SUK ZONE: it's all a pointless exercise and you're just screaming into the void

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > SUK ZONE: it's all a pointless exercise and you're just screaming into the void

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Vox Nihili: May 28, 2008

Joementum posted:

"implicitly" doing a lot of work here

https://twitter.com/edzitron/status/869690290675699712

it was removed from the platform in 1980 to spite Ted Kennedy and never added back

if we can trick dems into believing theyve always supported single payer then so be it

# ? May 31, 2017 00:18

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# ? Apr 19, 2024 14:58

Oh Snapple!: Dec 27, 2005

This is a really weird argument to me.

NARAL stirred poo poo up because they're a single-issue organization that cares about that specific issue and nothing else. It's why they acted against actual abortion rights activists on the ground who were supporting Mello because they understood that he wasn't going to be able to really do anything to hurt abortion rights as a mayor while also being better for the people of that city as mayor than a Republican would be. The latter part of that does not factor into NARAL's interests whatsoever. They do not care, broadly, about the quality of life for most people in that city. Just that their rights to an abortion remain intact. MP is completely correct when he says that this was a no-risk way for them to flex their muscle in an attempt to deter democrats from any kind of compromise on abortion, regardless of location.

# ? May 31, 2017 00:18

MLKQUOTEMACHINE: Oct 22, 2012; Some motherfuckers are always trying to ice-skate uphill

Venom Snake posted:

To elaborate: after Hillary lost my life fell apart and I went through a fairly major depressive period.

Lol

# ? May 31, 2017 00:20

Venom Snake: Feb 19, 2014; by Nyc_Tattoo

Joementum posted:

"implicitly" doing a lot of work here

https://twitter.com/edzitron/status/869690290675699712

it was removed from the platform in 1980 to spite Ted Kennedy and never added back

@fawfulfan

# ? May 31, 2017 00:20

Venom Snake: Feb 19, 2014; by Nyc_Tattoo

Martha Stewart Undying posted:

Lol

Indeed it was extremely lol that I lost my apartment and had to double my meds

# ? May 31, 2017 00:22

100 degrees Calcium: Jan 23, 2011

Why do you folks have to be such deranged nerds? It's not like Venom Snake is one of those irredeemable assholes LARPing #TheResistance on twitter.

# ? May 31, 2017 00:31

Condiv: May 7, 2008; Sorry to undo the effort of paying a domestic abuser $10 to own this poster, but I am going to lose my dang mind if I keep seeing multiple posters who appear to be Baloogan.

With love,
a mod

100 degrees Calcium posted:

Why do you folks have to be such deranged nerds? It's not like Venom Snake is one of those irredeemable assholes LARPing #TheResistance on twitter.

i wished him well :sigh:

# ? May 31, 2017 00:33

100 degrees Calcium: Jan 23, 2011

Condiv posted:

i wished him well

The rules of engagement demand that I address the entire thread whenever I have a complaint about anyone's posting. It's call Zegerman's Dilemma.

# ? May 31, 2017 00:36

Venom Snake: Feb 19, 2014; by Nyc_Tattoo

100 degrees Calcium posted:

Why do you folks have to be such deranged nerds? It's not like Venom Snake is one of those irredeemable assholes LARPing #TheResistance on twitter.

It's the SUCC ZONE so I kinda understand what I'm getting myself into at some level. But I think most posters here are decent, good people.

# ? May 31, 2017 00:38

Vox Nihili: May 28, 2008

Venom Snake posted:

It's the SUCC ZONE so I kinda understand what I'm getting myself into at some level. But I think most posters here are decent, good people.

some of them, i assume

# ? May 31, 2017 00:39

ate shit on live tv: Feb 15, 2004; by Azathoth

Concerned Citizen posted:

i'm sorry but the defense of "well he actually co-sponsored the compromise anti-choice bill that let women opt out of looking at the ultrasound instead of the REALLY bad anti-choice bill that didn't" is a really weak defense of someone with a record of voting for bills that restrict women's access to legal abortion services. at this point i don't know if you're even arguing honestly here or trolling me as you're just straight up stubbornly ignoring the forest for the trees when it comes to mello's overall anti-choice record.

Interesting, would you say Mello's voting on the compromise anti-choice bill is similar to a politician supporting the Defense of Marriage Act as a compromise of a theoretical constitutional amendment, and that such a politician should be rightly called out even if it means dealing a blow to the democratic party?

Would you call a politician who voted against and made multiple public statements against same-sex marriage "overall anti-lgbt"? Would you vote for that person?

# ? May 31, 2017 01:20

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

Condiv posted:

the text of that press release is the same as that twitter storm, which, once again, sourced the false WSJ story. you can't make the argument she was arguing from a position of knowledge when she's sourcing lies. also, i don't think mello's anti-choice record counts for much when he's running for mayor of a red state town and is considerably less anti-choice than his opponent.

you know, the exact same argument you and others have used to say that ossoff should be supported even though he's not very progressive. cause him in office is better than a republican in office. problem is, i've made that argument consistently for both mello and ossoff, while you think it's ok for some reason for NARAL to sink dems in order to maintain their influence. do you think it would be more prudent for bernie and progressive dems to start laying in to what a capitalist sack of poo poo ossoff is? if not, why mello?

i think it's okay for NARAL to sink Dems who back policy positions they disagree with

i also think it's okay for leftists and progressives to sink Dems who back policy positions they disagree with

I'm not going to get mad at an interest group actually fighting for that interest, and it's pretty hypocritical to bitch out NARAL for getting mad when an establishment figure says "actually, gently caress abortion". because regardless of Mello's voting record, Perez definitely did that

imo the national party shouldn't have gotten involved in the race in the first place. it's a loving mayor race. send the guy some money and stay the gently caress out. don't go in there and make a point of highlighting where the guy differs from the democratic platform to show off how big-tent and inclusive the party is, because it's just inviting every special interest and political faction to go gently caress with it.

the whole "unity tour" has been one disaster after another, and i have to admit, I didn't think it was possible to gently caress up the DNC chair job this badly. all he had to do was keep his mouth shut, shuffle money around, and let Keith do the talking.

# ? May 31, 2017 01:26

Nonsense: Jan 26, 2007

Concerned Citizen posted:

oh ok

jfc

# ? May 31, 2017 01:27

MLKQUOTEMACHINE: Oct 22, 2012; Some motherfuckers are always trying to ice-skate uphill

Venom Snake posted:

Indeed it was extremely lol that I lost my apartment and had to double my meds

have u tried tripling them

# ? May 31, 2017 01:43

Turdfuzz: Jul 23, 2008

Venom Snake posted:

Indeed it was extremely lol that I lost my apartment and had to double my meds

how the gently caress do u lose an apartment it doesnt even move

# ? May 31, 2017 01:44

Shear Modulus: Jun 9, 2010

I am extremely down with slapping down Dems who want to compromise on abortion access, but I was disappointed that after NARAL hit Perez, Sanders and Mello for looking like they were wavering and made Perez walk it back, they didn't raise anything near the same level of a stink a few days later when Pelosi said pretty much the exact same thing as Perez had.

# ? May 31, 2017 01:44

Turdfuzz: Jul 23, 2008

Venom Snake posted:

It's the SUCC ZONE so I kinda understand what I'm getting myself into at some level. But I think most posters here are decent, good people.

lol
sounds like u need to triple ur meds to me

# ? May 31, 2017 01:45

Turdfuzz: Jul 23, 2008

cuz u a crazy boy!!!!

# ? May 31, 2017 01:45

Frijolero: Jan 24, 2009; by Nyc_Tattoo

https://twitter.com/ZaidJilani/status/869648779569483776

# ? May 31, 2017 01:45

MLKQUOTEMACHINE: Oct 22, 2012; Some motherfuckers are always trying to ice-skate uphill

Turdfuzz posted:

how the gently caress do u lose an apartment it doesnt even move

doubling depression meds will do that to you

# ? May 31, 2017 01:45

UHD: Nov 11, 2006

Shear Modulus posted:

I am extremely down with slapping down Dems who want to compromise on abortion access, but I was disappointed that after NARAL hit Perez, Sanders and Mello for looking like they were wavering and made Perez walk it back, they didn't raise anything near the same level of a stink a few days later when Pelosi said pretty much the exact same thing as Perez had.

pelosi is way fuckin scarier than any of those other guys

like sanders is popular or whatever but he still looks and talks like a grandpa who might waggle his finger at you at worst

pelosi will swallow your goddamn soul

# ? May 31, 2017 01:46

ex post facho: Oct 25, 2007

"triangulation," i rasp, blood and spittle flecking my lips, "triangulation... is the key...", shortly before expiring, as the last democrat on earth

# ? May 31, 2017 01:49

Philip Rivers: Mar 15, 2010

anime was right posted:

The suck zone.

# ? May 31, 2017 02:17

fits my needs: Jan 1, 2011; Grimey Drawer

https://twitter.com/ObamaFoundation/status/868195174509359104

# ? May 31, 2017 02:27

fits my needs: Jan 1, 2011; Grimey Drawer

Venom Snake posted:

Indeed it was extremely lol that I lost my apartment and had to double my meds

https://twitter.com/ObamaFoundation/status/867846093782085632

# ? May 31, 2017 02:28

Bip Roberts: Mar 29, 2005

It's gonna be cool as heck when Ossoff loses and the take is to never run any young blood and that center dems are a-okay.

# ? May 31, 2017 02:30

ex post facho: Oct 25, 2007

haha bip that is always the dcccs take no matter what

# ? May 31, 2017 02:32

Bip Roberts: Mar 29, 2005

Really it just needs someone older and more moderate to appeal to the conservative Georgia voters.

# ? May 31, 2017 02:32

WhiskeyJuvenile: Feb 15, 2002; by Nyc_Tattoo

excellent jacobin piece on single payer

quote:

Has the time for Medicare for All finally arrived? Many on the Left certainly think so.

�Various half-measures are not worth it,� physician and activist Adam Gaffney wrote a few weeks ago. �Single-payer is the alternative to the health care status quo.�

This is not just idle chitchat. A January Pew Research survey found that 60 percent of Americans think the government �has a responsibility to make sure all Americans have health care coverage.� And a recent Morning Consult poll showed 44 percent of Americans backed a single-payer plan, much more than those who opposed it.

Those are real numbers, and the Left has every reason to be excited that our arguments are gaining traction.

But if we want to make Medicare for All a reality, we have an obligation to think through the consequences of effectively euthanizing an industry that many have come to rely on for employment.

A Spending Machine

The private health insurance industry is, as many have observed, one of the primary drivers of health care costs. We spend far more on health care than any other advanced capitalist country and end up with inferior health outcomes.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) kept that basic system in place. For all the talk of mandates and cost curves and exchanges, Obamacare massively increased spending in the health care system. When more people get health insurance, more people use health care.

The Medicaid expansion and the subsidies for coverage on the individual market funnel tens of billions of additional dollars into insurance companies and health care providers every year. In 2014, the first year that the ACA was more or less in full force, net expenditures on health care rose 4.6 percent. In 2015, they jumped 5.6 percent. The same year, the federal government estimated that outlays would expand �1.2 percentage points faster than Gross Domestic Product� over the next decade. By 2025, it projected, health care would no longer make up one-sixth of the American economy. It would make up one-fifth.

Much of this spending results in new jobs. From 2011 to 2016, overall job growth in the US sat at 8.3 percent, but the number of health care practitioners rose 15.8 percent. Nurse practitioner jobs increased 76 percent. Speech-language pathologist positions expanded by 29.6 percent. �Medical records and health information technicians� went up 58.6 percent. In the health insurance industry, �insurance claims and policy processing clerks� went up 11 percent.

As long as the ACA fire hose keeps spraying money at the health care industry, jobs will balloon accordingly. If the water pressure drops, the consequences will be real and drastic, even if the overall result is more equitable and more affordable health care.

Medicare for All wouldn�t just scrap Obamacare � it would uproot the entire industry. It would be a huge efficiency savings. But it would also be devastating in the short term for hundreds of thousands of working people whose only crime was getting a job at an insurance company, and the hundreds of thousands more who work as billing specialists for clinics and hospitals (the number of medical assistants shot up 44 percent between 2011 and 2016). Yes, the CEO of United Health Group made $101 million in 2011. But few of the 230,000 other people working for the company saw money like that.

Bernie Sanders�s recently announced Medicare for All plan asserts that we �need a health care system that significantly reduces overhead, administrative costs, and complexity,� and projects that his plan would save $6 trillion over ten years.

Those trillions � currently being sucked up by a bloated, profit-hungry industry � could do amazing things. Infrastructure. Education. Housing. Insurance for all, in and of itself, would be remarkable.

But you don�t save $6 trillion just by getting rid of the insurance industry. The US has 35.5 MRI machines per million people. The UK, with its National Health Service, has 6.1. Single-payer Canada has 8.5. We don�t need as many as we have. We can deliver complete patient care with many fewer machines. But fewer machines means fewer manufacturing jobs, fewer technician jobs, less need for new construction for new facilities, and so on.

And MRIs are just one facet of a huge health care system that will see efficiencies across the board in a single-payer system. The benefits of those efficiencies will be felt by all, the harms by few, but they will feel them hard.

The effects of these changes would be highly local. Some of the campuses of large health insurance companies employ thousands. Shuttering them would be like shuttering a steel mill or auto factory � the shockwaves would reverberate through the whole community. Like laid-off autoworkers, employees of insurance companies would be pushed onto the job market with a set of skills and experiences unsuited to most other occupations. The color of their collar wouldn�t change that.

And that disruption would have serious political effects.

The 2016 election hinged on the Rust Belt, states like Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania that used to be home to huge numbers of unionized, high-wage blue-collar jobs. As those industrial jobs disappeared, cities across the Midwest sustained hits from which they still haven�t recovered.

The Democratic Party�s prescriptions � like trying to encourage fifty-year-old autoworkers to go back to community college to study IT � were both condescending and impractical. Many saw no reason to back a party that hadn�t done anything for them, and that left them exposed to the nativist economic nationalism of Trump.

We can�t risk the same thing happening because of single-payer.

Possible Prescriptions

Legislators in two of the states most seriously looking at Medicare for All, California and New York, don�t seem to have considered the job loss problem at anything more than a surface level.

The California bill simply requires that the state �provide funds � for a program for retraining and assisting job transition� for people who lose employment because of single-payer. The amount of money isn�t specified, isn�t guaranteed, and there�s no sense of what �retraining� means in any real sense. The New York legislation contains very similar language.

What�s more, any solution can�t just be about individual workers. It has to be about communities. Rochester, Minnesota has a population of 115,000; the Mayo Clinic employs 34,000. If Mayo shed five or ten thousand jobs because of single-payer�s efficiencies, all the retraining in the world wouldn�t avert a sizable blow to the local economy. And what good would it do for a Rochester resident to get a degree in something new, when the job market has basically dried up?

US representative John Conyers�s Medicare for All bill takes a more direct approach: it throws money at the problem. The legislation allows �clerical, administrative, and billing personnel� displaced by the law to receive their old salary (not to exceed $100,000) for two years, and to receive priority in job training. Even that bill, however, wouldn�t do anything to save communities � many of those displaced workers would take their money and move, only exacerbating the challenges of the Rochesters of America.

Any serious Medicare for All plan needs to include investments in affected communities on a scale this country hasn�t seen since New Deal projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority. In addition, any attendant growth in federal employment would need to be funneled back into the same communities that shed jobs. And that�s just for starters.

Medicare for All is a moral imperative. But the urgency of passing it doesn�t mean we can forget about the details. Otherwise we�ll send the message that our support for single-payer is more aspirational than practical, substituting hope for policy depth and leaving health care workers out in the cold.

# ? May 31, 2017 02:33

ex post facho: Oct 25, 2007

fits my needs posted:

https://twitter.com/ObamaFoundation/status/867846093782085632

barry huss really buyin into those wsj thinkpieces in his retirement

# ? May 31, 2017 02:33

ex post facho: Oct 25, 2007

uh clearly rhe response to that jacob poece is to divest all health insurance cl levelss of their salaries, redistribute to all the workers, problem solved

# ? May 31, 2017 02:35

GalacticAcid: Apr 8, 2013; NEW YORK VALUES

Even Matty Glesias says....

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/869715491568443392

the suck zone

# ? May 31, 2017 02:46

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

WhiskeyJuvenile posted:

excellent jacobin piece on single payer

lol at this right-wing hitpiece against God's one truth, single-payer

# ? May 31, 2017 02:48

Uncle Wemus: Mar 4, 2004

WhiskeyJuvenile posted:

excellent jacobin piece on single payer

Epic thissery

# ? May 31, 2017 02:51

etalian: Mar 20, 2006

Main Paineframe posted:

lol at this right-wing hitpiece against God's one truth, single-payer

lol

The effects of these changes would be highly local. Some of the campuses of large health insurance companies employ thousands. Shuttering them would be like shuttering a steel mill or auto factory � the shockwaves would reverberate through the whole community. Like laid-off autoworkers, employees of insurance companies would be pushed onto the job market with a set of skills and experiences unsuited to most other occupations. The color of their collar wouldn�t change that.

# ? May 31, 2017 02:52

Venom Snake: Feb 19, 2014; by Nyc_Tattoo

Martha Stewart Undying posted:

have u tried tripling them

Yeah

# ? May 31, 2017 02:56

WhiskeyJuvenile: Feb 15, 2002; by Nyc_Tattoo

https://twitter.com/therealroseanne/status/869717387439857664

y i k e s

# ? May 31, 2017 02:56

Joementum: May 23, 2004; jesus christ

seems like we could use the new CAP guaranteed jobs program to offset any employment losses caused by single payer, so I don't see what the problem is

# ? May 31, 2017 02:58

Thoguh: Nov 8, 2002; College Slice

etalian posted:

lol

The effects of these changes would be highly local. Some of the campuses of large health insurance companies employ thousands. Shuttering them would be like shuttering a steel mill or auto factory — the shockwaves would reverberate through the whole community. Like laid-off autoworkers, employees of insurance companies would be pushed onto the job market with a set of skills and experiences unsuited to most other occupations. The color of their collar wouldn’t change that.

Allow me to put on my best neoliberal voice.

'Those jobs aren't coming back, what those people need is means tested retraining tax credits'

# ? May 31, 2017 02:59

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# ? Apr 19, 2024 14:58

Gene Hackman Fan: Dec 27, 2002; by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

WhiskeyJuvenile posted:

https://twitter.com/therealroseanne/status/869717387439857664

y i k e s

yikes indeed. everybody wants to attribute all sorts of mafioso-style killings to dread abuela, when it would be far more accurate and far more provable to blame her for all the deaths that can be attributed to tronkian policy implementation.

# ? May 31, 2017 03:14

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > SUK ZONE: it's all a pointless exercise and you're just screaming into the void

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