Sen. McCain has brain cancer
- Thread starter TheOriginalHappyGoat
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Yeah, as long as you get the stuff you want, corruption and treason and the loss international standing don't matter.
Because you're drawing an unjustified conclusion about my point in bringing it up.
I never implied you shouldn't vote for someone simply because a bad person also votes for them. I did say, and have said in the past, that you should engage in some self-reflection when you find yourself agreeing with an exceptionally bad group of people. This is the first election in a long time in which white nationalists coalesced so strongly around a major party candidate. It's especially concerning for someone like you to not readily grasp this concept, since you've been a particularly vocal proponent that certain other groups (namely Muslims) should do the same.
That being said, my real purpose wasn't to start a fight over racism; it was simply to highlight a particularly assholish comment by a renowned asshole in the context of McCain's health scare.
But you didn't simply highlight an assholish comment -- or, at least, you didn't stop there. You implied that anybody who voted for Trump, simply by the nature of their vote, takes some level of ownership in the assholish sentiment.
And that was a really stupid implication -- just as stupid as it would be to point out somebody who made similar nasty comments about Reagan (or whomever) and saying that anybody who voted the same as them should "engage in some self-reflection."
But they need do no such thing. To say they should is just childishness posing as high-mindedness.
I've done plenty of reflection on my vote -- did so before I decided it, in fact. And I assure you, Richard Spencer didn't have the first thing to do with how I voted....and I would assume that Kathy Griffin didn't have the first thing to do with yours, which is why it would be stupid for me to assign you any ownership of her crassness.
Alright, so I wasn't clear in the original post (because, as I said, my intent wasn't actually to make some big point, despite my ornery reference to "Trumpians"), but after explaining it clearly in the post you just supposedly responded to, there's no call for you to fail to understand. This isn't just one asshole. He's part of a broad movement of particularly vile people who have attached themselves to a major party candidate - and now president - in a way they really haven't before in modern times. That's an entirely different proposition than just pointing out some people who vote for a particular candidate are jerks.
This does not solve the problem with your logic. It's not that you didn't clearly make your point. It's that your point is so obviously fallacious.
The New Black Panthers supported Obama. So the hell what? That doesn't mean that anybody who voted for Obama was, in any way, tied to their extremist ideas or rhetoric.
If Donald Trump had run on a platform that resembled Richard Spencer's garbage, you'd have a valid point. But he didn't, so you don't.
I don't expect you to agree with my point. I'm just flabbergasted that you failed to understand it. Like I said, I take the blame for my original post, but it should be clear now what I was getting at.
Trump was pretty clear about NOT alienating any of them. Several times. Remember his who is David Duke comments? How long it took to even get him to disavow the KKK? His various dog whistles throughout the campaign? He knew what he was doing.
I totally believe Trump didn't know who David Duke was. There is so much that Trump doesn't know that it would surprise me if he did know who Duke was!
I totally believe Trump didn't know who David Duke was. There is so much that Trump doesn't know that it would surprise me if he did know who Duke was!
David Duke? Yeah, he was the guy who started that school in North Carolina. I think they are called the blue devils. Maybe it's the white devils. I don't remember.
That's exactly what he did. And yet you still voted for him.
I'm pretty sure it came out that the two of them had interacted in the past. At the very least, he definitely knew who he was.I totally believe Trump didn't know who David Duke was. There is so much that Trump doesn't know that it would surprise me if he did know who Duke was!
He's coming back tomorrow (Tuesday) for the health care vote (among others).
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/article163420973.html
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/article163420973.html
I'm glad he's healthy enough to fly back. But to do so, in order to vote yes on this bill taking healthcare away from millions would be the height of hypocrisy right now. Hopefully he's going to vote no.
Hope he does the right thing now that he is facing his end -- be the maverick that you claim you are McCain!
Just read McCain's twitter timeline. Hundreds and hundreds of people telling personal stories and begging him to vote now. How anyone could read these stories and vote yes is just beyond me. I'm going to be very, very disappointed in him if he does.
I wouldn't worry too much. If this becomes law (which I still doubt), the Republicans will have (a) left the bulk of Obamacare in place and (b) taken sole ownership of the political millstone that has been bedeviling Democrats for the past 7 years.
Don't get me wrong...Obamacare very much warrants repeal. It was (mostly) a bad law from the get go. But there are better ways and worse ways of putting it in the past. They've chosen the latter.
The ACA could largely be fixed by simply undoing what republicans have done to sabotage it.
No it couldn't.
Among various other key flaws, it was predicated on an assumption that healthy (that is, inexpensive) people would essentially volunteer to pay significantly more than the underlying cost to provide for their care for a protracted period of time so as to subsidize unhealthy (that is, expensive) people being able to pay significantly less than the underlying cost to provide for their care. That was never going to work. People are pretty much always going to tend to favor their own interests over those of anybody else. To expect otherwise is foolish.
That said, you do bring up -- albeit unintentionally, I think -- a salient point. And that is that it is very much in the country's best interest to have policies (healthcare and otherwise) which have bipartisan ownership. Of course Republicans aren't going to do anything to salvage a problem-plagued program that is 100% owned by Democrats. Guess what...Democrats would never do anything to salvage a problem-plagued program that is 100% owned by Republicans, either. If GWB had managed to pass his Social Security reform in 2005 with only Republican votes and that plan ran into trouble, do you think Democrats would be riding to its rescue? Of course not. Once again, to expect otherwise is foolish.
That's why I think the best move for Republicans here -- not only for their own political interest, but also for the country's -- is to just let Obamacare continue to falter under its own weight until enough Democrats feel the political heat from that and become willing to address an approach with at least some genuine bipartisan equity. I realize that Republicans are feeling a lot of heat from their voters to follow through with their oft-stated commitment to ditch Obamacare. And I fully support replacing it. But going from one single-party healthcare policy to a different single-party healthcare policy isn't an improvement....in large part because there's no such thing as a magic bullet here. Neither party should want outright ownership of America healthcare -- because it's something fraught with wildly unrealistic and fallacious expectations.
The ACA was NOT predicated on the assumption that healthy people would voluntarily buy insurance, it mandated that everyone buy insurance. Without such a mandate essentially healthy people won't pay for insurance and insurance markets will collapse. At that point essentially nobody will have insurance. So, the choice we have is either (1) mandate people have insurance which creates viable markets for different plans; or (2) don't mandate insurance and then the only plans for sale are crap and nobody should buy one.
Very sad to hear the news about McCain and I don't wish brain cancer on anyone.
I hope he's free to vote his conscience now. Even if you agree with Trumpcare the process has been a complete cluster to try to ram this bill through and we'd get a much better outcome for the American people if we went through normal process (i.e. committee hearings and mark-ups) instead of voting on mystery amendments that will have 10 minutes of debate.
I hope he's free to vote his conscience now. Even if you agree with Trumpcare the process has been a complete cluster to try to ram this bill through and we'd get a much better outcome for the American people if we went through normal process (i.e. committee hearings and mark-ups) instead of voting on mystery amendments that will have 10 minutes of debate.
It's striking that crazed forgets the individual mandate, since unhinged conservatives called it an egregious assault on individual liberty and appealed it all the way to the Supreme Court. That said, despite Republican efforts to undermine the law, Obamacare isn't in a "death spiral", and the exchanges have mostly stabilized, except in some (mostly rural) areas where insurers have struggled to create workable networks. If Congress made the subsidies more generous and the penalties more onerous, that would fix pretty much all the problems that now exist, although rural areas would still present challenges.
What's utter bullshit, though, is crazed's call for bipartisan health care reform. That's because Democrats and Republicans fundamentally disagree about what the goals of "health care reform" should be. Democrats want to get better care to more people at lower cost. Republicans want to finance a huge tax cut for the wealthy by taking health insurance away from the poor, the middle class, the sick, and the elderly. I'll leave it to the centristy centrists to find the middle ground there.
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I'd very much say it was voluntary -- at least in a de facto sense. If you don't believe me, look at how many people have chosen not to buy it.
In most cases, the penalty for forgoing insurance paled in comparison to the cost of obtaining it.....and, because of the pre-existing condition provision, obtaining it when and if it was ever needed was not only guaranteed (though you might just have to wait a bit for open enrollment), but guaranteed to not escalate much in cost. In other words, the law also makes it easy to transition from being an inexpensive person to an expensive person....and it didn't really matter whether you bought the insurance while you were in the inexpensive category. It's a wonderful deal, but for the underlying math.
Now, you could say that they just undershot the penalty. That's clearly true -- but that was well-known even at the time of deliberation. And the reason they didn't increase it is and was obvious -- doing so would've prevented the bill's passage.
Oh, I didn't forget the mandate, Rock. It's just that it seems obvious that a whole lot of people have made the perfectly logical choice not to abide it. And Obamacare was predicated on their dollars being there. But they aren't there.
Thus the modifier "essentially" in front of "volunteer". Maybe "effectively" would've been a better modifier. Either way, there's a reason I modified it.
Is a mandate that millions of people consciously and reasonably choose to flout truly a "mandate"?
That's funny, because I remember when the mandate was a heinous assault on individual liberty, but now it's a nothingburger. You guys say whatever you have to say.
The bottom line is that you guys couldn't care less about health care reform. You care about tax cuts. Everything else is bullshit.
Just this morning Jerry Brown was discussing bipartisanship on Morning Edition. He spoke of it in context of the new climate bill in California, but it was tied into healthcare. He was very big on the need for more bipartisanship. Of course he was more critical of the right, but he did say he encounters people on the left mad that he spoke to the Chamber of Commerce or energy companies about the bill (as an example of the left also having issues with bipartisanship).
I agree with him, but your point still stands. The Kochs (to pick on them) actively want fewer people covered. I actively want more people covered. I don't see a compromise possible. I really have no idea how to build this compromise coalition. In theory, Brown is 100% correct. But in practice, at this moment, I am not seeing it being possible. What is the compromise between insure far more and insure far fewer? I guess the status quo is it?
I should also add to this: there's a reason that liberal social programs rarely ever rely on people doing much of anything voluntarily.
And, yes, buying health insurance under Obamacare is, for all intents and purposes, voluntary. If you're healthy and your near-term healthcare expenses aren't much, it makes all kinds of sense to elect to pay the penalty in lieu of obtaining health insurance. Not only is it, in many cases, significantly cheaper in the near-term, you also have the reassurance of knowing that you can obtain it (without much additional expense, even) when and if you do actually need it. It's a very reasonable gamble for many people to take -- and many people are (unsurprisingly) taking it.
If participation in Social Security, as an example, were ever made voluntary -- and, by that I mean the taxes as well as any future claim to bennies -- you would quickly see millions of people running for the doors. There's a reason for that: mathematically, it's not a good deal for people, the farther their retirement dates are from the date of inception. It was a great deal for early retirees -- but it's only gotten worse as time has gone on. And if the government left it up to people to decide whether or not to participate, millions and millions would not.....which would, of course, cause the Ponzi scheme to collapse even faster than it presently is.
And, yes, buying health insurance under Obamacare is, for all intents and purposes, voluntary. If you're healthy and your near-term healthcare expenses aren't much, it makes all kinds of sense to elect to pay the penalty in lieu of obtaining health insurance. Not only is it, in many cases, significantly cheaper in the near-term, you also have the reassurance of knowing that you can obtain it (without much additional expense, even) when and if you do actually need it. It's a very reasonable gamble for many people to take -- and many people are (unsurprisingly) taking it.
If participation in Social Security, as an example, were ever made voluntary -- and, by that I mean the taxes as well as any future claim to bennies -- you would quickly see millions of people running for the doors. There's a reason for that: mathematically, it's not a good deal for people, the farther their retirement dates are from the date of inception. It was a great deal for early retirees -- but it's only gotten worse as time has gone on. And if the government left it up to people to decide whether or not to participate, millions and millions would not.....which would, of course, cause the Ponzi scheme to collapse even faster than it presently is.
Remember what Republicans said when Democrats took about a year to pass Obamacare, after an excruciatingly deliberative process with numerous hearings and CBO scores? They baselessly affected to be appalled that Democrats would enact sweeping new changes that would affect one-sixth of our economy so hastily and so secretively. So how are they proposing to finance tax cuts for the wealthy by taking health insurance away from ordinary people? Just as you'd expect:
Sometime on Tuesday, Senate Republicans will vote whether to start debate on a plan to overhaul American health care, without knowing exactly what is in that plan or, by extension, how it will change the lives of millions of Americans.
There are few, if any, comparable examples of a bill with such wide-reaching consequences, being voted on so abruptly, with so many critical questions left unanswered less than 24 hours before it is taken up.
Senate leaders are bent on holding a vote. But after the plan was drafted in secret, it now needs substantial revisions under the Senate budget rules. And yet the White House and GOP leadership insist on forcing members to vote on Tuesday.
It is an unprecedentedly opaque process to try to pass legislation that overhauls an industry worth more than $3 trillion, which would undercut a law that has extended health coverage to more than 20 million middle-class and low-income Americans in the past seven years.
The fate of Obamacare, arguably the most significant domestic policy passed in a generation, hangs in the balance. Medicaid, a pillar of the American safety net since Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, could be fundamentally changed by the Senate bill, with federal spending capped permanently for a program that covers more than 70 million of the most vulnerable people in the country.
But as the vote approaches, there is no final text, no Congressional Budget Office score. Senate Republicans at least acknowledge the absurdity, if you ask them — this, coming from a party that spent seven years eviscerating Democrats for passing Obamacare in the quote-unquote dead of night.
. . . This half-blind dash is the climax of a two-month debate that has been shrouded in mystery. McConnell decided in May to draft the BCRA entirely in secret, with no public hearings or expert testimony.
They aren’t just repealing and replacing Obamacare, which they have promised for seven years to do. They are also overhauling Medicaid — ending the program’s days as an open-ended entitlement and instituting a federal spending cap. Over the next 20 years, the CBO projects that federal Medicaid spending would drop by 35 percent versus current law. States could be forced to cut benefits or enrollment in order to make up for those losses.
But not a single expert has testified before the Senate about the plan — a fact that even some Republicans find unfathomable.
. . . It’s a heck of a way to overhaul a sixth of the economy. And it is the choice Republicans have made for themselves.
The modern Republican Party: all bullshit all the time.There are few, if any, comparable examples of a bill with such wide-reaching consequences, being voted on so abruptly, with so many critical questions left unanswered less than 24 hours before it is taken up.
Senate leaders are bent on holding a vote. But after the plan was drafted in secret, it now needs substantial revisions under the Senate budget rules. And yet the White House and GOP leadership insist on forcing members to vote on Tuesday.
It is an unprecedentedly opaque process to try to pass legislation that overhauls an industry worth more than $3 trillion, which would undercut a law that has extended health coverage to more than 20 million middle-class and low-income Americans in the past seven years.
The fate of Obamacare, arguably the most significant domestic policy passed in a generation, hangs in the balance. Medicaid, a pillar of the American safety net since Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, could be fundamentally changed by the Senate bill, with federal spending capped permanently for a program that covers more than 70 million of the most vulnerable people in the country.
But as the vote approaches, there is no final text, no Congressional Budget Office score. Senate Republicans at least acknowledge the absurdity, if you ask them — this, coming from a party that spent seven years eviscerating Democrats for passing Obamacare in the quote-unquote dead of night.
. . . This half-blind dash is the climax of a two-month debate that has been shrouded in mystery. McConnell decided in May to draft the BCRA entirely in secret, with no public hearings or expert testimony.
They aren’t just repealing and replacing Obamacare, which they have promised for seven years to do. They are also overhauling Medicaid — ending the program’s days as an open-ended entitlement and instituting a federal spending cap. Over the next 20 years, the CBO projects that federal Medicaid spending would drop by 35 percent versus current law. States could be forced to cut benefits or enrollment in order to make up for those losses.
But not a single expert has testified before the Senate about the plan — a fact that even some Republicans find unfathomable.
. . . It’s a heck of a way to overhaul a sixth of the economy. And it is the choice Republicans have made for themselves.
Apples and oranges. You're talking about a legal and constitutional argument. And there certainly is something to be said for that.
In practical dollars-and-cents terms though, it's been clear from before the bill was even signed into law that it was predicated on a glaringly perverse incentive....which is why many people believed then and now that it was designed to fail just as it is. I'm ambivalent about that myself. I suppose it's possible -- but I'm just not sure that Zeke Emmanuel and Gruber and those guys were actually that clever. But, if so, it was a strikingly bad political calculation.
I see pundits and others claiming that we all have the same objectives, we just have different ideas about how to accomplish those objectives. This is obviously false.
LOL. The heinous assault on individual liberty is now of so little consequence that people can freely disregard it without consequence. You constitutional scholars are a laugh riot.
I used to agree with the pundits, that the gulf was in the process not in the objective. It seems all to obvious that isn't right. The fact that after 7 years of swearing they had a better plan the GOP clearly still has no plan to this day is proof that their plan has always been a shiny trinket designed to distract.
I am sure there are Republicans who do not share the base idea that we just need to have fewer people (no people) with insurance. And I imagine they could be worked with to develop a plan. But any such thinking is dead with the GOP in control of the House due to their determination to abide by the Hastert rule. No plan that gets a majority of Republicans in the House gets 60 votes in the Senate.
Can you point out some "social programs" that are voluntary?
Paying taxes that help fund the military, SS, Medicare, Medicaid, police, firefighters, roads, sidewalks, public schools, public libraries, public parks, trash removal...I could go on.
Are these "liberal" social programs? I'll bet you rely on a lot of them.
Forget liberal and substitute government. Government sets the ground rules and then people voluntarily do what they want within those ground rules. The bottom line with health care is that we can't have a market for anything but fake insurance without a mandate to purchase insurance. The uber wealthy don't need to worry about a world without insurance because they can self-insure. So what gets sacrificed here is the advantage of pretty much everyone in order to make the uber wealthy trivially better off.
Wanting a healthcare reform that would result in rational incentives for consumers and providers and everybody in between, fostering greater competition, and (as such) lower pricing is simply not the same thing as "actively wanting fewer people covered."
You have to get past that thinking. I can't speak for the Koch Brothers, but I can speak for myself. And I can assure that you that I don't "actively want fewer people" with health insurance. I just have qualms with the way that you'd prefer going about that happening. In my mind, the best way to increase access to healthcare goods/services is for those people routinely buy to be affordable for the typical American consumer. Obviously, there will always be some goods/services which will be beyond our capacity to afford. And, for those things, an insurance model makes perfect sense. But not for everything -- and I'd say we can start there.
It's not an accident that, with very little in the way of subsidy or public policy involvement, we've been able to just about achieve "universal cellphone." That is to say, our national cellphone penetration rate is somewhere in the high 90% range. Why? Well, primarily because it's affordable. Is there some regulation there? Yeah, and that's OK. But the important lesson is that we've gotten that kind of "universal coverage" not because we've made it an entitlement, but because it's within most peoples' price range.
This doesn't mean that there's room for common ground on healthcare between, say, Rand Paul and Elizabeth Warren. But so what? There doesn't have to be in order to get a bipartisan national healthcare policy.
Mmm, that's not what I said. I said that you're mixing apples with oranges. I think there was, and is, a perfectly sound argument to be made that the mandate was an egregious overreach of government. At least 4 of the 9 justices on the court agreed with that -- and there's some reason to believe that number actually began as 5.
That's neither here nor there though about the penalties for non-compliance. I think it's an open question whether the incentives for healthy people to forgo the mandate were a feature or a bug. I do not, however, think it's an open question that this is the incentive the ACA constructed. It wasn't in 2009-10 -- and it still isn't today.
But that really says nothing about the constitutionality question.
Well, predictably, you throw out the old chestnut of police, firefighters, and roads -- and even sidewalks! -- to defend any and all government programs. "Hey pal, either you love the welfare state we've constructed -- and pay happily for it -- or else you can kiss your sidewalks goodbye!" That's just puerile.
My primary point here is that there's a reason social welfare programs typically are -- genuinely -- compulsory. The ACA does, of course, feature various "mandates." But it also creates a pretty obvious incentive for healthy people who don't consume much in the way of healthcare goods/services (and don't plan to) to just pay the penalty in lieu of carrying a policy. Not only is the penalty very often significantly cheaper, the guaranteed issue and community rating provisions make it such that, if you ever need health insurance down the road, all you need to do is await an open enrollment period and, voila, you're good (and at roughly the same rate as you'd have been in had you always been insured, too!). As I said, that's a great deal -- but for the underlying math.
If the government had constructed Social Security in the same fashion, it would've said: you can either pay the payroll tax (originally 1%, currently at 12.4%!) on every paycheck from now until retirement or you can opt to pay a smaller penalty for not paying the tax and still get your benefits all the same by starting to pay the full tax rate at roughly about the time you're going to need the benefits...
...and then acted shocked when lots of people chose the latter.
My secondary point is that, if the government made participation in SS (and perhaps even Medicare) optional -- even if only in a de facto nature -- you'd see so many people cancelling out of it that your head would spin. I don't think that would've been the case at its inception. But that's because it was a pretty good deal for people then. Today, for anybody who knows even rudimentary financial math anyway, not so much.
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