So your idea is to reward the insurance company’s profiteering off our health by putting them in charge of the bureaucracy of paperwork and billing, and then task them with putting themselves out of for business once and for all?
I see some problems with your plan.
Bernie’s giraffe is sexy. That heater at the end, wow.
This question is obviously unfair but maybe you have a number. Given a Warren win and over 51 but under 60 D Senate seats, how likely do you think it is that Warren gets M4A done? Adjust some numbers/assumptions if it helps get you to an estimate. This isn’t an attempt at a chessmate, I’ll say extremely low, 2 outer at best.
If she’s willing to go to the mattresses to nuke the filibuster, and all indications are that she is, I think if we get over ~55 Senate seats, M4A is a near lock.
If it’s 51 we’re an underdog, but drawing live. Then it also depends heavily on who is in the 51. We lose Manchin and Jones, probably, but if Jones isn’t one, she very well may be able to get Tester’s vote and then we have to start looking at who is flipping which seats. I don’t know where someone like Feinstein comes down on this who’s old enough to be impervious to pressure from POTUS.
So I’m sort of pulling numbers out of my ass and just making guesses here obviously, but:
50 Seats: <5%
51 Seats: 15%
52 Seats: 33%
53 Seats: 50%
54 Seats: 70%
55 Seats: 80%
56+ Seats: 90+%
(If anything, I’m tempted to go higher at 52 and 53 seats.)
Part of the reason for the way I’m estimating this is that once you get above 52 seats, she’ll have won a landslide and flipped a ton of seats on her coattails and the political mandate that will give her will be immense. You’re talking about netting five seats at 52, which assuming we lose Alabama, means flipping six seats. When you start getting up above that, you’re talking about stuff like Texas going blue. I haven’t looked at what it would even take to get to 52, but Texas might already be involved in that 52-53 range.
I’m also assuming she’s willing to REALLY apply pressure. Like, “Does your hometown have a band gazebo, Senator? Doesn’t matter, we’ll build one,” kind of pressure.
Ok, maybe this is a more interesting, or at least different way to approach the disagreement. If I truly felt that a Warren win with 53-55 D Senators was 50% chance for M4A, I’d feel a lot more passion for making this the centerpiece of the campaign. However, given that I assume Chucky Cheese Schumer will be the Majority Leader, given that literally every D Senator who may be corrupted by private insurance money today will be corrupted by private insurance money tomorrow, that I kinda think the filibuster is staying, etc. etc. I’d say M4A is 20% at best even if they have 60+ seats.
Maybe he’ll be the Secretary of State… Depends how badly she wants to shake things up.
They’re corrupted if they think that the biggest threat to their job is the private insurance money getting cut off. If they think the bigger threat is POTUS endorsing a challenger, that could change.
Totally depends on her willingness to go to battle over it with Senate leadership if necessary.
Sorry I write slow and then think I can ninja edit my point in time. Let’s say you shared my pessimistic assessment of how likely it is that M4A would get done even under a very good D election, would you still prefer to start from single payer and work backwards, or more willing to consider starting with a compromised position with a likelier chance of getting done?
I think the Democrats can strengthen Obamacare without nuking the filibuster, that’s an above 50% proposition for me. There’s actually a bunch of stuff a D President could do by EO. I don’t even think Biden could get a public option, I’d guess 2:1 dog.
Actually, here is a point I’m not squishy about. I don’t see why Sanders, Warren, Pete, basically all of them, fail to say, that if our healthcare proposals don’t succeed, we will still 100% improve Obamacare in the following ways. If I’m one of those 2018 health care swing voters, I’d like to hear that in the worst case a D President has a plan to maximally improve what currently exists.
I don’t know the answer, but whatever it is, it’s many multiples the likelihood Biden or Pete get M4A done, since they’re not even starting with it as the opening bargaining position.
HRC took state because she was not going to be vp or in leadership, you’re dreaming
Yeah, that would take a while, for some 2 years, for others 4 years, for the rest 6 years
I don’t think she would have that much pull, if Moscow Mitch didn’t see the wisdom in doing it, why would Wall Street Chuck?
To add to this, I don’t care that Bernie labels his own plan a tax. That’s on him, so he can live and die with his own messaging. But Dems shouldn’t undercut Dems on messaging in the same way that Republicans would, and that’s what Pete was doing to Warren.
Everybody was undercutting her though, maybe the messaging was not great? Bernie undercut her by biting the bullet and sounded a lot better imo.
She can always tell them if you want to remain private, and able to be used, just go non-profit. In our system, healthcare won’t be for profit it will be to help people.
Gun barrel business practices are very common. If you don’t play ball at these terms, you can’t play. Find those places that make the insurance company want to play ball with M4A or make them go away. Make it their choice. The insurance companies know all about bureaucracy, and wasting time. Tell them they can’t be profitable, but can be a part of the system, and all of a sudden they’ll make it very efficient (even incentivize this stuff so it can ‘look’ like profits to them).
No matter what any candidate says, if M4A gets rolling there eventually will not be private insurance outside of a supplemental market. This idea of transitioning into the system with heavy oversight would be helping them with a soft landing. Play ball, or be gone. Up to them. They’ll figure out a way to play ball (profit can be a place of negotiation too, just not gouging profit like what is going on now).
That seems like a bizarre connect-the-dots. Were they undercutting her because her messaging is not great, or because she’s the front-runner and they’re desperate to score points? How many times she was attacked on this when she wasn’t the front-runner.
Mayor Pete is not trying to help her workshop a better message; he thinks the only way he gains in the polls is to knock her down, so he’s borrowing GOP talking points to do it.
Notice how many times Biden was attacked this last round? Barely at all–not because he suddenly learned the lesson of messaging, but because the other runners see someone else as a bigger threat.
If I were trying to score points against the front runner, I would attack her weak points, that’s far from exclusive, that’s the default strategy?
Meh, it seems to me in politics 10% is attacking an opponent’s weak points, and 90% is attacking what can be construed or concocted as a weak point, even if it’s capitalizing on the public’s knee-jerk reaction to the word “tax,” or Gabbard trying to single Warren out as not-a-former-soldier, or competely making shit up like Swift Boat Veterans for Fucking over John Kerry.
That she wants to go for a moon shot is not a weak point. The weakness is in those who don’t even want to try it.
I’d always rather start left of my goal and work towards a compromise position that is close to my goal, because I’m more likely to get my goal. The outcome is likely to be right of whatever we run on in the general when it’s all said and done.
I don’t think Biden will even try very hard to get a public option. I don’t think they can strengthen the ACA without nuking the filibuster, because I don’t think they’re getting any Republican votes for most of it.
I would assume it’s because they don’t think people want to hear about worst case scenarios in an election, and I agree. I think it would hurt them electorally. I think the safe assumption is that if a candidate is for a liberal position on healthcare, they’ll be for improvements on the ACA as a worst case scenario.
I don’t know, it’s as high of an office as Schumer has any chance of attaining. You dangle it and see what happens.
You start with the ones up in 2022, and go from there.
Well, for starters, McConnell is totally a partisan actor. If he didn’t nuke the filibuster, that alone should be a reason for Dems to seriously consider nuking it. He thought it was disadvantageous for the GOP to nuke the filibuster.
For someone who likes to talk down to others about not being genuine Democrats, you’re trying REALLY hard to give the for-profit insurance industry a golden parachute.
You say that like there aren’t hundreds of thousands of employees in these companies trying to make ends meet that have nothing to do with the insurance company goals. You want to nuke those people for the main reason that they work in an industry that sucks?
I think there’s a continuum between good faith objection 1 to bad faith swift boating 10. These attacks did seem exaggerated to me relative to their substance (not much) but still within fair play, I’d rate them around a 3. Why does Bernie not hesitate to call it a tax?