As Napoleon once said, if you want a man to walk off a cliff, give him a comfortable pair of shoes.
Just kidding, I just made that up.
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I donât know⌠I guess it comes down to personality? Bernie is the lovable grouch who shoots straight and always sounds like heâs angry at you. Warren is the school teacher who isnât going to humor you when you try to bullshit her about how the dog ate your homework?
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I mean that is a pretty good analogy for how I feel. I want them to off themselves in the most pleasant way possible so we get what we should have, M4A. If you keep threatening them, theyâll spend every resource imaginable to stop it.
Itâs like the old quote about diplomacy. âDiplomacy is telling someone to go to hell in such a way that they look forward to the trip.â
I think her messaging is ~fine from a bunch of imperfect options. As much as I buy into M4A, thereâs no way to put it that is impervious to OMGTAX, which is tragically a compelling message in American politics. Sheâs trying a fairly novel approach to this obvious attack, and I think her team should join her in that, rather that legitimizing the attacks that Republicans will make.
At this point Iâm just ready for the next debate, to see if an1 adjusts. I kinda expect a very similar battle, unless Biden jumps back out in front and gives us a new battery of âHereâs the fact of the matterâ to evaluate
I mean, I might toss out at a campaign brainstorming session messaging like:
âLOOK, LET US BE CLEAR [apparently the essential components of all Dem messaging], you have to pay at least some money to get health care. I donât think those payments should be health insurance premiums that line the pockets of wealthy insurance executives. I think itâs better to pay into Medicare, the most popular and efficient health care program in America, and one that doesnât profit off of your participation.â But I am a mere humble internet poster.
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So when Joe says âthe fact of the matterâ, does that mean everything else he says other than that one thing is a lie? 
The government will be hiring a bunch of people to administer M4A, theyâll be recently unemployed and well qualified. Seems like a good match.
I see no reason to cut in the insurance companies and our corporate overlords in the healthcare industry. Especially given that part of the pitch for Medicare for All is cutting costs and being more efficient. Anything that inflates costs that does not improve care is a huge detriment to the success of the program.
Do you own some Blue Cross stock or something nunn?
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I can only assume Warren has a team of highly paid strategists working on this and doing focus groups and polls, and thus it seems likely that they havenât struck gold yet.
Hey Team Liz, if youâre listening, I think youâll be highly rewarded by our media for that âHey Joe, which is less, 30 trillion or 40 trillion?â line.
Itâs a beautiful way to flip it back on them. Might even catch them off guard and bait someone into saying âThatâs cost, not taxes.â
At which point you smile and say, âExactly.â
If you think theyâre going to kick and scream any less because theyâre getting a golden parachute as they jump off the cliff, I donât know what to tell you. Theyâre going to fight tooth and nail to keep their ~4 trillion a year industry from turning into a ~1 trillion a year industry. Adjust the numbers as needed, but theyâre going to fight just as hard.
Letâs just beat them once and be done with it, letâs not keep them around to fight us 20-30 more years.
The facts are on our side, the people/voters are on our side, the front runner is on our side⌠Stop pounding the table for the insurance companies, nunn.
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There will be a huge net loss of jobs of regular workers in the insurance industry no matter how you slice an immediate cut off of private insurance. That has to factor into the equation here no matter how much we all hate insurance companies. And no I donât have any stock in any insurance companies. Iâm just trying point out that none of this is simple, and will take years to implement just like the ACA took 4 years to implement, but this will be much much harder than that was if it can get through.
Weâll be pretty fortunate to have M4A by 2028 if it actually gets through in the next presidentâs term, in my opinion. Iâd be happy for it to be implemented by 2024, but I canât see that happening if it was passed on the first day of Congressâs term in 2021. The same will go for any other plan that gets out there that is anything more than a very moderate improvement on the ACA.
lol, Iâm not doing that. I want M4A, and would love if there were no private insurance companies. No matter what you think, thatâs not realistic especially with the voters in this country. M4A polls great until you say no private insurance. Then it doesnât poll so great. Itâs kind of like how the stuff in the ACA polls great, but then doesnât poll so great when itâs called Obamacare. This is the country we live in.
People are dumb, and thereâs a very high likelihood that we will have a âpathâ to M4A rather than just a light switch. I donât know enough about any of this to know what these alternate paths are, and am just throwing out random ideas that are meant to be picked apart.
I love it when he just gives up at the end of his responses when time is up. Sleepy Joe is the only candidate who does this and itâs always funny/sad.
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Public opinion is fluid. The goal should be trying to shift public opinion on M4A, not waiting for the people to catch up.
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The economics on the question of public option vs true single payer are not complicated. For profit healthcare has looted and pillaged this country at least since WW2. We spend 6% more of GDP on healthcare than the next developed world competitor, and thatâs worse than it sounds like because in real terms our GDP is significantly larger.
That 6% goes a lot of places, but ultimately itâs pure rent seeking and buys us a system with worse results than the rest of the world gets. We are doing absurd amounts of unnecessary medical work while simultaneously not doing huge amounts of massively +EV medical work because of insurance coverage⌠because the unnecessary puts money in the pockets of the rent seekers.
This is the big economic issue of our time. That money could be used to improve our schools, rebuild our infrastructure, do massively more basic research (including drug research into⌠cures. Something drug companies arenât generally too keen on because the ROI isnât as good as having a pill you need to take for the rest of your life), and generally make life better for everyone.
People ask how weâre going to pay for stuff. Reclaiming the 6% of GDP weâre wasting would be a damn good start. If you claim youâre a liberal/progressive/sensible person and think that we need to keep for profit healthcare youâre kidding yourself.
This issue is more important than any of the other issues (except maybe climate change) combined. It helps drive every bad thing in our country. It matters more than LGBTrights, racial justice, or making the tax code more progressive⌠because getting raped by healthcare costs is having a bigger impact on LGBT Americans, POC Americans, and poor Americans than literally anything else. Itâs not just the fact that they are disproportionately affected by the terrible quality of our healthcare system, itâs that the 6% we are wasting could be spent on literally anything else.
So yeah Pete is a complete piece of shit. So is Joe Biden. So is Amy Klobuchar. Their stand on that stage at the 4th debate taking shots at M4A for the benefit of their own personal careers is literal proof that they are selfish assholes who donât deserve to be elected dog catcher. Really any Democrat who took health lobby money to fight against public healthcare in this country falls into the same category. I know itâs a lot of names and includes pretty much the entire GOP. I could forgive some of these people, but if there was an option to have them all drummed out of public life with a snap of my fingers theyâd be gone in 5 seconds or less.
This probably seems extreme and Iâm sure skydiver is going to be really mad at me about it. I donât particularly care. This is the issue I care the most about because itâs the biggest issue full stop. If our next president got nothing at all done but M4A theyâd be the best president of this century probably through 2100.
I donât care even a little bit how many eggs they have to break to get that done. And I donât give even a microscopic amount of shit about the mostly administrative employees who will lose their jobs as a result of M4A. They need to find new jobs for the good of the country.
This issue is very black and white and very big. It is causing an unbelievable amount of human suffering when you zoom all the way out and look at the real impacts of both getting worse results in one of largest countries in the worldâs health system + the loss of 6% of GDP in the supposedly wealthiest country in the world. Itâs just bigger than any individual person. This thing is macro important and the only reason it didnât get done in the 50âs, 70âs, 90âs, or 2000âs is just corruption plain and simple.
As to the incrementalist approach⌠we havenât beat the healthcare lobby once yet. Even though weâve tried god knows how many times. So letâs not pretend like planning on beating them more than once is a viable strategy. If we let them live they will do everything they can to weaken the healthcare system for their own profit until we are right back where we are today. This thing needs to be uprooted, burned, and completely replaced. We canât keep any aspect of the current system because the current system is a cancerous tumor on our nation. You donât keep pieces of tumor so that they can regrow. You cut them out completely.
Just about the only good news about the current system is that, like a tumor, it is starting to kill its host. Everyone can see it and everyone wants something done about it. If we fix it partially and push it back below the water line we are making a devils bargain that allows it to keep feeding on us to 50-75% of the current extent, and guarantee that our children/grandchildren will be facing an identical situation to the one we face today. That option is literally worse than doing nothing. At least the status quo is obviously terrible and is generating political will in favor of really changing it. We need to take this pain until it becomes so excruciating that we can justify doing the right thing. We do not need to remove 50% of the tumor so that we can be more comfortable while it regrows so that we can move on to smaller/easier things.
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End discussion
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If you skipped over boredsocialâs post because it was long, scroll back up and read it. Thatâs a 
post imo.
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Yeah this is why I think single-payer has to be the option in the US. Iâm not actually religious about that in general, like Australia has a hybrid system and it works fine (especially since many of the entities providing private healthcare are not-for-profit). Iâm not out clamouring for that to be replaced by an NHS. But the system in the US is so thoroughly fucked for so many reasons that step 1 really has to be destroying it completely.