The General US Politics Thread

Contractors have a well deserved reputation for being money sinks, so they hopefully won't be included.

Also, @M84, technically it's the original complaint that came from a dubious source. I don't know of the "pursuers" being suspect.

For those who don't remember, one of the guys who pursued most Clinton scandals. I'll be having some fun teasing BoBers with stuff like "hey, the investigation's run by the guy who ran the benghazi and emails investigations on Hillary, so it's probably as believable as those".

I mean, there's a difference between "you claim this position is a deal-breaker for you, so why are you ok with Sanders if he shares that position?" and "I hope he goes to jail from an investigation done by a guy that has done phony investigations on high-profile Democrats".

*Surprisingly, the comparisons aren't just a joke based on the title, Trump can be legitimately compared to Pink.

edited 25th Jun '17 7:32:45 AM by IFwanderer

x10 — Yeah, but just try telling them that their sense of entitlement is wrong, and they'll sue, even if they don't have a case. It would take a Supreme Court ruling to squash them, and even then, they probably wouldn't quit.

Their standard tactic is to tangle up the courts for as long as their hired-gun lawyers can charge billable hours, until the opposition gets tired of fighting them and throws in the towel.

EDIT: Dis thread asplode.

edited 25th Jun '17 7:32:13 AM by pwiegle

I thought you said competent in one area?

Even with a single-payer system, private contracting can easily inflate prices.

edited 25th Jun '17 7:33:52 AM by RainehDaze

Marketing and conning people count.

He is an effective Evil Clown, to be fair.

edited 25th Jun '17 7:33:45 AM by IFwanderer

Lying is indeed one area.

JBC: If he would stop portraying himself as some sort of messiah when he's not even in the party, then, yeah, I might be interested in what he has to say up until he denies the importance of anyone who isn't white.

edited 25th Jun '17 7:35:22 AM by Krieger22

Also, to those who might draw comparisons between Sanders and Corbyn...

1) Corbyn, unlike Sanders, actually managed to win the leadership of a party (much to the dismay of most of the M Ps) via a democratic vote.

2) Corbyn has been with said party from day one.

3) Corbyn's success in the general election was in large part due to him running on "Enough with the fucking austerity already" after years of austerity fucking up the UK.

It's weird that single-payer in the United States seems synonymous with universal healthcare in general.

I generally prefer single-payer to multi-payer since I don't really trust the government to be able to negotiate and control the private insurance and medical companies, at least not in their current state.

In the end though I think the most likely scenario (and what would "Medicare for all" would actually be) is a Japanese/ Australian style system of national health insurance with supplemental private insurance and/or hopefully supplemental state level public plans.

Those people are likely not going to come around unless the Democartic party has someone about as left as Bernie at the helm. And that's assuming that no stupid conspiracy theories of this being a plot by the DNC to undermine him or something.

It largely depends on how liberally you interpret the commerce clause of the constitution (which is how a lot of the things the Federal government does gets legally allowed) or how narrowly you want to interpret the 10th Amendment (which explicitly disallows the Federal Government from doing a lot of things).

Either way if Medicare already legally exist I don't see why single-payer would be legally disallowed, unless the Supreme Court wish to make Medicare illegal.

edited 25th Jun '17 8:05:51 AM by Mio

I think they were referring to a man called Ben Carson, though I admit my memory on that guy is hazy.

You forgot the Taxing & Spending clause.

That was who I was talking about, I was wondering at the intended comparison.

edited 25th Jun '17 8:02:45 AM by RainehDaze

The issue is the takings clause. Health insurance is a trillion dollar industry. You don't just destroy that in a whim without making sure everything is in order policy wise.

I'd rather work with them then meet potential resistance. And even then there are other factions who have a vested interest in killing any single payer proposal.

Is it a guaranteed win for the insurance corporations should (read:when) this gets to the Supreme Court? Not at all. But the ensuing debate up until then is gonna be extremely murky, with tons of propaganda from the right (and to some extent our side as well, just the nature of politics.

Trump. Asides from licensing his name to other real estate developers, almost all of his non-The Apprentice business ventures have crashed and burned.

The insurance industry has honestly demonstrated that it's pretty pointless working with them.

Even when we put out a really watered down system that was much more in their favor then almost anything else they put up resistance, and they seem perfectly content to let the system as it is now be destroyed.

They have stock market valuations that high, but that is not based on any kind of property - it is entirely based on the market expectation that their customers will maintain their subscriptions and get sick at historic rates. That isnt the kind of value you can ever seek recourse for when it gets destroyed, because it is inherently understood to be fickle as all hell. An expensive-to-treat pandemic could wipe them all out tomorrow, as would being out-competed by a new market entrant, ect, ect. The government deciding to provide health insurance is no different from that sort of event.

Again, that is the entire point of the free market - Market incumbents do not own their customers! That would be.. I dunno, corporatism? Fascism?

And that. That is really the main argument for single payer at this point. The US insurance industry appears to be ideologically opposed to actually doing its job effectively. Thus, the best move is a reform that leaves it a sad remnant of what it is. Practicality. These corporations are the enemy of sanity. So destroying them is, while not the point, a helpful side effect.

.. Also, I wouldnt be too concerned about them putting up a legal fight. If a single payer system looks likely to pass, the market will do what it always does, and panic. Everyone invested will try to sell at the same time, crashing the stock value. At which point the government can buy them out at the bottom of the market at penny stock valuations and close them out.

edited 25th Jun '17 8:25:38 AM by Izeinsummer

Like do the two of you even understand what happens when you destroy something that's 1/6th of the economy?

This isn't even about protecting insurance companies more about what the ripple effects would be domestically and by proxy worldwide.

Sure. "Not much". The thing you need to keep in mind is - This has been done elsewhere. Sky did not fall. The only consequence that actually matters is that a lot of medical billing experts need retraining and new jobs.

.. Less facetiously. health is a very big chunk of the US economy. Going by the desired level of service, it ought to be just over a tenth of it. 12% of gdp will pay for pretty darn gold-plated health care for all, given an efficient system. It is currently over 17% for.. not that stellar results. This means at least five percent of US gdp is presently the private sector engaging in epic amounts of red tape like a Kafkaesque parody of what the right wing thinks the government is. - it isnt even rent extraction, it is just epic amounts of human sweat tears and labor expended for no productive end.

Putting a stop to that will make the US quite noticeably richer.

edited 25th Jun '17 8:45:58 AM by Izeinsummer

Except you're not destroying it, a ton of skills will be transferable to the new single-payer system, you want to know where all the insurance accountents and burucrats will find jobs? Working for the new American Health Service. Not all insurance companies will go under anyway, even in the UK we still have private insurance and private practices.

Thr market isn't a baby, it's smart and capable, it will adapt to anything we throw at it.

Beyond all of this, it's not going to be a giant change that hits on a single day, this kind fo system takes years if not decades to get up and running, there will be plenty of transition time.

The horseshoeing industry got pretty whipped out by the development of the automobile, but it took time and was a slow transition that saw some become more specialised, some change to totally different industries and others put their talents to work in similar fields of work.

An American Health Service would have plenty of demand for medical billing experts.

edited 25th Jun '17 8:41:17 AM by Silasw

See, I don't think destroying the private insurance market as it is now would have that level of catastrophic impact. A lot of the jobs that it currently provides would still be eminently useful under a new system—someone has to work on the costs for various procedures and medications under different areas, ffs, so even a lot of the financial side would still remain.

The issue seems more one of getting said people to transfer.

.. no, it would not. Not to the same extent. US health care has entirely unique levels of overhead. Any health reform that works. No matter the details, this is not an unique consequence of single payer, will involve transitioning around a million people out of that sector. Their paychecks are literally where the excess costs of US healthcare currently go. They are doing jobs that can demonstrably be eliminated with no impact on the delivery of health care, because nowhere else employs that many admin to do health-care. That is also where the gain for the economy from the whole comes from - their current jobs add no extra value to the economy, but they are hard-working souls, so if employed instead doing something actually useful, the US gets richer to the tune of a million person years of labor per year.

I think the greater problem isn't that the jobs problem isn't fixable, it's that all of those insurance workers vote.

The government also can't hire every single worker in the industry. Thousands of people, maybe even millions, will lose their jobs.

Yeah, take the issue with coal miners, multiply it by a thousand or so, and in an industry that isn't yet obsolete. And they're all over the country, not just in a few (albeit key) states.

edited 25th Jun '17 9:12:52 AM by M84

Sure but Fox was acting as if the entire industry would be made jobless overnight, that won't happen.

Some people will stay in the industry, some will move to other industries (where companies will be able to hire more workers due to lower costs due to not having to provide healthcare to workers), some will need retraining help from the government, some will move into the government run healthcare industry, they're not all going to end up on the street jobless.

All of this will happen slowly and with enough oversight to ensure that there's not a huge economic shock, this can be managed.

With coal you have the problem of coal towns, I don't belive that you have healthcare towns in the US where the entire town is dependant on an insurance company hiring people.

Plus I don't think healthcare workers are as hard to retrain (making a healthcare administrator a different kind of administrator is probably easier than making a coal miner an engineer), have the same tribal identities or are as heavily concentrated in deprived areas.

edited 25th Jun '17 9:20:19 AM by Silasw