Communion

Looking at Twitter days after a historic wave midterm election and seeing that the woman leading the most influential liberal thinktank to the Democratic Party is spending her morning trying to trigger Hasan Piker's eating disorder by retweeting people calling him fat.

You will, in fact, find no leftist in America promote the tactic of setting police officers on fire. Because leftists know the American surveillance and carceral state will come down upon them like a destructive hammer. This is why Western chauvinists are criticized as not caring about human rights abroad but whitewashing the human rights abuse of their Western nations or the Western nations who ally with their economic interests in regions abroad. Several leftists tried to do much more moderate versions of these protests - where the damage was property damage, not a police officer's skull - in both places like the US and the UK to try and stop arms shipments to Israel. In the best scenario, these protestors were charged with terrorism and in the worst scenario they've been given decades-long sentencing in blackbox style prisons, their identities now forever on government watch lists. No, there has never been and never will be American leftists -re-reads what the OP did- trying to overthrow the government. American leftists can't even easily decide when to hold a book club and you think they're getting away with being able to coup their own government while hypocritically denying people elsewhere of the chance to coup their own government too?

@nooniebao this being who replaced Angie "Proud Voter of the Laken Riley Act" Craig in the House. Even if Daniel Koh turns out to be a phony, that Eric Swawell was replaced by Aisha and Angie by Matt feels big. (Imagine if we had replaced Haley Stevens' seat with Aisha Farooqi instead of Jeremy "Israel First" Moss )

Hearing her as a sitting congresswoman talk about the CPC/New Dem divide (while also being like wtf is a Blue Dog) is such a kii and fascinating in itself.

Yes! I was looking at the New Dem and Blue Dog class photos and I don't see them there so that's good. I hope they don't get lost in the mix. For reference, these annoying stupid centrist *******: People being shocked that Manny Rutinel is there when the tea on him was that he was always an insane attention ***** with no beliefs ddd.

Non-DSA/JD freshmen who attended the CPC presser: CA-01 - Mike McGuire (Defeated Republican incumbent, probably moderate shift left) CA-14 - Aisha Wahab (Eric Swalwell expelled, major shift left) CA-22 - Randy Villegas (Defeated Republican incumbent, major shift left) IL -04 - Patty Garcia (Progressive Chuy Garcia retired, probably no meaningful shift left) IL-09 - Daniel Biss (Progressive Jan Schakowsky retired, probably no meaningful shift left) MA-06 - Dan Koh (Seth Moulton didn't run, moderate shift left) MI-07 - Will Lawrence (Defeated Republican incumbent, major shift left) MN-02 - Matt Little (Angie Craig didn't run, major shift left) NY-10 - Brad Lander (Defeated Dan Goldman, moderate shift left) TX-23 - Katy Padilla Stout (Defeated Republican in open R-seat, major shift left)

Oh! @nooniebao He's a Biden admin guy and can just be doing it cause he reps MA, but he also attended the CPC presser today. For reference, he's replacing Seth Moulton who wasn't a co-sponsor on M4A.

I think his question is in bad faith though because the legislation itself outlines how... providers can't opt-out. The options are to participate in Medicare or effectively have a cash-based black market. It's also why I questioned his push for having cash based transactions as an example of transparency. Like, yes, it's true that most people don't know how most individual tests or procedures cost, but it's very "corporate brain" of him to act as though private insurers can just be regulated into due diligence. The issue isn't the transparency - the issue is the cost distribution. Even in a cash system, most people could not afford to pay out of pocket if providers still want the inflated rates agreed on under private insurance agreements. You'd.. just have no patients! I also don't think most people want to treat healthcare as a business transaction. Providers' fee schedules can have thousands of itemized costs that then align with hundreds of CPT codes for pricing. Do we really want people to have to 'shop' for healthcare? I don't think most people want to have to add blood tests to their cart and see the charges individually. $28 for a CBC, $32 for a CMP, $45 for a Lipid Panel + $10 fee for the venipuncture? Ready to check out for $115? Cuban treats people as consumers when they're patients. There's a distinct effort by "Big Business" people to push "no, the insurers aren't the ones driving up the costs! it's the doctors!!!". And there needs to be cost transparency, especially on things like Big Pharma, but his entire approach reads as pushing us away from where we need to go. We need doctors to complete the delivery of care. We don't need third-party medical coders. So when he's completely aware of what the M4A legislation says and completely works to try and discredit it, it's like.. oh! This is a bad person explicitly using his wealth to lie and help make sure his other wealthy friends do not ever see their own wealth decrease!

Basically, while some pundits argue "not every major developed country uses single payer," the inverse is also true - there is no other major developed in the world that uses the same system as America currently: healthcare treated as an administrative jobs program before a unit of care, the proliferation of for-profit, private insurance companies inflating the care in delivery of care, etc.

We did this in 2020 already.

I think people do not trust Mark Cuban because he still is ultimately against single payer healthcare. His advocacy against pharma gets confusing when he's then advocating to push people in a direct-to-buyer, cash based kind of market for care. He has routinely made bad faith criticism of M4A due to not getting to craft the plan as a billionaire with interests in healthcare:

I do think the below also captures where the tension is for many progressives against centrists. Like.. Lis Smith is lying. And she gets paid to lie. And she knows the lie she is pushing is the lie invented by Republicans. A lot of these contradictions and frictions were really explored in the 2020 presidential primary, though I appreciate not everyone was paying attention to that specific policy debate. I may be mis-remembering, but I think Elizabeth Warren making Amy Klobuchar almost cry during the debates was about healthcare (?), but it's hard to take centrists as genuine in their offense at being told they hate poor people when people like Lis Smith do the above. Leftists genuinely believe such so I think it's good to vocalize, but the consequences of the status quo is factuallypeople being discriminated against for being poor, people dying by virtue of not being able to afford going to the doctor, people crushed by medical debt, etc. Party unit becomes extremely difficult if trying to unify with people whom you believe genuinely are trying to kill poor people. This was one of the most pivotal moments of the 2020 president campaign:

@Bloo @Rian @Azulito @rihannabiggestfan There are a few little things. Re: Banning Duplicative Coverage - Yes, Abdul even back when he wrote his book on Medicare For All argued you don't necessary have to ban duplicative coverage. You can simply cause market friction and let the government run private insurance 'out' of business by providing the service and making people feel the squeeze of the taxation / not want to pay for the same thing twice. The question is whether you trust the American public to have high enough trust to drop their private insurance quickly or not. Because how quickly Americans only use Medicare impacts doctor participation. If primary care was only handled by Medicare (which is what banning duplicative coverage is), that's then the mechanism by which doctors can't really refuse Medicare participation. "What if doctors don't participate??" is nuked if the only choices for providers are either participate in Medicare or be forced onto a de-facto cash-only black market. Part of the problem is: how do you get doctors to participate in the plan and not opt out due to lower reimbursements, like with Medicaid having lowered participation. You can't let it be so providers can afford to discriminate against some insurance pools. This is why single payer > a public option. (Most doctors do not opt-out of Medicare and Congress could also pass legislation making participating in Medicare a requirement to be licensed as a specific medical professional, etc. Both Sanders & AES' views have merit.) Re: Workfoce - Private insurers are a prominent employer in many states*. Part of the cost-savings for all parties is the reduction in administrative bloat. Billing and medical coding departments are often such a large part of the workforce on both the provider and payor side because there's dozens of payors but then each insurance company can have dozens of plans, with then the rules of reimbursement (medical coding, prior authorization, documentation) varying from plan to plan, payor to payor, etc. If you remove all those complex rules, you do need less billing staff. This is why the Sanders plan in 2020 included regulations where CEOs of insurance companies couldn't basically run away with the bag and lay-off all employees if M4A passed, a transition for those laid off into a kind of jobs program under Medicare, tuition-free college / increase the number of new doctors / student debt forgiveness to compensate medical professionals over future lowered reimbursements. *Re: Choice - It's the elephant in the room that there's not much actual choice in insurance coverage. It's an illusion of choice. Many states have a single insurer that represents a monopoly. Highmark make up 75% of the insurance market in Delaware, for example. Half of the insurance market in New Jersey is BCBS, etc. People who choose employer-based insurance don't get a 'say' in which insurer they broker with. The most popular parts of single-payer are that it's free at point of service: no premiums, no deductibles, no co-pays. --- I made this back in 2020 (ddd) off of the data at the time so the numbers have shifted, but the point was to illustrate what people actually mean. Centrists were arguing that most people love their insurance and that the 10% of uninsured Americans really just need a "public option" that the government can offer them to buy. But.. what then is that in practice? Is it just the government banning "catastrophic coverage" plans for private insurers but now offering it themselves for people too poor for the marketplace but who do not qualify for Medicaid? And how do you get people to buy what is promoted as a cheap, poorly ran product solely for poor people? The unpopular mandate to BUY insurance? I know several people who are like "I don't pay for health insurance and just lie to the state when they ask if I'm covered at tax time" [because NJ has a state level mandate], because the costs of paying for insurance annualy are seen as far higher than the fine if 'caught' not having it.

I think it helps if we kind of just make sure we define or get a better understanding of terms. There's "universal healthcare," but this has come to mean by many politicians the idea that all Americans can say that they have some type of health insurance coverage from somewhere (Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, Employer, Marketplace). So universal healthcare just really means "the number of uninsured Americans is at 0%". What progressives want is to establish a universal insurance plan where there is zero cost-sharing and care is free at point of service. So that means there are no deductibles, no monthly premiums, and no co-pays. The costs of the plan are financed through new taxation. For this plan to work, as any insurance pool needs to work, it needs to be large in size. People who have gotten insurance through their employer knows that the type of plans the company is offered get worse when less and less employees sign on. As well, if you're going to finance it through taxation, the survival of the program largely relies on everyone being invested. Welfare programs (Medicaid) are often far more attacked and face calls to defund than universal entitlements (Medicare, Social Security). So what John Conyers, Bernie Sanders, Abdul El-Sayed, lots of other nations, etc. understand is that there needs to be a government insurance plan every single American is auto-enroll in, that they cannot opt-out, and that everyone helps finance through taxation. Sanders advocates for a much more generous package than any other country offers (dental, vision), but nations like Canada effectively at the provincial level do Medicare For All, ie: here's the government plan, your primary care will be billed to us. Conyers + Sanders have argued that banning duplicative coverage from private insurance will work out the economics. It doesn't ban private health insurance from existing, but bans private insurance from offering to cover the same health events Medicare would. Abdul has argued you don't necessarily have to fight that fight first. That you can just roll out the universal plan and allow people to maintain duplicative insurance, but that can only work if you fund it through taxes and no one can opt-out. Because it's.. then logical. If the government sends everyone cheese, people will stop having to buy cheese. If the government gives everyone primary care coverage.. most people are going to drop their private insurance coverage cause no one wants to pay twice for the same thing. People like CAP or Pete Buttigieg get the ire of progressives because they've tried to push plans that are nothing like this under the branding, Buttigieg pushing for an "opt-in" public option where the US just runs its own insurance coverage and people pay premiums to the government, while CAP claims it supports a universal insurance plan but says people should be allowed to "opt-out" (how?) that would not work.

The issue is that it shows Dems unwilling to take easy, low hanging fruit. The same issue with leadership challenges. At least trying out something new signals to votes "you're heard" and kicks the can down the road.