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On March 11 2017 03:35 xDaunt wrote:I've seen that argument elsewhere. It's not a bad one, and is probably most likely explanation. The alternative is that Paul Ryan is a policy moron, which I'm not quite willing to rule out given his debate performance in 2012.
I think it's both. The GOP as a whole is trying and failing on purpose with it, with Ryan and a few others convinced that this bill is made of miracles.
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This too much 5D chess for me. I think the Republicans caught the car and how no flippin' idea what to do, and the best they happened to be able to do was a complete garbage bill. It really relies on the myth of Paul Ryan especially - he's *actually* a genius legislator with sharp political instincts, so there's NO WAY he could have botched this so badly... except on purpose. Reality is, he's a youngish looking dude who idolizes a low-grade philosopher that most people grew out of in high school.
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I just watched a clip of Ryan explaining that the insurance based on healthy people paying to cover the sick people isn’t working. And I had this very real moment where I didn’t know if he was deeply stupid or just believes enough voters are that dumb.
I am convinced that the current batch of house republicans have no idea how to govern and never intended to.
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On March 11 2017 03:35 xDaunt wrote:I've seen that argument elsewhere. It's not a bad one, and is probably most likely explanation. The alternative is that Paul Ryan is a policy moron, which I'm not quite willing to rule out given his debate performance in 2012.
Er, all I remember about Paul Ryan from 2012 was that speech he gave that was so full of bullshit that even FOX News couldn't defend it. (Cf. http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/08/30/paul-ryans-speech-in-three-words.html )
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He's not stupid, he's just a Wisconsin Republican.
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On March 11 2017 02:22 LightSpectra wrote:Show nested quote +On March 11 2017 01:45 Krikkitone wrote:On March 11 2017 01:27 farvacola wrote:On March 11 2017 01:21 Krikkitone wrote:On March 11 2017 01:14 chocorush wrote:
Reliant on some sort of welfare and are faced with choices like working more and losing benefits.
. This one is particularly interesting because unlike the others, it is Not something middle class/rich people do (with some weird exceptions of people that turn down a raise to avoid getting into a higher tax bracket). Because society created welfare as that system. That is true, though it's important to note that most welfare or welfare-type programs (like TANF, SNAP, and WIC, to name a few) also tie into Medicaid eligibility, which is the primary reason why most on the benefits line opt for staying under the threshold. This is why moving to a single payer system or at the very least a merging of medicare and medicaid would do wonders for breaking down the margin game as its played right now. Couple that with effective rate-focused reform more generally and maybe things will look a little less shitty  Well I'd agree there, the problem is we have ~6 separate "entitlement" systems in the US Welfare (multiple parts)-poor Social Security-old and then 4 for Health care Medicare-old ACA-non regularly employed Medicaid-poor Employer deduction-employed The ones for "poor" have that welfare trap effect It would be best if they could merge all 4 of the medical into one (at least combine Medicaid+ACA into one so that they can tell their conservative wing the net eliminated one "entitlement"...while leaving alone the two medical entitlements that are 3rd rails) (same for Welfare and Social Security... one single base amount of money... the more you work and put in over time, the more you get to get out of it) Show nested quote +On March 11 2017 01:48 LegalLord wrote:On March 11 2017 01:45 Krikkitone wrote:
The ones for "poor" have that welfare trap effect I certainly know a few people who are afraid to earn more money because it would mean that they have to pay for their own healthcare now. "Welfare" as we typically think of it, where poor people get money when they become unemployed, hasn't existed since 1996. But yeah, I agree that any social safety nets that vanish as soon as you make too much money are counter-productive. So here's an easy fix for all of that: 1. Single-payer healthcare. [Until we get to that point, I could envision a system where whenever you're uninsured for any reason whatsoever, you're automatically enrolled in Medicaid.] 2. A guaranteed basic income/negative income tax. [This would replace unemployment insurance, food stamps, and social security.] 3. Emergency/disaster relief that is guaranteed for a certain period of time, and doesn't disappear when you reach a certain income level.
Well #2 could cover #1 as well, if it had an age related component (get $X for general life get + $Y if you have insurance)
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On March 10 2017 16:06 IgnE wrote:Show nested quote +On March 10 2017 15:26 KwarK wrote:On March 10 2017 15:23 Aquanim wrote:On March 10 2017 15:01 KwarK wrote:
...
The status quo is not sacred, it's not the product of some well ordered design, it's just where we are. I feel like you folks would be preaching the innate virtues of a strong peasant class if public education wasn't mandated and insisting that it would be absurd to think that the plough pullers could generate greater value from their labour if they were literate. I would say that it is absurd to think that you can just wave your hands and say "all of you go and get literate". The structure of society had to change for that to be possible. And what structural barrier prevents literate individuals with iPhones and wifi from watching MS Word tutorials on YouTube? Serious question. What do they need that they don't have, beyond a will to do it. What the fuck are you even talking about? You accuse me of shameful strawmanning about 16 hour work days and you are acting like watching MS Word tutorials on Youtube is going to help someone make a significant amount of money? Show nested quote +On March 10 2017 14:41 KwarK wrote:On March 10 2017 12:15 IgnE wrote:On March 10 2017 07:48 KwarK wrote:On March 10 2017 07:33 WolfintheSheep wrote:On March 10 2017 06:58 KwarK wrote:
If you ask me for a solution to poverty in the nation then I'll talk about wealth inequality, deficient public services, economic dislocation, the prison industrial complex etc etc. If you ask me for a solution to a poor individual then I'll talk about education, hard work and planning. I know you gave me shit for this before but you really can fund a retirement by donating plasma, and donating plasma alone. Should people have to donate plasma to retire? No. Should individuals who have no retirement savings and 3 hours a week they can spare donate plasma? Yes, absolutely. I'm not advocating it as a fix to structural problems but as an example of a way that an individual can identify and tackle a specific problem in their life. I'd say this paragraph is the crux of the issue that many people have with your economic views. It's good that you have the awareness that your solutions apply solely on a micro scale, but then you keep jumping back to apply it on a macro scale. The blood donation thing is a perfect example, as the only reason you're getting good money from that is because no one else is doing it. It has all the bearing of the typical get rich biography that collapses on itself once it's been spread to the masses. Do more things that create value than you are currently doing, including learning ways to increase the value of your labour, while simultaneously improving the allocation of your resources through budgeting and investing is not a get rich scheme that will collapse if more people become aware of it. It's the essence of human progress. It's how you get someone going "I wonder if having a horse pull this plough would increase the output of the field enough to offset the trouble involved in having a horse?". There is this false dichotomy between the two truths which people seem to struggle with. We have liberals so desperate not to blame individuals for poverty that they find themselves arguing against the idea that if you're poor and not working as hard as you could be then working harder would help. Literally disagreeing with hard work. Or that if you're spending money on crap you don't need and don't have enough for the shit you do need then maybe that's a problem of resource allocation, rather than of resource shortages. Meanwhile we have conservatives insisting that what a kid growing up in an area with shitty schools and a single parent working two jobs really needs is cuts to public services because that way they'll obviously learn to be more self sufficient, once they're done learning to read that is. It is true that there are structural problems in society. It is also true that individuals can improve their own outcomes. There is literally no conflict there but for some reason people seem to want to insist that it be an ideological warzone and because they are certain that their side is right they must pretend the other side is wrong. Sure, health insurance costs more than an iphone and saying "just don't buy a phone" is an oversimplification of the problem. I'm fine with that. But at the same time, if you have a perfectly good phone and know that you're too broke to pay for any health issues then don't fucking upgrade your phone. It is legitimately a normal thing for working poor people with regular and predictable income streams to do shit like say they can't pay rent by the 3rd and will have to pay it on the 10th for an extra $200 in fees, month after month. When someone says there should be more affordable housing I'm behind that, but at the same time you can't pretend that the reason they can't afford rent is it's too expensive for all of these people. They can afford it, they can afford $200 more than it, and they can afford to overpay by $200 month after month. If you halved the rent you wouldn't change the problem which in many cases is just that people don't see the need to not spend their rent money before rent is due. It might shock you to hear this but I don't actually think an economic system where people have to sell 16 hours of labor every day in order to not be destitute when they retire is a good one. This isn't about "literally disagreeing with hard work." I think hard work is valuable, and I think human beings seek meaningful work even without the threat of poverty looming over them. This is about the limits of the possible. Let's put aside for a moment your assumption that the highest goal in life is for people to create more "value." If you tell a thousand people "just learn a second language at night when you come home after you put your kids to bed" and 1 or 2 do it you have to wonder what these other 998 irrational idiots are doing right? They must be either idiots or lazy under your schema. And then you wonder why conservatives don't want to take care of these lazy idiots. Something is wrong here, Kwark. Few issues here. Firstly you're making a wild straw man, comparable to the kind of idiocy where people say "if tax rates were 100% then nobody would work so clearly raising taxes is always wrong" with that 16 hours shit. You should feel ashamed of yourself for that. Secondly, people who have the capacity to improve their lot and don't do so often are lazy or idiots. Some people have valid reasons, of course, but an awful lot of people just don't give a fuck. From the guy I helped with his taxes who deliberately chose a smaller refund so he could use it as a deposit on a truck he couldn't afford sooner to the large numbers of renters who each month choose to spend their rent money on other shit and incur late fees. And I absolutely empathise with the conservative outlook of "why should I work harder so that other people can choose to work less hard". I'm working full time, going to school three quarter time and still pulling odd jobs for secondary income streams on the weekends and I'm supposed to want to share with people who have the same ability to provide for themselves as I do? I believe in redistributive taxes because I understand that it's the only way the world can work because for whatever reason the other "998 irrational idiots" don't seem to get it. Hell, half of people eligible for the EITC don't even claim it because apparently it's not worth their time to do so. I bolded the part where we have incompatible interpretations of what's really going on. I get that you deal with a lot of people who are idiots. But what are you going to do? Write off the half of humanity with less than mean IQ as lazy idiots that you only ruefully give handouts to? Our economy doesn't only suffer from wealth inequalities, it also suffers from a surfeit of meaningless work that chews up the idiots who are lucky enough to have any work to do at all. My entire point at the beginning of this conversation was that we need to reframe what we mean by "have the capacity to improve their lot." Kind of as a tangent, since you seem to love the idea so much, I really dispute this notion that selling your plasma is a simple trade of "3 hours" a week. Selling that much of your plasma for essentially the rest of your life is a serious stressor on your body. It's a vampiric transaction that will take a toll on your health long term if it becomes an essential weekly occurrence. This stressor is to be added to the already significant stress of simply living in poverty. That's just one graphic example of you seriously underestimating the real costs involved. Glibly suggesting that people could learn another language on top of a full time job while taking care of a family is another. You want these people to go from zero to fluent enough to quickly and reliably translate things as a part-time internet gig for a few extra bucks? For someone that dropped out of community college? What?
Blood donation here in Spain is recommended a maximum of 3 times a year for men, and 2 times a year for women. While that's probably on the conservative side, too often can have serious effects on your health. I can't imagine what doing it weekly for years on end would do to you.
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United States44296 Posts
On March 11 2017 03:39 Danglars wrote:Show nested quote +On March 11 2017 02:08 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:Paul Ryan is just an asshole it seems: House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) admitted Friday that the Congressional Budget Office will likely estimate that millions of people would lose health insurance under the GOP's proposed health care bill.
But he said that the the bill wasn’t meant to address the “beauty contest” of increasing coverage.
“We always know, you’re never going to win a coverage beauty contest when it’s free market versus government mandates,” Ryan told radio host Hugh Hewitt, after Hewitt floated the possibility that the CBO would estimate 15 million people will lose health insurance because of the American Health Care Act.
He was referring in part to the Obamacare's mandate that individuals purchase insurance, and the tax penalties it imposes on those who don't. But the law also provides more government assistance to buy care than the Republicans' alternative, which provides tax credits based mostly on age.
“If the government says, ‘Thou shall buy our health insurance,’ the government estimates are going to say people will comply and it will happen. And when you replace that with, ‘We’re going to have a free market and you buy what you want to buy,’ they’re going to say not nearly as many people are going to do that,” Ryan continued. “That’s just going to happen. And so you’ll have those coverage estimates. We assume that’s going to happen. That’s not our goal. Our goal is not to show a pretty piece of paper that says, ‘We’re mandating great things for Americans.’
“We’re not going to get into a bidding war with the left about how much we can mandate, or put entitlements out there for people,” he said later.
Paul isn’t the first to discredit the CBO’s coverage estimates as a legitimate measure of the success of health care legislation.
The director of the Office of Management said Wednesday that “insurance is not really the end goal here.”
“So we’re choosing instead to look at what we think is more important to ordinary people: Can they afford to go to the doctor?” he added later.
And Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, the White House’s point person on the legislation, granted later that day that it was the legislation’s “goal” to provide insurance for all at a lower cost – Trump’s promise of the bill – but said the priority was cost.
“I would suggest to Martha that what our desire is, is to make sure certain you are the individual that is able to select the physician and the treatment that you desire for yourself, not that the government dictates to you,” Price said, responding to a woman who stood to lose thousands of dollars in government health care subsidies.
In his interview with Hewitt, Ryan also agreed that the ACHA’s eventual capping of Medicaid was the largest change to federal entitlements in his lifetime.
“We’re talking about hundreds of billions of dollars a year,” he said. “This is so much bigger, by orders of magnitude, than [the] welfare reform [of 1996].” Source It's amazing how many more people buy health insurance when the government assesses penalties. It's almost as if you're forcing them to buy a product they would rather have the freedom to choose otherwise.
Given freedom of choice people would buy fire insurance after the fire already took and demand the government force insurers to pay. The individual mandate forces them to buy it before.
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On March 11 2017 03:42 farvacola wrote:
He's not stupid, he's just a Wisconsin Republican.
What the fuck is going on in the mid-west? Is there something in the water?
Edit: Never mind, I just remember that this is the state that elected Scott Walker, the man actively their state and workers rights.
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United States44296 Posts
On March 11 2017 03:43 Acrofales wrote:Show nested quote +On March 10 2017 16:06 IgnE wrote:On March 10 2017 15:26 KwarK wrote:On March 10 2017 15:23 Aquanim wrote:On March 10 2017 15:01 KwarK wrote:
...
The status quo is not sacred, it's not the product of some well ordered design, it's just where we are. I feel like you folks would be preaching the innate virtues of a strong peasant class if public education wasn't mandated and insisting that it would be absurd to think that the plough pullers could generate greater value from their labour if they were literate. I would say that it is absurd to think that you can just wave your hands and say "all of you go and get literate". The structure of society had to change for that to be possible. And what structural barrier prevents literate individuals with iPhones and wifi from watching MS Word tutorials on YouTube? Serious question. What do they need that they don't have, beyond a will to do it. What the fuck are you even talking about? You accuse me of shameful strawmanning about 16 hour work days and you are acting like watching MS Word tutorials on Youtube is going to help someone make a significant amount of money? On March 10 2017 14:41 KwarK wrote:On March 10 2017 12:15 IgnE wrote:On March 10 2017 07:48 KwarK wrote:On March 10 2017 07:33 WolfintheSheep wrote:On March 10 2017 06:58 KwarK wrote:
If you ask me for a solution to poverty in the nation then I'll talk about wealth inequality, deficient public services, economic dislocation, the prison industrial complex etc etc. If you ask me for a solution to a poor individual then I'll talk about education, hard work and planning. I know you gave me shit for this before but you really can fund a retirement by donating plasma, and donating plasma alone. Should people have to donate plasma to retire? No. Should individuals who have no retirement savings and 3 hours a week they can spare donate plasma? Yes, absolutely. I'm not advocating it as a fix to structural problems but as an example of a way that an individual can identify and tackle a specific problem in their life. I'd say this paragraph is the crux of the issue that many people have with your economic views. It's good that you have the awareness that your solutions apply solely on a micro scale, but then you keep jumping back to apply it on a macro scale. The blood donation thing is a perfect example, as the only reason you're getting good money from that is because no one else is doing it. It has all the bearing of the typical get rich biography that collapses on itself once it's been spread to the masses. Do more things that create value than you are currently doing, including learning ways to increase the value of your labour, while simultaneously improving the allocation of your resources through budgeting and investing is not a get rich scheme that will collapse if more people become aware of it. It's the essence of human progress. It's how you get someone going "I wonder if having a horse pull this plough would increase the output of the field enough to offset the trouble involved in having a horse?". There is this false dichotomy between the two truths which people seem to struggle with. We have liberals so desperate not to blame individuals for poverty that they find themselves arguing against the idea that if you're poor and not working as hard as you could be then working harder would help. Literally disagreeing with hard work. Or that if you're spending money on crap you don't need and don't have enough for the shit you do need then maybe that's a problem of resource allocation, rather than of resource shortages. Meanwhile we have conservatives insisting that what a kid growing up in an area with shitty schools and a single parent working two jobs really needs is cuts to public services because that way they'll obviously learn to be more self sufficient, once they're done learning to read that is. It is true that there are structural problems in society. It is also true that individuals can improve their own outcomes. There is literally no conflict there but for some reason people seem to want to insist that it be an ideological warzone and because they are certain that their side is right they must pretend the other side is wrong. Sure, health insurance costs more than an iphone and saying "just don't buy a phone" is an oversimplification of the problem. I'm fine with that. But at the same time, if you have a perfectly good phone and know that you're too broke to pay for any health issues then don't fucking upgrade your phone. It is legitimately a normal thing for working poor people with regular and predictable income streams to do shit like say they can't pay rent by the 3rd and will have to pay it on the 10th for an extra $200 in fees, month after month. When someone says there should be more affordable housing I'm behind that, but at the same time you can't pretend that the reason they can't afford rent is it's too expensive for all of these people. They can afford it, they can afford $200 more than it, and they can afford to overpay by $200 month after month. If you halved the rent you wouldn't change the problem which in many cases is just that people don't see the need to not spend their rent money before rent is due. It might shock you to hear this but I don't actually think an economic system where people have to sell 16 hours of labor every day in order to not be destitute when they retire is a good one. This isn't about "literally disagreeing with hard work." I think hard work is valuable, and I think human beings seek meaningful work even without the threat of poverty looming over them. This is about the limits of the possible. Let's put aside for a moment your assumption that the highest goal in life is for people to create more "value." If you tell a thousand people "just learn a second language at night when you come home after you put your kids to bed" and 1 or 2 do it you have to wonder what these other 998 irrational idiots are doing right? They must be either idiots or lazy under your schema. And then you wonder why conservatives don't want to take care of these lazy idiots. Something is wrong here, Kwark. Few issues here. Firstly you're making a wild straw man, comparable to the kind of idiocy where people say "if tax rates were 100% then nobody would work so clearly raising taxes is always wrong" with that 16 hours shit. You should feel ashamed of yourself for that. Secondly, people who have the capacity to improve their lot and don't do so often are lazy or idiots. Some people have valid reasons, of course, but an awful lot of people just don't give a fuck. From the guy I helped with his taxes who deliberately chose a smaller refund so he could use it as a deposit on a truck he couldn't afford sooner to the large numbers of renters who each month choose to spend their rent money on other shit and incur late fees. And I absolutely empathise with the conservative outlook of "why should I work harder so that other people can choose to work less hard". I'm working full time, going to school three quarter time and still pulling odd jobs for secondary income streams on the weekends and I'm supposed to want to share with people who have the same ability to provide for themselves as I do? I believe in redistributive taxes because I understand that it's the only way the world can work because for whatever reason the other "998 irrational idiots" don't seem to get it. Hell, half of people eligible for the EITC don't even claim it because apparently it's not worth their time to do so. I bolded the part where we have incompatible interpretations of what's really going on. I get that you deal with a lot of people who are idiots. But what are you going to do? Write off the half of humanity with less than mean IQ as lazy idiots that you only ruefully give handouts to? Our economy doesn't only suffer from wealth inequalities, it also suffers from a surfeit of meaningless work that chews up the idiots who are lucky enough to have any work to do at all. My entire point at the beginning of this conversation was that we need to reframe what we mean by "have the capacity to improve their lot." Kind of as a tangent, since you seem to love the idea so much, I really dispute this notion that selling your plasma is a simple trade of "3 hours" a week. Selling that much of your plasma for essentially the rest of your life is a serious stressor on your body. It's a vampiric transaction that will take a toll on your health long term if it becomes an essential weekly occurrence. This stressor is to be added to the already significant stress of simply living in poverty. That's just one graphic example of you seriously underestimating the real costs involved. Glibly suggesting that people could learn another language on top of a full time job while taking care of a family is another. You want these people to go from zero to fluent enough to quickly and reliably translate things as a part-time internet gig for a few extra bucks? For someone that dropped out of community college? What? Blood donation here in Spain is recommended a maximum of 3 times a year for men, and 2 times a year for women. While that's probably on the conservative side, too often can have serious effects on your health. I can't imagine what doing it weekly for years on end would do to you.
You're thinking whole blood, not plasma. Different thing entirely.
Edit: Oddly enough I wrote this post in the waiting room to see my doctor and subsequently had the opportunity to ask him. He said that a number of his patients regularly donate plasma and that the only real long term health issue is the possibility of fatigue which can be treated by stopping donating so regularly for a bit. Obviously there are possible side effects from fuckups, such as inadvertently donating whole blood due to mechanical failures making it not possible to return your blood, allergic reactions to anticoagulant or whatever, possible contamination from equipment (a shitton of people got AIDS from a Chinese plasma firm and that's why we use American plasma cattle now) etc but assuming no fuckups, the loss of the plasma itself isn't going to hurt you much.
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On March 11 2017 03:41 Plansix wrote:
I just watched a clip of Ryan explaining that the insurance based on healthy people paying to cover the sick people isn’t working. And I had this very real moment where I didn’t know if he was deeply stupid or just believes enough voters are that dumb.
I am convinced that the current batch of house republicans have no idea how to govern and never intended to.
I'd veer towards the "believes voters are dumb." Remember, the GOP have been successfully riding the Reaganist neoliberal doctrines of "government always fails, privatization/deregulation will always produce better results, rich people becoming more rich equals poor people becoming rich too" for over 30 years now with no signs of it slowing down.
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On March 11 2017 03:43 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On March 11 2017 03:39 Danglars wrote:On March 11 2017 02:08 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:Paul Ryan is just an asshole it seems: House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) admitted Friday that the Congressional Budget Office will likely estimate that millions of people would lose health insurance under the GOP's proposed health care bill.
But he said that the the bill wasn’t meant to address the “beauty contest” of increasing coverage.
“We always know, you’re never going to win a coverage beauty contest when it’s free market versus government mandates,” Ryan told radio host Hugh Hewitt, after Hewitt floated the possibility that the CBO would estimate 15 million people will lose health insurance because of the American Health Care Act.
He was referring in part to the Obamacare's mandate that individuals purchase insurance, and the tax penalties it imposes on those who don't. But the law also provides more government assistance to buy care than the Republicans' alternative, which provides tax credits based mostly on age.
“If the government says, ‘Thou shall buy our health insurance,’ the government estimates are going to say people will comply and it will happen. And when you replace that with, ‘We’re going to have a free market and you buy what you want to buy,’ they’re going to say not nearly as many people are going to do that,” Ryan continued. “That’s just going to happen. And so you’ll have those coverage estimates. We assume that’s going to happen. That’s not our goal. Our goal is not to show a pretty piece of paper that says, ‘We’re mandating great things for Americans.’
“We’re not going to get into a bidding war with the left about how much we can mandate, or put entitlements out there for people,” he said later.
Paul isn’t the first to discredit the CBO’s coverage estimates as a legitimate measure of the success of health care legislation.
The director of the Office of Management said Wednesday that “insurance is not really the end goal here.”
“So we’re choosing instead to look at what we think is more important to ordinary people: Can they afford to go to the doctor?” he added later.
And Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, the White House’s point person on the legislation, granted later that day that it was the legislation’s “goal” to provide insurance for all at a lower cost – Trump’s promise of the bill – but said the priority was cost.
“I would suggest to Martha that what our desire is, is to make sure certain you are the individual that is able to select the physician and the treatment that you desire for yourself, not that the government dictates to you,” Price said, responding to a woman who stood to lose thousands of dollars in government health care subsidies.
In his interview with Hewitt, Ryan also agreed that the ACHA’s eventual capping of Medicaid was the largest change to federal entitlements in his lifetime.
“We’re talking about hundreds of billions of dollars a year,” he said. “This is so much bigger, by orders of magnitude, than [the] welfare reform [of 1996].” Source It's amazing how many more people buy health insurance when the government assesses penalties. It's almost as if you're forcing them to buy a product they would rather have the freedom to choose otherwise. Given freedom of choice people would buy fire insurance after the fire already took and demand the government force insurers to pay. The individual mandate forces them to buy it before.
Also I have to cover their bills when they choose not to get insurance, but then go to the emergency room because they broke their leg.
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On March 11 2017 03:42 farvacola wrote:
He's not stupid, he's just a Wisconsin Republican.
There's reason why I said "policy moron" instead of just "moron." You don't become Speaker of the House without a high degree of some kind of intelligence. It just may not be the same kind of intelligence that translates into creating good policy.
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On March 11 2017 03:44 LightSpectra wrote:Show nested quote +On March 11 2017 03:41 Plansix wrote:
I just watched a clip of Ryan explaining that the insurance based on healthy people paying to cover the sick people isn’t working. And I had this very real moment where I didn’t know if he was deeply stupid or just believes enough voters are that dumb.
I am convinced that the current batch of house republicans have no idea how to govern and never intended to. I'd veer towards the "believes voters are dumb." Remember, the GOP have been successfully riding the Reaganist neoliberal doctrines of "government always fails, privatization/deregulation will always produce better results, rich people becoming more rich equals poor people becoming rich too" for over 30 years now with no signs of it slowing down.
I wish people would stop calling the Reagan Democrats neoliberals. They were Dixiecrats and were never that into social programs to begin with. Of course the beliefs are the same, but it makes it seem like the Democratic party used to be more “progressive” before neoliberalism. It was sort of the other way around.
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On March 11 2017 03:49 Plansix wrote:Show nested quote +On March 11 2017 03:44 LightSpectra wrote:On March 11 2017 03:41 Plansix wrote:
I just watched a clip of Ryan explaining that the insurance based on healthy people paying to cover the sick people isn’t working. And I had this very real moment where I didn’t know if he was deeply stupid or just believes enough voters are that dumb.
I am convinced that the current batch of house republicans have no idea how to govern and never intended to. I'd veer towards the "believes voters are dumb." Remember, the GOP have been successfully riding the Reaganist neoliberal doctrines of "government always fails, privatization/deregulation will always produce better results, rich people becoming more rich equals poor people becoming rich too" for over 30 years now with no signs of it slowing down. I wish people would stop calling the Reagan Democrats neoliberals. They were Dixiecrats and were never that into social programs to begin with. Of course the beliefs are the same, but it makes it seem like the Democratic party used to be more “progressive” before neoliberalism. It was sort of the other way around.
?? I never even referred to "Reagan Democrats", I don't know what you're talking about.
Or perhaps you're not aware that outside of the USA, "neoliberal" corresponds loosely to the American conservatism that the GOP subscribes to (i.e. emphasis on limited government and individual responsibility).
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The theory that they want it to fail does seem quite plausible; I think I said the same thing myself a while ago.
reminds me of an issue I've had, feeling that the unelected people in washington do a better job than the elected ones, so I was wondering what the thread thought:
Poll: Who does a better job in the US federal government?The Unelected Bureaucrats (9) 90% The Elected Leaders (1) 10% 10 total votes Your vote: Who does a better job in the US federal government? (Vote): The Elected Leaders
(Vote): The Unelected Bureaucrats
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That poll is nonsense. They don't do the same thing. Bureaucrats only follow orders, the only measure of their success is if they do the job competently and don't succumb to corruption (bribery, nepotism, party favoritism, etc.).
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On March 11 2017 03:58 LightSpectra wrote:
That poll is nonsense. They don't do the same thing. Bureaucrats only follow orders, the only measure of their success is if they do the job competently and don't succumb to corruption (bribery, nepotism, party favoritism, etc.).
Plus the fact you hear about one in the media and not the other.
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Both and neither? You need elected officials to create policy and professional civil servants to implement those policies.
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On March 11 2017 03:43 Krikkitone wrote:Show nested quote +On March 11 2017 02:22 LightSpectra wrote:On March 11 2017 01:45 Krikkitone wrote:On March 11 2017 01:27 farvacola wrote:On March 11 2017 01:21 Krikkitone wrote:On March 11 2017 01:14 chocorush wrote:
Reliant on some sort of welfare and are faced with choices like working more and losing benefits.
. This one is particularly interesting because unlike the others, it is Not something middle class/rich people do (with some weird exceptions of people that turn down a raise to avoid getting into a higher tax bracket). Because society created welfare as that system. That is true, though it's important to note that most welfare or welfare-type programs (like TANF, SNAP, and WIC, to name a few) also tie into Medicaid eligibility, which is the primary reason why most on the benefits line opt for staying under the threshold. This is why moving to a single payer system or at the very least a merging of medicare and medicaid would do wonders for breaking down the margin game as its played right now. Couple that with effective rate-focused reform more generally and maybe things will look a little less shitty Well I'd agree there, the problem is we have ~6 separate "entitlement" systems in the US Welfare (multiple parts)-poor Social Security-old and then 4 for Health care Medicare-old ACA-non regularly employed Medicaid-poor Employer deduction-employed The ones for "poor" have that welfare trap effect It would be best if they could merge all 4 of the medical into one (at least combine Medicaid+ACA into one so that they can tell their conservative wing the net eliminated one "entitlement"...while leaving alone the two medical entitlements that are 3rd rails) (same for Welfare and Social Security... one single base amount of money... the more you work and put in over time, the more you get to get out of it) On March 11 2017 01:48 LegalLord wrote:On March 11 2017 01:45 Krikkitone wrote:
The ones for "poor" have that welfare trap effect I certainly know a few people who are afraid to earn more money because it would mean that they have to pay for their own healthcare now. "Welfare" as we typically think of it, where poor people get money when they become unemployed, hasn't existed since 1996. But yeah, I agree that any social safety nets that vanish as soon as you make too much money are counter-productive. So here's an easy fix for all of that: 1. Single-payer healthcare. [Until we get to that point, I could envision a system where whenever you're uninsured for any reason whatsoever, you're automatically enrolled in Medicaid.] 2. A guaranteed basic income/negative income tax. [This would replace unemployment insurance, food stamps, and social security.] 3. Emergency/disaster relief that is guaranteed for a certain period of time, and doesn't disappear when you reach a certain income level. Well #2 could cover #1 as well, if it had an age related component (get $X for general life get + $Y if you have insurance)
#2 could only reasonably cover #1 with a complete overhaul of how we pay for health services. The equilibrium market price for services is really high (demand is relatively inelastic when it comes to health), and for a UBI to be able to pay for healthcare without additional forces to bring down it's cost from equilibrium would require a UBI so high that it isn't really feasible. One way to picture why this is is just by considering how much it costs an employer to insure an employee. Even considering the massive tax benefits (which need to go), it's the equivalent of increasing salary by 10-20k for plans that aren't catastrophic plans. Taxing people enough for a UBI to cover enough of this on top of the cost of basic living? I'm not seeing it.
The healthcare system can only really produce the quantities we want for everyone if, we pay for it all at market price or make doctors and insurance companies take less. The main power of single payer is that it forces doctors to take less, or miss out on serving the majority of the population. While this results in less people wanting to go into medicine, and doctors generally being less happy and insurance companies not being happy, it still seems like the best solution all things considered, since taxing the shit out of everyone to pay the doctors is just not happening.
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EPT
