Are they natural consequences? Seems easy to gate out undocumented immigrants (e.g. an M4A card that’s provided to citizens or SSN check at the point of service). It’s a choice, either principled or part of a strategy. But I think Matt’s point is right that they don’t HAVE to do it, and that it’s politically counterintuitive to fully embrace it.
I think it’s a natural consequence. One of the big benefits of a M4A system is that you don’t have to burn administrative time/effort trying to convince your service provider that you’re covered, and that your plan covers their services, and the affiliated-but-non-employee anesthesiologist is also covered, and there are no enormous billing/collections structures in place to make sure that hospitals interface with the insurance companies correctly and seek out residual balances from the patient. It’s just all covered. Done.
Once you start saying, “Actually, this particular group is not entitled to those benefits and they’d have to pay separately”, you bring back all of those administrative burdens. I’d like to hear a M4A proponent describe exactly how they’d exclude undocumented immigrants/non-residents from healthcare services without having to maintain all of the existing administrative structure that those proponents hate.
There’s still going to be billing in most of the M4A plans, no? The hospitals, doctors and pharmacies are still billing the government. I don’t think M4A should leave non-citizens uncovered, but I think it could. Unfortunately it is almost certainly bad for electability to support covering everyone.
That’s true - I definitely overstated the case. Even in a Medicare world you’ve got lots of admin trying to figure out how to get reimbursed from the government. You’re just doing away with the payer-side admin.
So, who won the debate on Wednesday?
- Bennet
- Biden
- Booker
- Castro
- De Blasio
- Gabbard
- Gillibrand
- Harris
- Inslee
- Yang
0 voters
No option for Warren
Warren debated on Tuesday
I know, I saw both debates
Let’s have a poll for Tuesday as well, then 
This time with a public vote.
- Bullock
- Buttigieg
- Delaney
- Hickenlooper
- Klobuchar
- O’Rourke
- Ryan
- Sanders
- Warren
- Williamson
0 voters
But you asked where’s Warren on a poll for Wednesday.-
That’s because she was the winner of Wednesday’s debate
Sanders and Warren were co-winners to everyone but the media. It’s too close to call for me.
Cliffs: moderates feel more comfortable with Warren than Bernie because she doesn’t use the word “socialism” when describing the same policies.
I’m relieved it wasn’t anything more substantive than that. I’m still ever-so-slightly leaning Warren over Bernie.
For me, it’s the democratic reform. His first priority is the not-flashy shit that needs to happen before we can do all the pie in the sky stuff that the others like to talk about. fix gerrymandering, reform the courts, get rid of the electoral college, DC and PR (if they want it) statehood, etc.
Also this:
Douglass Plan
and this:
New Rising Tide
I know most folks on here probably haven’t paid much attention to Pete’s policies, because the media doesn’t breathlessly cover them like they do the latest Harris vs. Biden zinger and more of Bernie yelling, but I urge you to give those a look, plus his issues page.
A lot of it is wonky stuff that the general public probably doesn’t care about. That’s exactly why I do care.
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Pete’s track record of helping minorities is the opposite of helping minorities.
from a South Bend resident:
I’m honestly basically indifferent to Pete for various reasons, but the above I heartily agree with. At least, it seems obvious to me that the Republicans have long realized that it’s important to secure political power in addition to pushing their legislative agenda. Dems seem to have missed that memo and so the Rs have consolidated their position quite strongly in spite of their agenda being mostly unpopular.
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I really like your election reform case for Pete, skydiver8, and your passion to work for his campaign is admirable. I haven’t picked up election reform as his main issue so far, and that’s a compelling argument. Granted it’s a wide field, and I wouldn’t expect him to go full-blown Yang on it. It is however troubling when we already have a couple candidates having good success rejecting big-money donors and wall street money, but he’s not. I think that it calls into question his chops on truly pushing for that election reform, when money in politics seems to be one of the bigger issues. This seems to be a theme from the Current Affairs article posted above - is there a defense to that?
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I think there’s a reasonable, pragmatic case for a less high profile presidential candidate to embrace corporate donors. Frankly, it wouldn’t be easy to get traction without them. But I’d want to see clear lines drawn to convince me that these donors are buying into the candidate’s existing ideas, not buying a say in his future proposals. I haven’t seen Mayor Pete make that distinction.
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