MHF Democrat Primary Poll

[Speaker to Animals]

S’plain yourself - we currently pay $30 trillion in insurance premiums?


How is the middle class not being asked to heavily subsidize the entire fucking world (open borders remember)?

Already explained.



If that was a graph of household budgets, and Mr. Red Line was barely scraping by with less quality of life than the rest of the families, then you'd probably assume he has some problems with wisely spending his money.

[Zlaxer]

So you're cool with subsidizing the entire fucking world?

How the fuck are you going to do that?

[Speaker to Animals]

S’plain yourself - we currently pay $30 trillion in insurance premiums?


How is the middle class not being asked to heavily subsidize the entire fucking world (open borders remember)?

Already explained. I grow tired of repeating myself.

Eh..

If Medicare For All were implemented as the sole insurer, with private insurance being more supplemental services, then it likely would be cheaper than what we all pay for health care now. Sure, it would be a big budget item, but that budget would come from your payroll taxes, and your additional payroll taxes would likely be much less than what you currently pay for shitty private insurance.

The ZOMG Medicare for all will bankrupt us!! canard doesn't really track well. Most people realize it's a matter of shuffling how we pay for insurance, not add a bunch of shit to what we already have to pay for.

That's not to say there aren't other legit criticisms. Pretty sure death panels are going to be a major problem if the government controls what medical services you are allowed to get. That's a much better tactic to oppose the idea than the costs.

The obvious retort from the left is that profit in the context of a health care finance was always a really, really bad idea, since profit in that context means people are not getting health care they otherwise would want or need. It's death panels by other means, and being poor means you are most likely to be forced to die.

Thus, if you really wanted to oppose MFA, you'd want to acknowledge this fact and counter with the counterfactual that most single payer systems result in death panels of some kind, and therefore it might be worthwhile to just loosen up the regulations so that we could somehow establish national not-for-profit health care co-ops, etc.

[Zlaxer]

No - you’re not explaining anything relevant to my point - open borders means anyone comes in, and Warren is onboard with social services for all illegals - how you going to pay for that? I don't give a shit what percentage of GDP we spend on healthcare, not even close to cover what the left is intending to do.

[Speaker to Animals]

An honest assessment of the situation is as follows:

(1) For-profit clusterfuck we have now: poor people selected for death. Profit in a for-profit healthcare system means, in the case of insurance, the deaths of Americans and, in the case of providers, bankrupted Americans. You have Obamacare slapped on to this nightmare now, and it is just bankrupting Americans while still making important health care services unaffordable.

(2) Single-payer/Socialized medicine: government decides who gets to live and who gets to die. There's no telling what metric the government will use to determine who wins the death lottery, but it probably is going to be worse than the for-profit system in that selecting people for death based on how much of their wealth the health industry can plunder is not capricious.

(3) Remove regulations that break up health insurance markets and help institute private, nation-wide, not-for-profit insurance pools. Let people decide collectively how they want to come to these determinations free of government and free of death for profit.

They all have their trade offs. For-profit tends to result in faster medical advances, but most people cannot use those advances. Single-payer/socialized medicine tend to maximize coverage for all and nobody goes bankrupt. Co-op is a good middle ground.

Fighting against MFA as if we need to keep this Obamacare shit or go back to where people were being killed for profit prior to Obamacare is fucking dumb and won't win an election. Be honest about the problems and not ideological.

[Fife]

I'm laughing my ass off reading here that the new right wing narrative is that Warren is too moderate for the Dems. Awesome! Because the Democratic base is nowhere near as left as you guys think. The current loud far-left assholes don't define the party anymore than the far-right loud assholes of the Tea Party truly defined the Republicans in 2010.

Warren 2020!!!

Free health care for illegals combined with open borders is a real winner. Oh wait. Also take money from white people to give to minorities.

Winning platform, right there.

Neither are her actual positions. The fact that you equate "rich" with "white" and "poor" with "minorities" is about you not her. This is a classic dog whistle, conflating race and class, it's how the GOP has gotten poor and working class whites to vote against their own interests for generations now. Progressive taxation is, well, Progressive, which is what she professes to be. I don't think the millionaire wealth tax is doable for practical reasons, but it's not a bad idea.

How about some weekend red pills?

Why a “Billionaire” Wealth Tax Would Hurt the Working Poor and the Middle Class

So over time, it would be unlikely that any new Amazons or Apples would be started, and existing firms would be placed in ever less capable hands, with ever lower valuations as the wealth tax works its way down the line from billionaires to millionaires.

Sanders would either have to tax a vastly diminished pie or ask foreign investors to buy up US firms or, more likely, just confiscate shares directly and nationalize the companies. After a very short time, these companies would end up being majority-owned by the state—a veritable “trillionaire.”

. . .

A billionaire businessperson could, if they wanted to, spend their fortune building statues of themselves. But that would only be a drain on the wealth they had acquired through previous rounds of serving customers. They would quickly find that it does not generate new income, and would promptly stop, choosing instead to invest in ways that expand the business by serving even more people. There is an effective feedback loop to weed out unproductive choices and reward productive ones.

But the state, for its entire existence, has had the privilege of being able to just confiscate any resources it wants and order them to be used in any way its rulers direct. It can choose to build statues, pyramids, or whatever it wants, whether or not it serves real consumer needs. Neither does it have to worry about competition from new entrants doing a better job; it can just ban them. Since nobody gets to choose whether to commit the resources or buy the finished goods, there is no way of knowing whether those resources were spent wisely or poorly.

This does not mean people in government don’t make any good decisions. They will stumble upon some good ones over time. But the people involved do not bear any direct consequences for their bad decisions, and neither are they directly rewarded for their good decisions. They have less effective mechanisms for weeding out the bad decisions and doubling down on the good ones. There is more incentive for managers and employees to make their own job more comfortable and less demanding, and there is less consequence for leaving customers twisting in the wind.

In short, a wealth tax means state-owned enterprises, and a state-owned enterprise can get away with being unresponsive, self-absorbed and lazy.

If you dislike productive billionaires, you ought to be 1,000 times more suspect of confiscatory trillionaires.

and

“How can you talk economics when we’re talking about people’s lives!”

The results of all this is that you cannot dismiss economic realities–the cost of doing whatever “good thing” you want to do via government comes at the expense of no longer being able to do something else with those resources. After all, Economics is the study of cause and effect relationships in the allocation of scarce resources that have alternative uses. Scarce, meaning you never have enough for everyone that wants it. And so, use them for one thing and lose the ability to use them for something else.

In politics, people tend to make categorical decisions. We must do this, regardless of the cost. And doing “this” means we don’t do “that.” Political solutions tend to miss the incremental tradeoffs. How much of “that” are we willing to give up for how much of “this”?

And when the “that” is something as nebulous to most people’s thinking as a Gross Domestic Product, particularly when a lot of that product is in other people’s hands rather than ones own, the very real effects of trading “that” get lost in the shuffle.

It’s very short-sighted and we need to work hard to not do that.

Unless, of course, you want people to die.

[C-Mag]

Warren tries so hard to be oppressed and from a common background..... she just got caught again.

Her dad was a US military flight instructor............. not a poor janitor.

[Fife]

Warren tries so hard to be oppressed and from a common background..... she just got caught again.

Her dad was a US military flight instructor............. not a poor janitor.

"Janitor" is Cherokee for government teat-sucker.

[Fife]

An honest assessment of the situation is as follows:

(1) For-profit clusterfuck we have now: poor people selected for death. Profit in a for-profit healthcare system means, in the case of insurance, the deaths of Americans and, in the case of providers, bankrupted Americans. You have Obamacare slapped on to this nightmare now, and it is just bankrupting Americans while still making important health care services unaffordable.

(2) Single-payer/Socialized medicine: government decides who gets to live and who gets to die. There's no telling what metric the government will use to determine who wins the death lottery, but it probably is going to be worse than the for-profit system in that selecting people for death based on how much of their wealth the health industry can plunder is not capricious.

(3) Remove regulations that break up health insurance markets and help institute private, nation-wide, not-for-profit insurance pools. Let people decide collectively how they want to come to these determinations free of government and free of death for profit.

They all have their trade offs. For-profit tends to result in faster medical advances, but most people cannot use those advances. Single-payer/socialized medicine tend to maximize coverage for all and nobody goes bankrupt. Co-op is a good middle ground.

Fighting against MFA as if we need to keep this Obamacare shit or go back to where people were being killed for profit prior to Obamacare is fucking dumb and won't win an election. Be honest about the problems and not ideological.

The middle ground is the godless commie's paradise.

Implying that "ideological" is not "honest" is the ultimate blue pill.

[The Conservative]

An honest assessment of the situation is as follows:

(1) For-profit clusterfuck we have now: poor people selected for death. Profit in a for-profit healthcare system means, in the case of insurance, the deaths of Americans and, in the case of providers, bankrupted Americans. You have Obamacare slapped on to this nightmare now, and it is just bankrupting Americans while still making important health care services unaffordable.

(2) Single-payer/Socialized medicine: government decides who gets to live and who gets to die. There's no telling what metric the government will use to determine who wins the death lottery, but it probably is going to be worse than the for-profit system in that selecting people for death based on how much of their wealth the health industry can plunder is not capricious.

(3) Remove regulations that break up health insurance markets and help institute private, nation-wide, not-for-profit insurance pools. Let people decide collectively how they want to come to these determinations free of government and free of death for profit.

They all have their trade offs. For-profit tends to result in faster medical advances, but most people cannot use those advances. Single-payer/socialized medicine tend to maximize coverage for all and nobody goes bankrupt. Co-op is a good middle ground.

Fighting against MFA as if we need to keep this Obamacare shit or go back to where people were being killed for profit prior to Obamacare is fucking dumb and won't win an election. Be honest about the problems and not ideological.

Want to reduce the cost of everything, get government out of it. Once the gravy train is gone, they will have to figure out where else to milk for money, and if insurance companies aren't wiling to soak up the costs, medical companies are going to have to charge the US citizen the same price as the rest of the world, or go bankrupt.

Which right now, I will have no issue with it if that happens.