like a reverse godwin or something.

[74hc595]

@mcsnee

strangle the drug companies

With things like opioid crisis and Shkreli-like price gouging, I’d say that drug companies are doing the strangling right now.

[anon61221983]

@mcsnee

not least because they have never been much beyond soundbites.

Pretty much not the case. He has some rather detailed proposals on the table, has been focused on these issues literally all of his career, unlike some others running. Both Warren and Sanders have substance to their proposals.

[Fang]

Unpopular opinion time!

Matthew’s original comparison wasn’t about Sanders and comparing him to Nazis. His point was on the situation of the Dem establishment, comparing them to France after Paris is taken, with the argument that while notionally they still have resources, they should and would surrender soon. Unfortunate implications, sure, but there’s a change of emphasis in how this is reported from the original.

“It looks like Bernie Sanders is hard to beat… I think it’s a little late to stop him, and that’s the problem,” Matthews said during a panel segment. “It’s pretty much over unless that changes.”

He then dropped the eyebrow-raising WWII reference, seemingly as a way to describe how Sanders has—in his view—clinched the Democratic nomination.

“I’m reading last night about the fall of France in the summer of 1940. And the general calls up Churchill and says, ‘It’s over,’” Matthews said. “And Churchill says, ‘How can it be? You got the greatest army in Europe. How can it be over?’ He said, ‘It’s over.’”

[Will]

@mcsnee what about the current system incentivizes new drugs? If anything, the incentive is to exploit existing drugs as extensively as possible. See insulin.

Smaller profits are still profits and the margins are still huge. https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20170602.060376/full/

Medicare for all is extremely plausible and if you actually engage with Sanders and Warren’s proposal rather than repeat the soundbites, you will see the details.

Passing anything at all through a Republican Senate and Trump judiciary is a challenge. If this is your major concern then you may as well simply throw away any of the Democrat candidates proposals as unworkable.

[anon73430903]

@Fang

His point was on the situation of the Dem establishment, comparing them to France after Paris is taken, with the argument that while notionally they still have resources, they should and would surrender soon. Unfortunate implications, sure, but there’s a change of emphasis in how this is reported from the original.

It is still outside the realms of acceptable. Bernie Sanders, a Jewish man who had relatives die in Nazi Germany, was put in the role of the Nazis in that example. There are other examples in history that do not have that problem, Chris Matthews should have used those.

Then again, we are talking about a man who thinks that Vote Blue No Matter Who only applies to left wing voters.

MSNBC's Chris Matthews Suggests Four More Years of Trump Might Be Better for...

[eraserbones]

@mcsnee

Explain to me how it’s going to incentivize, for example, the development of new drugs.

The US can make enormous gains in life expectancy, quality of life, and lowering infant mortality by increasing access to known treatments, ensuring affordability of existing (largely off-patent) medications, educating the public, and applying decades-old well-understood public health measures. We could push all of these desirable metrics upwards for decades without a single new drug or treatment option.

Personally, I’m a fan of new miracle drugs and cutting-edge surgical procedures, but if I have to choose between them and reliable access to existing drugs and treatments I will choose the latter in a heartbeat.

[anon29537550]

I won’t point-for-point this the way you did, but I have to point out that the profit motive for pharma development is how now are dealing with $600 Epipens, mortgage-your-house insulin, infinite ED treatments and 0 new antibiotic classes despite growing numbers of omniresistant bacteria. Pharma as currently structured does not care how many people die, it cares about the bottom line. Profit motive in healthcare inevitably results in deaths of patients. M4A now!

[anon29537550]

[anon48584343]

@lorq

Whenever Chris Matthews and James Carville and their ilk come onscreen to hand-wring, I feel like they should be introduced with, “And now let’s hear what the '90s has to say…”

And when trump rallies it’s the 1930’s calling and it wants Hitler back.

F’ing tired of all these old whiny white guys.