As usual, West Wing was well ahead of the curve here.
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I guess I’m shallow but I clicked on this post because of the bad-ass t-shirt.
Which on one level I love it- on the other level it makes me remember all the punk bro boys who stiff-armed me out of the pit all the time.
Did they grow up and become Bernie bros? Or have we concluded that most/all the Bernie bros were bots and infiltrators?
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Depends on how early in the cycle they manage to establish universal care. Koch money isn’t going to have a lot of effect on an electorate learning to love universal healthcare, especially if the moderates can say, “Hey, you people are sleeping sounder at night because of something I brought in.”
Believe me, it does become something to cherish. Up here the notion of two-tiered healthcare is sometimes floated by Conservative governments, and just as often gets shot down by the electorate: they really would have to pry universal healthcare out of our cold, dead hands.
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Single payer systems already do this. If you think that a single payer system will guarantee the latest and greatest treatment to everyone regardless of cost, you are not based in reality.
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And so do insurance companies right now, just without any incentive to promote public health, and less accountability. Your point?
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At least Joe Lieberman isn’t around to fuck it up any more.
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ugggghhhh FTG
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I’d guess that some Sanders supporters were indeed sexist people who just couldn’t vote for a woman. I’d guess most of us are just people who would rather have had Sanders over Clinton, but still voted for Clinton, because we recognized Trump for what he is.
Fuck those guys, always.
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If the Democrats were to get it into law early in 2021 (earliest date to avoid a veto) it wouldn’t be in the exchanges until 2022. On the other hand, one thing about adding an option in the exchanges is that the “this is good” does start early, so it would already be on the plate in plenty of time for the 2022 off-year elections.
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That’s the biggest issue. People like your barber (I hope he cuts hair very well if you keep going back to him) don’t understand that getting single payer healthcare doesn’t mean that all of the insurance goes away. If you want to add to what you have, go ahead and do it! If you don’t, then you are still covered!
makes me sad…
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A single payer system would mean that people don’t have to pay insane premiums and deductibles that they can’t afford. More people would be able to have regular wellness visits, and to go to the doctor before whatever is wrong with them is life-threatening. If we focus on that, fewer people will need the latest and greatest treatments, because they’ll be getting basic care that heads off illnesses at the pass more effectively. Less people will die early for no reason at all. If we had had single payer, maybe my dad’s cancer would have been caught much earlier and he’d still be with us today.
And @jproffitt71 is spot-on that for-profit insurance companies do nothing to protect and promote public health. They take money out of our pockets and put them into the pockets of their ceos and shareholders. They don’t care about whether or not people die, as long as they don’t have to pay out for expensive healthcare coverage.
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Maybe, but remember he would have been facing a hostile TGOP controlled Congress. No matter how good the ideas, they would still have to get through a group that hated the previous President.
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The health sector lobby is the largest in the United States. Unless Medicare is spun off into a quasi-government corporation (like the Fed) so Congress can’t touch it, I doubt very much that they’ll be able to keep costs down.
After all, the United States already spends more money per-capita on public healthcare than Canada, France, Germany, Japan, The Netherlands, Spain, Italy, the UK, South Korea and Australia and yet, ours covers less than half the population.
If we had proper price controls set up for healthcare, what we already spend on Medicare/Medicaid/CHIP/etc would be enough to cover every American. I’m not holding my breath for single payer to be a panacea. It might take costs down a bit, but for goodness sake, Congress passed a “doc fix” every year for decades to keep Medicare’s cost controls from kicking in. I don’t see why Medicare will start doing it once they cover everyone.
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It just gets my goat. Hillary is one of the most skilled politicians of all time. In a stare off between her and Putin, Putin would blink first.
Bernie has better policies, and as head of the Senate could have been a force of nature.
Hillary/Bernie could have crushed it. But at this point it’s all speculation and revisionist. I just wish they would have compromised with each other.
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To be honest, I think it was more likely that Clinton and the DNC establishment was unwilling to really compromise with Sanders, especially considering he’s always been an independent (despite always caucusing with the Dems). It could have been great if she’d done this, and it could have tipped the scales, especially if it had really shaped the party platform in a more progressive direction. But you’re right that it’s only speculation now, sadly.
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We will see a woman in the oval office in our lifetimes. As more people just get over themselves and realize half the talent is a gender that isn’t a dude, it will happen.
And that is what is so heart breaking. Hillary has an almost super hero skillset, in certain domains. As does Bernie, and they don’t really overlap. They could have been a political justice league 
️
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The combination is called Elizabeth Warren.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see Gillibrand at least on the lower half of the ticket in 2020 though. Or maybe Duckworth.
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Exactly! There’s still a market for add-ons, but with a basic system for everyone, it unleashes a lot of ancillary market forces that people ignore (which others have said on this thread) like preventive and therapeutic treatments that allow people to work, and lessening fear of leaving a lousy job for a better one. You’d think the right would see universal healthcare as a force multiplier in the economy.
Plus, universal healthcare is just the right damn thing to do.
I quit going to that barber several years ago. I found a place that was closer, better, and run by attractive women.
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Team Duckworth! Our first woman, first Asian American!
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I want Warren as POTUS so bad, but she also doesn’t seem to have the desire for that office. I won’t press the issue, but she is what the nation needs.
Now if she had a running mate named Harding, I might have a stroke caused by laughter.
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