You realize the government subsidizes a lot of the pharmaceutical companies research and development, right? Then they turn around and extort the very people who publicly funded the development of a drug by gouging those who need it in order to make immorally sized profits. How about they can’t do that anymore and people get affordable prescription drug prices?
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Cool. Medicare should be allowed to negotiate drug prices. We don’t need M4A to do that. If I told you that a standalone bill to authorize negotiations with pharmaceutical companies could pass in 2021, but doing it as part of a larger M4A package means that it wouldn’t kick in until 2025, which would you prefer?
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The 2025 m4a. Clearly.
My point is that by holding out for M4A which eveyone agrees is incredibly unlikely to pass and which even if passed would not be implemented for several years, you are failing to provide short term improvements that could get passed more quickly and make some things better for some people in the short term. If you think the tradeoff is worth it in order to move the Overton window and increase the odds of getting to single payer down the road, cool, but you should at least acknowledge that there are real life tradeoffs involved in that decision.
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Seems like a good time to point out that my problem, and I think I speak for others, isn’t Pete’s plan itself (though it’s not my favorite), it’s his lines of attack on single payer. He was my #2 and a close #3 for a while, but when he used that line of attack I was very ticked off about it.
The plan itself is okay. If it’s being implemented by someone who wants to get us to single payer as quickly as possible and who uses robust subsidies, it does have a good chance of getting us there. My issue was with the messaging.
Also wanted to +1 or at least + .5 this. I still very much disagree with some of your defenses of Pete’s lines of attack, and some of the methods of argument you’ve used to defend him and lump his opponents in. But I do also very much respect the actual work you’re doing.
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It seems to me the best strategy is to vote in the primaries religiously, and I’m not just talking about the presidential primaries. It’s to support upstart candidates that match your views and/or are not bought and paid for even if their views are a little off from your own. We need more AOC’s. We have a handful right now, we need like 50-100. Then there will be a major voting bloc within the party that can start to draw more and more power.
Like, AOC is likely to run for president in 2028. So that’s the time where there should be like 20 of us doing what skydiver is doing for Pete. (Really we ought to be doing it every election for the best candidate in the primary that matters most to us.) That’s how we fight back, not with a protest vote that serves as a half vote for whatever shit sandwich the GOP is trotting out.
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And this is why we can’t have nice things. Dude claims to support single payer, but proceeds to spend his morning typing up like 1,000 words about why we can’t have it because we have to be pragmatic.
If you think single payer is the better system, then stop spouting GOP talking points about it, stop arguing about why it can’t happen, and realize that if we fight for it we can get it, because it’s really popular when framed properly. When framed well, it polls with broad and overwhelming support. When framed poorly, it polls negatively. When framed neutrally, it polls a little better than 50-50.
So if you know it’s the best system, stop fucking framing it poorly.
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Fine. I’ll drop it. Carry on.
Is Bigoldnit a dude?
I have no idea, honestly. If not my bad. I have perhaps a bad habit of assuming given that like 95% of us are since we came from a somewhat gross poker forum.
Not as I recall.
Sorry to single you out harshly, but I view this as a major problem on the left. We have a winning issue and somehow a majority of the people who say they want single payer talk non-stop about why we can’t have it.
I’m a woman, but often employ dude in a gender neutral fashion, so no big deal either way.
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It’s more complicated than that, but you’ve got a good point. To my mind it’s similar to the angle shoot on prohibiting Medicare from negotiating drug prices.
Drug research can be usefully divided into basic and commercial baskets. The (probably vast) majority of basic research is done by (or funded by) the feds either thru the NIH or by grants to Universities. This stuff is critical, but it doesn’t directly lead to any sort of production of drugs - rather, it acts as proof of concept sort of stuff, or in rare cases actually coming up with a chemical that MAY be useful as a drug.
At that point, the drug companies step in and figure out if 1) there is a way to commercially make whatever compound you’re interested in - there’s a HUGE difference between making a few milligrams and pounds of the stuff. and 2) running the trials to see whether or not the magic drug does anything. The majority of trials are insanely expensive to run, and end up with a drug that doesn’t work.
AFAIK there is NO reason for this state of affairs, except for the fact that the drug companies want to keep all the money. Like drug prices, this stuff can be negotiated. But some people seem to think that drug companies steal ready to go drugs from the NIH - that’s not what’s going on.
MM MD
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Big old nit or a bi gold nit is the more pressing question
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The first Patreon President. $5 a month gets you access to the bonus executive orders.
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Trump just felt it move a little.
And I’m hearing from a lot of people, a lot of people are talking about these mattresses and these mattresses are - folks, they’re bad! Very bad mattresses!
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I will vote whatever truest most lefty leftist person you like just to stop the whining
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