Bernie Sanders Health Plan Savings for Nearly Everybody

Its a fair question and you can't answer it except to bring up a bunch of parallels that are rather perpendicular.


I'm glad you brought up LBJ, who seized on the unity inspired by the assassination of Kennedy, his natural skill and stature as the most gifted and effective legislative power broker in the modern history of the Senate, and temporarily, at least, owner of a massive electoral mandate during an era of economic expansion. Because of this, after a ton of hard work, he was able to pass the 64 Act, voting rights act, medicare etc.

Bernie has approximately zero of these things going for him, and is opeating in an environment many times more difficult.

He has zero chance of enacting single payer.

Zero.

 

Great post Deji.

 

a lot of things can change in 9 years. although i don't see sanders nor clinton winning a 2nd term.

republicans have to win eventually again right? if democrats win the next election that would 5 out of the last 7, and 6 out of 7 with popular vote. which would mean if they won again then obviously it would be 6 out of 8 elections, and 7 out of 8 popular votes. pretty crazy.

 

Oh, a glynch thread. What do we have to do to get Bernie's health plan? Denounce Israel? Allow the Taliban to retake Afghanistan? Do whatever it is that ISIS wants?

 

Fortunately elections are not based on odds, but candidates put forth. Personally I believe too many put too much stock in the R™ and D™ names. What frightens me more is the disparity between two candidates in the general election. When was the last time there were two strong candidates going head to head? Its not much of a democracy when one of your two candidates are very inadequate.

I believe the good news is that more and more people are becoming moderate. I grew up with a predominate Republican circle. Most of us are embracing issues we rejected a couple decades ago. For the topic at hand, most people I know support a single payer option of some sort. For myself, I have concluded that the insurance companies will never allow a true free market solution.

 

i don't know enough about politics and government to that informed of an opinion. i have solid stances on social issues that haven't changed much at all since i was 13 years old, and being that i'm almost 36 is 23 years ago.

what i do know is that i have impressions about people in office about if they are intelligent or not. for instance...

obama >>>> bush II
bush I >>>>>>>> reagan
clinton >>>> gore
rand paul >>>>>>>>>>>> palin
palin ??? rick perry (my head just exploded)

those are just random people i'm comparing. and then you take someone like ted cruz he seems highly Highly intelligent but i would not vote for him unless i was forced.

ironically my least 2 favorite candidates from all of the remaining are trump and cruz which are #1 and #2 in polling at the moment for republicans.

as far as the issue at hand i support a single payer system as well. like i said i dont know a ton about these issues. but if you can spend billions on the military why cant the people of this country have healthcare.

i would assume people struggling to pay bills would be able to provide better for themselves and their family if they were healthy. and if something is dragging them down every that would seem to lead to even more problems. i dunno it's 2016 i think it's time to start working on it. utopian society and all.

 

I don't pretend to know the future but I know that there is a shift in opinion on the issue -- which has proven to be enough in the examples I cited. I also know that the talking heads that claim with smug certainly to know what the future holds are usually embarrassingly, Karl Rovely wrong.

And everyone saw it coming? And he was so popular that he really expanded his Great Society mandate into his second term? Find me a pundit that foresaw the political events of 1964 or 1968, or the Southern Strategy that would come later. LBJ's accomplishments were monumental, but are you implying that without LBJ we would still be living under Jim Crow?

More difficult than Jim Crow, Vietnam, widespread urban rioting, and the peak of the Cold War?

Ah the easy going days of 1964:
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fVQjGGJVSXc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

And those peaceful, predictable days of 1968:
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qUO8ScYVeDo" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

If Bernie's crime is not being LBJ enough, where does that leave Hillary Clinton? A conviction candidate she is not.

Bernie might not be for everyone, but he's had a long record of consistency, sympathy for the common man, animosity for the Wall Street brahmins, and incorruptible public service. And I don't know if you noticed, but those issues are resonating with GOP voters as much as anyone else. Why do you think they are lining up to cheer for a populist?

Well he might not have to. Trump could very well win and beat him to it. It might not be the 60s, but there seems to be an open revolt in both parties. I for one am not weeping for the failure of the Brahmin candidates of the business class being rejected by American voters. If the one conviction candidate in the race manages to win, so much the better.

 

If we hadn't had to arm 10,000 nukes, build a permanent, two-war standing army and an interstate highway system: all of which seemed irrational and impossible eighty years ago, these would have all been fiscally plausible and politically feasible; at least if you add "basic" and replace "all" with "anyone who can't afford it."

 

Yes, unfortunately. Remember Republicans went out of their way to disavow their Civil Rights vote by nominating Goldwater, and that Wallace was cultivating a burgeoning third party movement based on segregation. Even more grimly, without King's assassination, fairly aggressive and sympathetic news footage and the start of the race riot era, mainstream whites in either traditionalist or low-minority areas would not have been cold-shocked into fully embracing integration. This wasn't like slavery where automating farm work and equipment, eventual industrialization of the South and moral stigma from all other Western countries would have ultimately killed it off: the economic and social constructs that facilitated segregation have never dissipated, and the logistics weren't going anywhere without massive government intervention.

 

Elect Democrats to Congress, LOTS of them.

 

Yeah, so anyway I am kind of sandbagging tyou.

i just read:



You should read it, it's an excellent book, but you are completely bungling your history- most of the events you allude to (oppositon to Vietnam, rioting) either occurred after the signature accomplishments of LBJ's regime or instead served as unifying events that helped him grab the middle (the cold war wasn't a distraction, rather it served to unite people) and the momentum.

His signature achievements occurred during the narrow window of the Kennedy assassination in 1963 and his monumental beatdown of Goldwater/post inaugural second honeymoon early in 1965. After that, while some bills got through, domestic unrest and above all Vietnam began to take over.

LBJ himself *knew* the fleeting nature of this moment and only through the applicaiton of his prodigious legislative/dealmaking/bargaining tactics & talents (talents that Sanders does not possess, and that probably do not make a ****-all worht of difference now anyway) tried to get through as much as he could before the moment was lost.

None of this has any parallel to Sanders today. LBJ was an idealist but also a pragmatist in his approach, to a level of extremity in terms of passing legislation that has very little precendent, before or since.

Sanders single payer pipe dream does not demonstrate this quality.

 

How about that dark blue portion of the pie?

Spoiler

 

Ordered via Amazon.

 

LOL, it's always defense that those on the left want to blame for budgetary woes of this country despite the fact that it's entitlements that are really putting a choke hold on the budget.

I mean, that's not to say that there isn't a ton of funding we could cut from defense without really harming them if they were forced to use the money more wisely but it's a drop in the bucket compared to the money we waste on entitlements.....and those who want to buy votes with "free stuff" are always trying to add to the pile.

 

Military spending also includes a lot of federal contracts that keep a lot of people employed.

 

Well, you'll take some solace in that you're both wrong.

There really aren't any short term budgetary woes, but to the extent there are in the near future:

 

I don't have any problem with insurance company executives. They lead organizations in a vital part of the healthcare value chain. They are going to be compensated like executives in other industries. Maybe compensation for execs is too high in general, but I don't see that it is any more egregious in insurance than it is anywhere else. And there would probably be a much different lever to pull if we wanted to change executive compensation generally.

Anyway, you probably will have to draw me a picture on how copays increase profits and stock option values. I really don't think they do other than they enable a mechanism for the rational usage of insurance benefits and discourage runaway medical costs.

 

There really are budgetary woes, the US spent more than a trillion dollars more than they had for 4 straight years when Obama took office, just because the budget deficits are closer to what they were before Obama (one of those you can tie to the last Bush year and the Democrat controlled congress if you like) now doesn't mean that they did a good job, there was a problem before he ballooned the deficit to over 1 trillion a year. A 439 billion dollar deficit is a huge problem, but it's the smallest deficit since 2007 and probably the smallest deficit that we'll have any time soon if we stick with the status quo. I mean, sure it looks good compared to the 1.4 trillion dollar deficit that we had in 2009, but that doesn't mean it's good.

 

Simple. The government doesn't pay for it. Models are shifting now towards lump sum payments per generalized service anyways. I believe this happened under Obamacare. It's one of the reasons hospitals claim Obamacare is killing their business.

Perform a total knee replacement, you get $5000 reimbursement. Have a child in NICU, receiver $50k. An ER visit for x.xxx ICD10 code, receive $1k.

As far as the smart decisions go - people don't make them now, and never will when it comes to healthcare. You have people who are on medicaid getting a splinter, or hyperventilating and calling for an ambulance. Then, you have someone who can't afford his anti-rejection meds from his liver transplant because of his insurance company waiting to come into the ER until he's actually on the verge of death. I've seen all these things happen, and it's sickening.

My wife and I both work in the medical field. Neither one of us go in for regular medical checkups. It's too expensive, and we've been burned by doctors that are poor in their field before. Instead, I rely on friends that are doctors if I ever need anything (a rare antibiotic for an ear infection is about all I ever need). It's not the best thing, but luckily, we're both healthy and young.

Hopefully before then, we'll have some kind of healthcare system that works. I've talked to Canadians about their system before, and I realize they all think their's sucks, too.

I don't know the answer. I do know that I pay taxes that go towards getting people that choose not to work universal health care. I've been on medicaid before. Growing up, my mom didn't work (for no good reason), and my step dad was on disability. I could go to most doctors in town and get most services done without paying anything. In some cases, I had to settle for lesser treatments, such as mercury-based fillings, but not often.

There's no good reason, to me, why certain people in the population can be propped up by everyone else, yet everyone that's doing the supporting can't be a part of it.

In fact, the candidate that has a proposal for universal-type care, that studies show is feasible, is the candidate that will likely get my vote. Unfortunately, Obamacare has largely been a failure, in my opinion.

The medical landscape of our country is despicable. I want no part in lining the pockets of some suit that has no knowledge of what actually happens to real people because of his decisions.