What do you think of this poll, about Medicare for All?

[Lemon Drop]

vision63 wrote:
[quote=Lemon Drop]
[quote=vision63]
We could have passed the ACA with a Republican majority in the 80's with a strong charismatic President. Any reasonable person wants Single Payer. Kobe isn't going to come down the lane and slam dunk that shit. You gotta go through the playoffs first because of the fierceness of an opposition that gets more and more desperate ever year they become less influential. They don't concede any ground and it's just going to get worse even if we win.

They always have the advantage. It takes a fraction of the effort to tear down institutions than it does the effort to build them up. We're not going to win every election and everything we want takes time.

I think that's a generous assessment about why we don't yet have universal health care in the US and every other industrialized western nation does. We should have had this by the 1940s. It goes back to our racist history, I'm sorry to say.


In 1945, when President Truman called on Congress to expand the nation’s hospital system as part of a larger health care plan, Southern Democrats obtained key concessions that shaped the American medical landscape for decades to come. The Hill-Burton Act provided federal grants for hospital construction to communities in need, giving funding priority to rural areas (many of them in the South). But it also ensured that states controlled the disbursement of funds and could segregate resulting facilities.

Professional societies like the American Medical Association barred black doctors; medical schools excluded black students, and most hospitals and health clinics segregated black patients. Federal health care policy was designed, both implicitly and explicitly, to exclude black Americans.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019...acism.html
I think by the 80's we crossed a lot of the barriers you mention and we had a congress that was much more cooperative. That ended in the 90's ('94 to be specific). I'm not saying it would have passed. I am saying that the political conditions that would have been required for it to pass was possible then. where I don't believe it is now and I believe that window is closed for the time being.
Yes I agree the current Senate and WH would never advance single payer.
It's so ironic that "Obamacare" closely mirrors a bill developed by Pres George H W Bush in the 90s and of course Romney's Massachusetts plan. It's basically a Republican plan.

I think it's wrong to let the country off the hook about why we didn't have this decades ago. The reasons for resistance haven't changed that much in reality (state control and the discrimination that system allows)
I don't think incremental change is the way to go - that's been a waste of decades and lives. Needs to get done right.

[vision63]

Lemon Drop wrote:
[quote=vision63]
[quote=Lemon Drop]
[quote=vision63]
We could have passed the ACA with a Republican majority in the 80's with a strong charismatic President. Any reasonable person wants Single Payer. Kobe isn't going to come down the lane and slam dunk that shit. You gotta go through the playoffs first because of the fierceness of an opposition that gets more and more desperate ever year they become less influential. They don't concede any ground and it's just going to get worse even if we win.

They always have the advantage. It takes a fraction of the effort to tear down institutions than it does the effort to build them up. We're not going to win every election and everything we want takes time.

I think that's a generous assessment about why we don't yet have universal health care in the US and every other industrialized western nation does. We should have had this by the 1940s. It goes back to our racist history, I'm sorry to say.


In 1945, when President Truman called on Congress to expand the nation’s hospital system as part of a larger health care plan, Southern Democrats obtained key concessions that shaped the American medical landscape for decades to come. The Hill-Burton Act provided federal grants for hospital construction to communities in need, giving funding priority to rural areas (many of them in the South). But it also ensured that states controlled the disbursement of funds and could segregate resulting facilities.

Professional societies like the American Medical Association barred black doctors; medical schools excluded black students, and most hospitals and health clinics segregated black patients. Federal health care policy was designed, both implicitly and explicitly, to exclude black Americans.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019...acism.html
I think by the 80's we crossed a lot of the barriers you mention and we had a congress that was much more cooperative. That ended in the 90's ('94 to be specific). I'm not saying it would have passed. I am saying that the political conditions that would have been required for it to pass was possible then. where I don't believe it is now and I believe that window is closed for the time being.
Yes I agree the current Senate and WH would never advance single payer.
It's so ironic that "Obamacare" closely mirrors a bill developed by Pres George H W Bush in the 90s and of course Romney's Massachusetts plan. It's basically a Republican plan.

I think it's wrong to let the country off the hook about why we didn't have this decades ago. The reasons for resistance haven't changed that much in reality (state control and the discrimination that system allows)
I don't think incremental change is the way to go - that's been a waste of decades and lives. Needs to get done right.
You get nothing without power. I do think if we can bridge the racial divides then it's possible to move forward. Europe doesn't have Single Payer if they had their current levels of diversity back then. They had immigrants but not this quantity.

If we lose RGB then that game is over. A minority GOP congress will run the roost for decades.

In light of all this, getting the ACA passed in a hostile political environment was a miracle that could have only been accomplished via the intellect, skill and cunning of Nancy Pelosi.

It's an intimidating environment for incremental change because people on the left are breathing and alive and desire dramatic change immediately. They don't care about the practicality and the chess game of power. It's abstract to them and they just want what they want. But it is what it is.

Even Biden's wife Jill was dissin' his ACA stance despite it being the most possible path towards single payer that could maybe occur in our lifetimes. That's the lunacy that we live in now.

[RgrF]

Incremental would be better than the degradation we see coming from this Republican administration but incremental change still results in an unnecessary death sentence for far too many people, the same could be said for incremental climate and environmental policies.

Incremental is better than what we have but not nearly what we need.

[$tevie]

Will Medicare For All mean that we will all have to buy Medicare Supplement policies, which will surely triple in cost as the insurance companies try to cover their losses? When will anybody ever point out that Medicare is not the same as Medicaid? These rich-ass Congress people have no idea what Medicare is.

[Ca Bob]

When we have Medicare for All, the system will slowly evolve to include a lot of what is already in the supplemental policies that Medicare participants have to buy nowadays.

[Lemon Drop]

$tevie wrote:
Will Medicare For All mean that we will all have to buy Medicare Supplement policies, which will surely triple in cost as the insurance companies try to cover their losses? When will anybody ever point out that Medicare is not the same as Medicaid? These rich-ass Congress people have no idea what Medicare is.

These plans so far are sorely lacking in detail including answers to your great questions. I notice that Bernie changed the name of his plan to "Health Care for All" to avoid confusion with Medicare. Essentially he's advocating for a single-payer, government run insurance system but I haven't seen anyone explain how we pay for it except to say "tax the rich." At the moment Warren doesn't have a health care plan on her website at all. Biden's plan is to strengthen the ACA. Harris' proposal kind of sounds like the public/private system they have in France. I guess the common denominator is "we're not there yet."