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On August 16 2018 13:10 GoTuNk! wrote:Show nested quote +On August 16 2018 13:02 KwarK wrote:On August 16 2018 12:44 GoTuNk! wrote:On August 16 2018 06:35 ticklishmusic wrote:Elizabeth Warren has a big idea that challenges how the Democratic Party thinks about solving the problem of inequality.
Instead of advocating for expensive new social programs like free college or health care, she’s introducing a bill Wednesday, the Accountable Capitalism Act, that would redistribute trillions of dollars from rich executives and shareholders to the middle class — without costing a dime.
Warren’s plan starts from the premise that corporations that claim the legal rights of personhood should be legally required to accept the moral obligations of personhood.
Traditionally, she writes in a companion op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, “corporations sought to succeed in the marketplace, but they also recognized their obligations to employees, customers and the community.” In recent decades they stopped, in favor of a singular devotion to enriching shareholders. And that’s what Warren wants to change. Warren came out with a plan for overhauling corporate governance. It requires corporations above a certain size ($1 billion in revenue) to give 40% of board seats to employees, which would likely result in more money going to employees and being reinvested in the business rather than being spent on dividends and stock buybacks. I've criticized Warren a fair bit for her grandstanding, but this is the best and most substantive stuff that's come from her in some time. The numbers/ implementation need some tuning, but I actually really like the concept, which mirrors the system in place in Germany. The $1 billion revenue threshold can be gamed pretty easily for one. I'm also not sold on the 40% of board seats. Maybe some sort of preferential tax or other regulatory treatment for corporations who give their employees a voice would be better than an outright law. There are a couple other bits which I really like, such as requiring board (so including the employee reps) and shareholder approval for political expenditures, which would effectively neuter Citizen's United. Vox ArticleSummary from Warren's website So the solution to the inequality problem is turning it into a poverty problem by massively crashing the stock market, peoples savings and skyrocketing unemployment? The government is not directly doing it, but this magical thing called economic growth has allowed 4 million people to join the work force since certain presidential election. And this other thing called "tax cuts" has allowed many other million workers to keep more of their money and get company benefits, while helping with that economic growth thing. Maybe keep doing that instead of crashing the economy in pursuit of "equality"? Why is inequality a problem again? I thought poverty was the issue. Those tax cuts are just corporate welfare, printing money and running up the deficit to reward political supporters. You'd never support it if someone you perceived to be on the left did it, but you're apparently okay with fiscal irresponsibility and handouts now? Only a leftist would call cutting taxes "a hand out". I'm always in favor of tax cuts. That's what being a right winger is mostly. I'm still waiting on cutting the government size though. Don't think Trump will do it. We can stop talking guys, GoTunk! has solved politics. Honestly, do you really think what you write is true? Politics is divided into two lines and those two lines happen to be about "tax cuts"? How absurd.
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On August 16 2018 18:34 iamthedave wrote:Show nested quote +On August 16 2018 13:27 Yurie wrote:On August 16 2018 13:20 GoTuNk! wrote:On August 16 2018 13:14 KwarK wrote:On August 16 2018 13:10 GoTuNk! wrote:On August 16 2018 13:02 KwarK wrote:On August 16 2018 12:44 GoTuNk! wrote:On August 16 2018 06:35 ticklishmusic wrote:Elizabeth Warren has a big idea that challenges how the Democratic Party thinks about solving the problem of inequality.
Instead of advocating for expensive new social programs like free college or health care, she’s introducing a bill Wednesday, the Accountable Capitalism Act, that would redistribute trillions of dollars from rich executives and shareholders to the middle class — without costing a dime.
Warren’s plan starts from the premise that corporations that claim the legal rights of personhood should be legally required to accept the moral obligations of personhood.
Traditionally, she writes in a companion op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, “corporations sought to succeed in the marketplace, but they also recognized their obligations to employees, customers and the community.” In recent decades they stopped, in favor of a singular devotion to enriching shareholders. And that’s what Warren wants to change. Warren came out with a plan for overhauling corporate governance. It requires corporations above a certain size ($1 billion in revenue) to give 40% of board seats to employees, which would likely result in more money going to employees and being reinvested in the business rather than being spent on dividends and stock buybacks. I've criticized Warren a fair bit for her grandstanding, but this is the best and most substantive stuff that's come from her in some time. The numbers/ implementation need some tuning, but I actually really like the concept, which mirrors the system in place in Germany. The $1 billion revenue threshold can be gamed pretty easily for one. I'm also not sold on the 40% of board seats. Maybe some sort of preferential tax or other regulatory treatment for corporations who give their employees a voice would be better than an outright law. There are a couple other bits which I really like, such as requiring board (so including the employee reps) and shareholder approval for political expenditures, which would effectively neuter Citizen's United. Vox ArticleSummary from Warren's website So the solution to the inequality problem is turning it into a poverty problem by massively crashing the stock market, peoples savings and skyrocketing unemployment? The government is not directly doing it, but this magical thing called economic growth has allowed 4 million people to join the work force since certain presidential election. And this other thing called "tax cuts" has allowed many other million workers to keep more of their money and get company benefits, while helping with that economic growth thing. Maybe keep doing that instead of crashing the economy in pursuit of "equality"? Why is inequality a problem again? I thought poverty was the issue. Those tax cuts are just corporate welfare, printing money and running up the deficit to reward political supporters. You'd never support it if someone you perceived to be on the left did it, but you're apparently okay with fiscal irresponsibility and handouts now? Only a leftist would call cutting taxes "a hand out". I'm always in favor of tax cuts. That's what being a right winger is mostly. I'm still waiting on cutting the government size though. Don't think Trump will do it. No, anyone who believes in fiscal responsibility does. The handout is the public services and spending that are still being handed out without the associated tax obligation. You need to remember that money is fungible. The default situation is that we give the government $X of our money, the government gives us $X of services. There is absolutely no difference between us giving the government $X and getting $X of services + $5 cash (a handout) and us giving the government $X-5 in taxes and receiving $X of services. They're mathematically identical. What is happening is that the government is printing money in order and distributing it in the form of tax relief (and incidentally in the US the tax code is actually one of the things used for handouts which you'd know if you knew things, a lot of payments to needy families happen through "tax cuts" in excess of total tax obligation so that the actual tax owed turns negative (EITC, child tax credit, AOTC etc) resulting in a "tax refund" that is effectively a check from the gov). Also there is far, far more to being on the right wing that blindly cutting taxes at every opportunity. It's an entire political philosophy, not a magic 8 ball which always returns "cut taxes". Yes I am a firm believer in personal liberty and responsability. Only a person who believes in neither, as you seem to be the case, would consider that the government taxing people and then giving back that money in services is the same as people keeping their original money because they are "mathematically identical" in the absolute sense. This is my last post here for a while, arguing with what is a democrat-leftist echo chamber is too tiring; I have no idea how xDaunt has such patience. I will post the claim that Trump gets re-elected on 2020, and will come back to cheer though. Regards I would say this site is mostly centrist. The US doesn't really have a notable left wing when looking at it from an European point of view. The US political axis is fucked, though. Our centrists are their version of a raging, frothing-at-the-mouth marxist. It's bad enough that they pretty much have to do mental gymnastics currently to say that left wing policies are simply implausible and impractical and can never work, while pretending that the entirety of Europe - most of whose most successful nations are leftish to quite left wing - simply doesn't exist and consistently proves that such policies work fine. Not to mention gotunk's entire diatribe here is based on forgetting that nobody literally nobody said Trump's rampaging corporate cuts wouldn't be a short term benefit. The criticism was that the tax cuts to the middle and lower classes had expiry dates and the corporate class ones don't, meaning that after a decade, I think it was, the corporations will still be swimming in it and the lower classes will be worse off than ever with even less of a chance of doing something about it, and the increased likelihood that programs that benefit those classes will be slashed to pay for the corporate tax cuts, which Ryan has already floated. That and adding to the deficit, which I thought Republicans wanted to reduce, not increase? Or is that a misunderstanding on my part?
Well, the tax cuts have actually had a negligible effect. The thing is the way taxes work, the most profitable corporations are the ones paying the most tax and ergo the ones that benefit the most from cuts. But the fact they're already really profitable means basically they already don't know how to spend all that money. If you add even more money to their pile, they don't magically figure out how to spend that either. And beyond that is the entire trade war and general instability brought on by the Trump admin which dissuades corporations from making expansion/ R&D/ capex type expenditures.
The Republicans preach fiscal conservatism, but much like religion what they practice is rather different.
If I had been born/ lived in Europe I think I'd be center left there. Like, there's no way I'd say the existing model of nationalized healthcare in European countries is bad, because obviously it works. It's just not something easily transposed to the US for a variety of reasons. I'm more or less center left in US as a product of the situation here and what seems feasible/ practical.
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Why do you think that nationalised healthcare is not easily transposed to the US, outside of political reasons? There's nothing inherent against introducing nationalised healthcare in USA, as it already exists in the form of various guises, it simply doesn't exists for all. There's nothing for instance implementing a German style healthcare system.
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On August 16 2018 23:16 Dangermousecatdog wrote:
Why do you think that nationalised healthcare is not easily transposed to the US, outside of political reasons? There's nothing inherent against introducing nationalised healthcare in USA, as it already exists in the form of various guises, it simply doesn't exists for all. There's nothing for instance implementing a German style healthcare system.
The German multipayer system is actually one a US system could follow more closely. I'm more just tired of quixotic single-payer/ M4A proposals.
Other things like the supply of US physicians/ other medical professionals (and how our training and accreditation works), the US just being much larger with significant rural areas with sparse populations, etc. also need to be taken into account.
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M4A isn't quixotic and has models for the provision of services in medically needy areas readily available.
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A one size fits all system is generally bad for most things in the US. But congress is bad at iterating on an idea, especially healthcare programs. We only deal in creating or destroying programs, rather than improving.
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On August 16 2018 23:24 farvacola wrote:
M4A isn't quixotic and has models for the provision of services in medically needy areas readily available.
There are much better alternatives to ensuring universal healthcare in the US and the focus on M4A is absurd. Here's some stuff that's more accomplished much more easily in the meantime:
- Enforce the provisions of the ACA and stabilize the high risk markets
- Get Medicaid expanded to all 50 states and close the insurance gap
- Offer federal incentives for value based payment models
- Allow CMS to negotiate drug prices
- Allow smaller/ regional non-profit insurers to buy into Medicare Advantage pricing
- Fund a proper program to combat the opioid epidemic
- Increase funding for sex ed, pre-natal and maternity care, ensure access to safe abortions is never more than 100 miles away in the US
- Offer scholarships/ loan forgiveness programs for medical professional graduates, with special incentives for PA's and NP's, GP's.
Some are hard, but every single one is way easier than M4A.
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Specifically and without hand wavey "the US sure is unique" gestures, why is it absurd? And by it, do you mean a specific iteration of universalizing Medicare or just the general concept of using it and Tricare as a baseline?
Edit: Expanding Medicaid is an absurd, awful idea aside from being a stopgap measure. State government involvement must be more constrained than that.
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On August 16 2018 23:27 ticklishmusic wrote:Show nested quote +On August 16 2018 23:24 farvacola wrote:
M4A isn't quixotic and has models for the provision of services in medically needy areas readily available. There are much better alternatives to ensuring universal healthcare in the US and the focus on M4A is absurd.
I disagree. Medicare is an existing program that people understand and has a degree of public trust. It has systems set up that are known and can be changed to fit an expanding role in the healthcare industry. It is selling the US public an expansion of a program they know and trust to be functional.
I don't care what it looks like in the end, selling universal healthcare through an expansion of medicare is the best way to get the job done.
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On August 16 2018 23:24 Plansix wrote:
A one size fits all system is generally bad for most things in the US. But congress is bad at iterating on an idea, especially healthcare programs. We only deal in creating or destroying programs, rather than improving.
One size fits all works as well in the US as anywhere else.
Things work bad in the US because you try to have a federal government while still letting states do whatever they feel like.
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On August 16 2018 23:44 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On August 16 2018 23:24 Plansix wrote:
A one size fits all system is generally bad for most things in the US. But congress is bad at iterating on an idea, especially healthcare programs. We only deal in creating or destroying programs, rather than improving. One size fits all works as well in the US as anywhere else. Things work bad in the US because you try to have a federal government while still letting states do whatever they feel like.
This is precisely why Medicaid must be replaced as soon as possible.
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On August 16 2018 23:27 ticklishmusic wrote:Show nested quote +On August 16 2018 23:24 farvacola wrote:
M4A isn't quixotic and has models for the provision of services in medically needy areas readily available. There are much better alternatives to ensuring universal healthcare in the US and the focus on M4A is absurd. Here's some stuff that's more accomplished much more easily in the meantime: - Enforce the provisions of the ACA and stabilize the high risk markets - Get Medicaid expanded to all 50 states and close the insurance gap - Offer federal incentives for value based payment models - Allow CMS to negotiate drug prices - Allow smaller/ regional non-profit insurers to buy into Medicare Advantage pricing - Fund a proper program to combat the opioid epidemic - Increase funding for sex ed, pre-natal and maternity care, ensure access to safe abortions is never more than 100 miles away in the US - Offer scholarships/ loan forgiveness programs for medical professional graduates, with special incentives for PA's and NP's, GP's. Some are hard, but every single one is way easier than M4A.
All of that stuff could be said to be part of having a national healthcare system. There doesn't appear to be anything particular to the US not having a nationalised healthcare system other than political will. There's already medicaid and veteran benefits which act statewide, there's no reason why such cannot be expanded for all.
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On August 16 2018 23:37 farvacola wrote:
Specifically and without hand wavey "the US sure is unique" gestures, why is it absurd? And by it, do you mean a specific iteration of universalizing Medicare or just the general concept of using it and Tricare as a baseline?
Edit: Expanding Medicaid is an absurd, awful idea aside from being a stopgap measure. State government involvement must be more constrained than that.
Tricare is very nice for active/ retired members of the military and their dependents, but it is not cheap. The DHP budget is $45 billion (not including the Tricare for life component which is budgeted under Medicaid at ~$10 billion) for 10 million eligible members. That is some primo stuff.
Medicaid not being expanded in states has fucked over millions of Americans by making coverage unaffordable.
On August 16 2018 23:41 Plansix wrote:Show nested quote +On August 16 2018 23:27 ticklishmusic wrote:On August 16 2018 23:24 farvacola wrote:
M4A isn't quixotic and has models for the provision of services in medically needy areas readily available. There are much better alternatives to ensuring universal healthcare in the US and the focus on M4A is absurd. I disagree. Medicare is an existing program that people understand and has a degree of public trust. It has systems set up that are known and can be changed to fit an expanding role in the healthcare industry. It is selling the US public an expansion of a program they know and trust to be functional. I don't care what it looks like in the end, selling universal healthcare through an expansion of medicare is the best way to get the job done.
M4A is a single payer program. I highly doubt we are getting that, and if we do it is going to be vastly more expensive that single payer in other countries, barring implementing many of the items I've mentioned in the meantime. Changing the payor component is not a magic bullet. It may solve the cost component of healthcare for individuals, but not necessarily quality or access.
M4A is shooting for the moon in one go. If that rocket blows up, we are fucked on healthcare reform for probably at least a decade and likely more. There's much easier stuff, which largely fits within the existing system, which can be implemented much easier and have significant impact while also gradually increasing the role the government plays in healthcare.
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Yes but state discretion is a cornerstone aspect of Medicaid and is the biggest reason why it needs replacing. Even in states that agreed to expand, Medicaid gets hung over the heads of the unfortunate like a poor man's sword of Damocles.
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On August 16 2018 23:56 farvacola wrote:
Yes but state discretion is a cornerstone aspect of Medicaid and is the biggest reason why it needs replacing. Even in states that agreed to expand, Medicaid gets hung over the heads of the unfortunate like a poor man's sword of Damocles.
It's impossible to take away the benefit once it's given. We've already done that song and dance with other social safety programs.
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Those who will have their Medicaid taken away when states like Kentucky fully implement their work requirement would certainly take issue with that maxim.
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If people want to fix the ACA, I am all about it. If people want to expand Medicare to cover the middle class so then it can’t be used as a cudgel to beat poor folk with, I’m all about it. What I am not about is the endless debate about having to get it right the first time because it will ruin healthcare for decades. Its already ruined, its just a slow rot. People know it too. And it isn’t a problem that can be fixed with one massive overhaul bill. It is going to take a decade of hard work and I would rather just start with whatever plan has support and work forward.
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Federal judge blocked HHS from granting the work exemption on the grounds that it runs contrary to Medicaid's purpose.
And Bevin is rolling back the cuts he threatened if he didn't get the work exemption approved. He knows that it's political suicide.
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Until some clown tries it again or another federal judge rules the work requirements are allowed. Hoping the courts to police the state legislatures stupid enough to pass the policies isn’t a long term solution. And frankly, it still creates a lot of instability for poor folks.
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On August 17 2018 00:04 ticklishmusic wrote:
Federal judge blocked HHS from granting the work exemption on the grounds that it runs contrary to Medicaid's purpose.
And Bevin is rolling back the cuts he threatened if he didn't get the work exemption approved. He knows that it's political suicide.
Yes but the fact that the poor need to rely on judicial relief, relief that is often denied, changed, or never given at all depending on the judge, further demonstrates that Medicaid gives states that don't want to provide for their poor far too much wiggle room. Further, in a healthcare context, looming uncertainty kept at bay by judicial order is yet another obstacle in the path of getting people less afraid of regularly seeing medical professionals. The uncertainty inherent to Medicaid makes people less healthy.
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EPT
