Bernie does not work in more than one place, his job is in Washington. Your argument is why does someone need a billion dollars and now it's why go after someone with three homes, can't you answer that question yourself?
This coming from the guy who just the other day got into his feelings because I said people of your ilk. You really are a big joke.
I think most of us can agree there are vast problems with our healthcare system and that a single payer system will address many of those but I'm not feeling the Bern on this because of the difficulties / impossibilities of how this get's done. Consider that the stumbling block to getting the ACA passed wasn't Republicans but was Democrats. As all of us can acknowledge that was rather mild reform. How are we going to expect to get 60 votes in the US Senate for something as radical as Medicare for All? Remember one of the problems among Democrats was that they feared they would get hammered by the Republicans in the next election over the ACA and given that the Democrats got slaughtered in 2010 that was prophetic. Some of you have said that if Sanders wins there will be a liberal wave electing Democrats on his platform and that any Democrat that doesn't agree will face a liberal primary challenge. That's possible but given history and geography if I'm a Democratic Senator from Iowa I'm going to be less worried about being primaried by the Ames version of AOC than I am who the GOP puts up against me in the general. Certainly if there is a Sanders wave if I'm Tammy Duckworth I might be worried about an AOC type primary challenger in IL. That's not going to apply to most districts. Even getting past the political problem there are problems of implementation, negative ramifications, and most importantly management. I've been to countries with universal health care and have been treated in Singapore and Hong Kong. The health care systems are great. Far cheaper than the US, better care and availability. In fact I've said if I ever need elective surgery I'm doing it in Singapore. Those countries are also much smaller than US. The often touted Denmark is only 5.6 million and the land area is about 16K square miles. The Houston metro area population is bigger than that plus you could fit 10 Denmarks in Texas alone. Singapore also has 5.6 million people in a land area of 280 square miles. You could fit three Singapores in just Houston. Even the UK is just 66 million people in a land area about the size of Oregon (99K square miles). The other part of this though is that these countries have per capita incomes that are not too different or in the case of Singapore much higher, than the US. The challenge comes then with how do we implement a nationalized system over a country several times larger in population and in land area yet at about the same level of per capita wealth? You can't just simply say we'll scale up. That would be like running a restaurant that serves 10 people and then suddenly switching to serving 100 people. And on top of that the restaurant has to have branches in other cities. Each level of scale introduces new complexities that will inevitably lead to more costs and delay. In that sense if anything the projections we're seeing for Sanders and Warren's plans are probably understated significantly. Negative ramifications are for all of the problems with our health care system this is the system we've had for a long time. About 20% of our economy is tied up in delivering health care and there are probably millions of jobs related to it. Now under single payer there still will be doctors, nurses and orderlies but if it does deliver in reducing overhead and administration what happens to all the administrators, accountants and actuaries who work in those fields? The insurance industry is a big part of our economy and while of course they will fight tooth and nail to preserve their income streams they also employ a lot of people. What I'm hearing is under Sanders' plan those people will have to be retrained to transition to other work. That means not only are we paying for the implementation of the new national health care system we're also going to be paying for relocating all of those displaced by this system. There is one other negative ramification that hasn't been brought up much but should be a concern. We ration our health care system. We ration it through the insurance industry and what people can afford. I'm not saying that is right but that is the case. There isn't an unlimited amount of resources for health care and if anything we're suffering shortages of staff and facilities. Presumably under a single payer health care system we'll see more people using health care. While that will be a big benefit in reducing preventable conditions that will also mean that we will be seeing a lot more people using a lot of healthcare at the end of their life. What happens to our system as we both live longer and use more health care at the end of our lives? No one likes to think about it but there will need to be some form of rationing or else the system might collapse. I can understand how people are upset that 90 year old billionaire could be spending millions at the end of their lives just to hang on another day but what happens when tens of millions of people do the same? Finally management. As stated our country is much larger in terms of population and size than countries with nationalized health care systems. The argument that if most of the industrialized world can do it why can't we. Most of them do not have countries that span continents, with populations in the 100's of millions and climates as diverse as Fargo and Miami. The sheer size of the US will make it much harder to manage than any system anywhere else. At the same time that size and complexity will make efficiency difficult and also give more opportunities for corruption. Consider most large scale government run programs. Does anyone think that the IRS, HUD, the VA do great jobs? If we look at Amtrak that government management of services is great? If we look at the military does anyone think government management of budgets is good? Most likely this system will end up as pork laden and rife for corruption as most other government projects. If a national health care system were to be implemented one of the first things I expect to hear is that a well heeled Congressman from South Dakota has gottten a major heart center in Pierre while a Congressman from Tennesee has gotten a major cardiac imaging center in Chattanooga so if you're having heart surgery in Pierre SD, you need to get your imaging done in Chattanooga. Our current healthcare system is unsustainable but we need to think very carefully about how we fix it. I'm frankly not sure if the proponents of single payer have thought through or are even aware of any of these issues.
The millionaires might be hurt. Their families may not be able to afford the education on which they had planned, they could be hurt because of lack of funds for medical expenses, people employed in helping them such as retirement planners, school PTAs that received money from them that is no longer available. There could be a lot of hurt from that.
I am answering the question. Bernie does work in more than one place. His job when in session is in DC when not there his job is in VT. Both Bernie and I would be fine with increasing the taxes on folks making the money that he does.
I guess it depends on the individual situation. But it isn't really important because the good done with the amount of money from those millionaires doesn't help to near the same level as the money done from those that are billionaires. I gave an example of how little it would hurt the billionaires and how much good could come for everyone else. That just doesn't happen with going after millionaires. You don't get the restructuring of wages, reducing the wealth gap, funding healthcare, education, infrastructure, reinvestment into the economy etc. The questions you are asking would be the same if there were 10 castaways on a deserted island and one of them had 50 days' worth of food, 3 of them had 4 days worth of food, and the rest had one day's worth of food and when someone says the castaway with 50 days' worth of food should share his so they can all survive better together asking why don't the castaways with 4 days worth of food share theirs instead. It doesn't really make sense, but they could share their food too if it would help.
Private hospitals exist in countries with single-payer. Governments look at the total costs and expenses for hospitals and set up fee schedules and reimbursement rates that are fair to providers. This is how the Canadian government buys prescription drugs from pharmaceutical companies, they look at their balance sheets and offer a price that is fair to both the citizens and the company. M4All will not just reimburse at rates that would put large swaths of hospitals out of business. Boards will be appointed at both state and national levels to assess costs and create fair fee schedules. The fee schedules are adjusted year after to maintain fair prices. This is how many countries across the world maintain their costs without leading to hospital closures. And if you want to talk about "profit motive", in a world where most everybody in the population is covered by medicare for all you will go out of business if you don't accept that insurance. Sure, small private groups will take cash-only customers like high-end cosmetics/plastic-surgery, high-end orthopaedics, and small private practices but that won't affect most people.
http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/best-healthcare-in-the-world/ We can do so much better. So many other countries have.
Yes , we can do better .... and we should. But there are so many roadblocks to getting us there .... our healthcare system has been a capitalist one from the word go and it's a difficult task to transition to one that isn't profit driven when so many people have built their lives around those industries. And telling people they can only make so much profit is just un-American , telling people they can accumulate only so much wealth is un-American .... I've said this before - But I believe the best way forward is to offer a public option and leave those private insurance companies in place. Beat them in price and equal them in quality of care and in short order you'll have eliminated them. But that is only solving a portion of the problem when drug prices are sky high and hospitals are for profit. Changing those two things from being capitalistic driven is the hard part. You can eliminate the insurance salesman but not the doctor , druggist , hospital. The real issue in this whole thing that no one is talking about is innovation. People need an incentive to risk wealth (money) on things like this and in a capitalistic market , that incentive is the potential of future earnings / profits. Sure , a lot of people do it for other reasons but the money , the investors .... take them out of the equation and where does that leave us ? Same can be said of the pharmaceutical industry - take away the potential for great profits and where do the new miracle drugs come from ? Particularly when in the USA its extremely costly to get a drug to market and can take years to get FDA approval. I know someone's gonna come in here and try to sell us that this is a noble cause and people are going to do it anyway .... I really don't have that faith in society. People don't work for free.
Slam on the breaks there ..... I don't want the gubmint telling me what I can eat / drink. I don't mind the idea of telling me what's good or bad but there's a line the libertarian in me just doesn't want the gubmint crossing and any idea of cracking down on / penalizing or whatever is beyond that line and beyond the scope of government.
I have no problem with the government banning certain carcinogens in our food or limiting the availability of certain things in restaurants or commercial foods like they hydrogenated oils. We have long had limits on what can and cannot be put in food or make up with little opposition. I am not talking about banning coke or drink sizes or even portion sizes. I am talking about banning substances that have been linked to cancer or heart failure in commercial foods.
This x1000000 Single-payer can be the north star we work towards, but we are not ready to flip a switch and get there in 2020. A public option is a bridge to get there - it has broad enough support to get passed as a law and is a less risky way for the government to figure out the implementation and management issues you highlighted.
I don't either, but the FDA is paid millions by corrupt corporations like Monsanto. It's corruption allows the crap put into the foods we eat. We injest a lot of bad stuff other countries ban. https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-c...anto-the-worlds-most-evil-corporation/5387964 Scary stuff. I watched a documentary on it that really shocked me.
LOL. That reminds me of a story my brother told me about a guy he knew in the Navy who actually heated bites of steak over a lighter in the barracks.
Yeah and so did Obama and Trump. People like Pelosi talk a big game but they don't bat an eye when It comes to bombing another country. Neither does cable news media. They made a law where you could not film troops that have died when they come back to the US. When does the news media show casualties on TV? Out of site out of mind and bought by corporations which then also buy politicians with super pacs and lobbyists. Bernie and Tulsi Gabbard and Andrew Yang were I believe the only ones that didn't take money from these groups. They were/are funded by people and small donations. Black, brown, and other people of color have been bombed since the 1950's by this country in so many places it would take a long long time to list them all. It's about damn time it stops. And people get healthcare in this country like everywhere else. I think times are changing (thanks Dylan) and the younger generations I have hope for. I think they see though the lies of the system that have perpetuated for so long that it has given our generation sense of hopelessness and complacency that is hard to wake up from.
The war machine .... I detest it. My grandfather (mothers dad) pulled 4 tours , two in WWII , one in Korea and the last in Cuba - Bay of Pigs. His wife lost 3 brothers in WWII. My other grandfather pulled 2 tours in WWII. My stepdad pulled two tours in Vietnam , his dad pulled three tours , two in WWII and one in Korea. I refused to sign up , my brother wouldn't either , I've told my boys I don't approve of our governments use of the war machine for US Imperialism (Corporatocracy is probably a better description) and hope they don't sign their lives away. Our government is in all these countries , not for us or our safety or for anyone's freedom but so corporations can exploit the natural resources and the aftermath of these places .... They aint fighting communism or Nazi's , Fascist or Socialist regimes like the generations before us.
I didn't mean to quote you earlier. My two grandfathers were both in the Korean War. That's all I personally know of. One was the gunner on one of the m16 half tracks. Looks like this I used to hear bedtime stories all the time about it. One I'll never forget was on one of the coldest weeks there my grandfather and others would throw water up into the air and when It came down it was already frozen when it hit the ground. And no they are not. I forget the exact statistic but out of all the countries the US has killed people in the last 50 years I don't think a single one is in the top 80-100 in GDP. They are all poor and defensless. Lucky for the military machine that helped create terrorists in the world. Which in turn they could bomb them also. Terrorism in way is a sick version of guerrilla warfare where a poor people fights back with their only means at their disposal.
