Thank you. A lot of clarity came out after I posted, and I really should have come back to update it with an “ok, I’m good” revision.
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Yeps.
More: http://time.com/4157904/bernie-sanders-fundraising-donations-record/
Official statement: https://berniesanders.com/press-release/bernie-sanders-scores-big-win-breaks-major-fundraising-record/
Wanna join a revolution?
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I am a Hillary Clinton supporter, but I believe Bernie Sanders if elected would be a great president. Either Bernie or Hillary will be the 45th President of the United States.
Both Bernie and Hillary are qualified and experienced–compared to the republican candidates who are daft, dippy and dangerous for the future and direction of America.
People need to be engaged, register to vote, if possible help and encourage others to vote and vote in massive numbers on election day–in all 50 states, up and down the ticket for democrats.
America after electing the 1st president of African-European ancestry, will in my opinion soon elect the 1st president of Jewish ancestry or the 1st female president.
The fact that both Bernie and Hillary are qualified to be president, makes electing either of them president even more significant for the social, cultural and political evolution of America
Vote in 2016–for democrats.
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Well that’s a no-brainer… the Republicans are, as ever in living memory, thoroughly unconscionable.
But the thing is, there’s no equivalence between Sanders and Clinton. There’s as much of a gulf separating them as there is between Clinton and Trump. On the face of it that might seem like an exaggeration, but Sanders, among politicians, is a fucking saint. Clinton? Yet another shifty sellout like Obama, making nice sounds and then being worse than Bush.
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I really wouldn’t go that far. All the rest I’m with you on.
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It is if she goes in half-assed, that just hurts us in the long run.
Obama basically ruined our chance at properly reforming healthcare by nuking the public option. Now it’s going to be insanely different to add it…while if we had JUST pursued that it would have been likely easier than the ACA to pass.
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I can’t agree with your assessment of what took place. The public option, i.e. single payer would be better, but it would not have been easier to pass when the ACA was being cobbled together.
Insurance companies were in the mix from day 1. Their involvement guaranteed a light touch on reform. There were a few flash points that they (the big payers) had to concede: lifting the ban on pre-existing conditions and some way to rope in more uninsured. The rest was a clever reshuffling of the deck to make it so that all but the biggest insurers were squeezed out of the health insurance market. Howard Dean, MD, notably lodged his disagreement with the entire bill, calling it “insurance reform, not health care reform.” Single payer was never a real possibility because of who was involved in crafting that bill.
Obama, a lawyer, looks to other lawyers for help. He does not give much credence to any industry’s brightest minds to help with policy. Lip service but not direct control or oversight. He uses lawyers. He did the same with the BP disaster, appointing lawyers over experts to solve a big problem.
In this regard, I would expect Hillary Clinton to follow the same path: lawyers above all else for crafting policy, instead of the experts with lots of experience.
Single payer may never occur in the USA. But not because of the ACA. As long as insurance companies are calling the shots and the government lets them, then there will be no public option.
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That’s because the public option and single payer are two completely different things.
Single payer would have been near impossible, yes. That would have required immediately wiping out the entire insurance industry and would have been very scary and dramatic, more so than the ACA.
The public option was to give people the OPTION to choose Medicare as their insurance provider, which would have forced insurance companies to compete with the most efficient and cost effective insurer in the nation.
It would have been a far easier sell and while there would have been tons of resistance (the insurance companies aren’t stupid and it would have murdered their profits), but it didn’t require their input or their cooperation like the ACA did. It even could have started small and expanded as popularity/desire increased if needed (and I for one would take Medicare in a heartbeat)
So, that clarification in mind, do you still disagree?
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I think you might be underestimating how much people hate insurance companies at this point. Everyone struggles with them to pay for anything… it’s killing people. Single payer really is the way to go. While having a public option surely would initially cause competition, the insurance cos would still do all in their power to strangle that baby in the crib and once they did, we’d be back at where we are now.
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How?
I mean, yes, I prefer single payer too, but unless the insurance companies could undercut Medicare (while it’s negotiating power is steadily increasing I might add) they didn’t have any ammo.
I was working at DHS in Wisconsin during that whole debacle and the people I respected and who knew more about the subject than I were LIVID about that specific decision…and we’re talking the good people who want the same things as we do. They saw it as a stealthy mechanism to get single payer and to finally break away from block grants and other things that end up hurting our people.
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I mean, the way they always do it - outspending and FUD (well, as long as they don’t have to spend on people getting sick, of course). The same way they managed to undercut a public option in the first place.
I do think that the whole concept of turning a profit on people’s health is, well, it’s just plain evil and wrong. I’m sure you agree, but they are just monetizing people’s lives.
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OK, yes, you are correct about the distinction. However, because of this:
It would never have happened. It was never really on the table.
If you recall, the original coining of the phrase “Obamacare” did not refer to the entire ACA, as it does now. It referred specifically to an expansion of coverage outside of Medicare, a whole other funding mechanism. None of the crafters would agree to an expansion of Medicare!!! It was nuts!
So to expand public coverage, a separate mechanism of piecemeal expansion of individually participating state Medicaid systems was collectively referred to as “Obamacare”. Many of the red states, including Texas, refuse this federal money on some warped, convoluted principle that allowing an expansion of coverage in their states would be helping Obama and the Democrats.
Talk about crazy. But that was the original intent behind the word Obamacare. And the reason was because nobody at the table would agree to an expansion of existing public health coverage except by this new, less effective way that allowed states to still play it politically to try to torpedo the whole thing, as they are still trying to do.
Public option, single payer, all the rest is not going to ever be a possibility until Liberal forces have a supermajority. And even then, the insurance lobby is incredibly strong and the Libs might not do it even if they did have a supermajority.
So yeah, I disagree with the suggestion that “we missed our chance!” There was never a chance.
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The consensus among the people that I was working with (including Jim Jones, who was the basically the reason why Wisconsin consistently ranked so high until Walker came. He’s basically the legend of Medicaid directors here) was that the Public Option was a far more powerful approach.
I think we should side with him on this one.
Do you know if there were any representation at the negotiating table for the majority of people? Or was it just politicians, insurance company dudes, and representatives from medical organizations?
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I’m not discounting the support for a public option or saying that it was a bad idea, just agreeing with @awjt that it was never fully on the table in the first place. Anything that expanded medicaid was never going to get through, because this was always built as a give away to insurance companies, who only want to monetize our health.
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It wasn’t necessarily fully on the table then, but it had a chance to be in the future. Health care wasn’t becoming less of an issue and the ACA mitigated some of that pain. I’m not a fan of the pain, but by proposing the ACA at ALL instead of ONLY proposing the public option for a limited number of participants (which was the strategy Jim&Co preferred) a huge opportunity was missed.
And again, that’s not just my opinion, that’s the opinion of the guys who were forced to deal with insurance companies all the time and believed Medicare was the best thing for most people (Medicaid was a middleman with the dual-eligibles and supported a different population).
They believed that people underestimated the potential popularity of buying into Medicare, and how much demand for expansion they could create through Medicaid by way of program transitions and revenue sharing.
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This may help.
There was the appearance of populists on the ACA architecture commission, but the reality on the ground was that everyone in the room was a politico, an insurer or a shill. Bernie was not in the room, for example, nor Howard Dean, nor anyone who might have had a chance to convince the others that a public option would solve real problems. A public option was never on the table.
The ACA is a funnel. It funnels people via the individual mandate to a narrower field of big insurers. It changes some of the rules on how the insurers can offer plans, mitigate risk, reject claims and increase premiums, but the struggle for regular people still remains as big as it ever was.
Hillary Clinton will not improve this situation one bit. She will not change it. Other stuff will happen if she’s President, but health care coverage will not improve.
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I don’t disagree that a public option would be good. It would be. But we are the tiny minority. The public option was never on the table, and until the Libs are back in full control of most of the government, incl SCOTUS, a public option will not be on the table, in the doorway, in the foyer, on the steps, on the walkway, out walking around the Washington Monument or even waiting in a DC hotel room somewhere. And even then Hillary Clinton will not be leading the charge.
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Well, the point I was making is that Obama took away a lot of Bernie’s potential ammo.
Besides, a small Medicare expansion WAS on the table, it was just going to be limited to a very narrow band of individuals. That’s what the people I knew (who knew a lot more about this than we do) were hoping for because they had mechanisms to expand that demand and saw the dual-eligibles, QWDIs, and a few other groups as mechanisms to create more hybrid programs that could be demand-transitioned into straight Medicare.
There was a lot more to it than that…but the whole point is that the ACA took away most of those options and all of their potential leverage to try to pull it off, and they just needed a variant of it that COULD have gotten through under the radar.
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