They all have continued to enjoy record profits while steadily increasing premiums as much as possible.

Private health insurance outfits benefited from ACA. Sooner we go to single payer the better. What people are paying for insurance premiums they can pay for additional taxes to cover cost of single payer.

Many people like their insurance and don’t want you to decide for them.

because number of people on that insurance is higher than other types.
It is typically offered by large and medium size employers and a few small employers.

But this is not a contest in popularity.

What is at stake is that more people are going bankrupt from healthcare bills than any other reason.
My ex-wife has cancer and her bills for the last 12 months were in excess of half million dollars. She is lucky to have a good private insurance with out of pocket max $2800, with monthly premiums of $184. It is through the employer. Imagine some unfortunate person who does not have such good insurance. Would be straight to bankruptcy court.

I have not kept up with latest premiums and deductibles of ACA, but I understand they are higher than the employer insurance my ex-wife has. Please correct me if I am wrong.

Um, actually, it is. Plans that are unpopular don't get passed.

The real problem that the US has is a lack of medical price controls. Only two countries in the world have Single Payer: Canada and the Republic of Korea. The rest have cafeteria types of plans, and several have plans nearly identical to the ACA. But when price inflation is completely out of whack and there is artificial restrictions on the number of professional doctors allowed to practice, massive cost is going to be the result.

Our military industrial complex is also single payer without price controls. It doesn't save money.

A lack of single payer isn't the problem. Massive - after the fact - unregulated billing is.

I am all in favor of providing health insurance to those who don't have it. But I am not convinced that a Medicare For All plan would be better than what I have now. Some aspects of Medicare are worse than my current plan. Medicare for All may have to work differently to make the cost work out. I'd like the option to keep my plan if it's better than what the government offers.

enriching these predatory insurance corporations even further in the process. The medicaid expansions were a positive and eliminating pre-existing condition discrimination was great. But that doesn't change the fact it was also a huge corporate windfall.

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My cousin had a pre-existing condition and could not buy insurance at any price. He died in an accident weeks before the ACA and might have survived had he had insurance. We won the house because people fear losing their insurance which you take so lightly.

....insurance premiums every year than we ever do for our actual health care. It's nuts.

I'd rather we all paid no insurance premiums or co-pays at all and used that money to instead pay the "higher taxes" that would allow the entire country to be healthier. I think the so-called "higher taxes" come out to less than we now pay in insurance bills under the ACA.

Medicare for all is cheaper than the ACA and still allows you to see your favorite doctor. You can also still buy additional private insurance if you can afford it.

How can anyone defend the fact that America pays more for health care than any other industrialized country and also has lower health rates? That's what insurance-company health care has brought us. Family bankruptcy and less health.

Voters or so voted for Stein in three states and we got Trump and he has damaged the ACA. If he wins in 20, we lose healthcare for a generation.

Guess we have to "compromise" with corporations in a Democracy?

Could have been upgraded years ago but the voters listened to the nay sayers, lost.

In 2018 they rebelled . It is in the voters hands this year.

If Biden runs they have a choice. Choose wisely.

Biden is known to kiss hair.
.

It was the purists who stayed home that midterm that caused us to lose the House.

"purists" were listening to.. that made them stay home and give up all those House seats? Defeating their own so called purpose of "progress"

Thank Goodness the purists had not much to do about our Midterm 2018 BlueWave! Flipping 45 red seats to BLUE!

least some of them have

Hope Springs Eternal!

Did the learn from that experience?

so let's hope.

Instead of what was essentially a multi-trillion dollar 2,000 page giveaway of taxpayer dollars to private insurers, that barely dented the actual cost of healthcare, we could have passed REAL healthcare reform that impacted both coverage AND cost.

We then wouldn't have needed to spend the next decade trying to reform and strengthen our own law.

Not a chance.

One fewer vote in the Senate or a change of four votes in the House would have been enough to defeat ObamaCare. We would have lost those votes with anything more comprehensive.

We were also guaranteed a public option by the candidate, a promise which promptly disappeared post-election.

We just need to follow through, by giving those who didn't vote at all, someone to vote FOR.

We got Agent Orange because of election shenanigans and Russian interference.

Some of them privileged celebrities and some of them just sore losers. A few of those sore losers have been recycled for 2020.

Obama is 100% right about this. He and Clinton are always trying to save us from ourselves.

In fact, I'd like to see 2yrs.of mandatory military service for everyone. Contentious Objectors can still do a national service. We've been fighting overseas now for close to 20yrs., In, I don't even know how many countries. Are we prioritizing properly when we make national security decisions? Ask a Vet.
Who is brave enough to say, insurance and drug companies should have less influence in national health care policymaking.
I also think that 50% of our population's underrepresented in the White House. We need the right woman.

Its the same on the right; so many over there fight constantly about the candidate being "not conservative enough". Like Mitt Romney. McCain. Etc. (even though trump is hardly a true conservative, but normal rules dont apply to him)

Did we do that to him? I think maybe we did.

The people will decide how progressive and “pure” they want their nominee and platform to be.

In order to have a circular firing squad, you have to have folks on the other side firing back...it’s not a one sided event, like a real firing squad, where people are told to get in line, or else...

Nothing wrong with folks speaking out for what they believe in- that is what primaries and debates are for.

has their own definition of what that means.


You can be a purist devoted to ideology or you can be a purist devoted to pragmatism.


My belief is that the overwhelming majority of the people fall in between those poles.

it'll never work given its reliance on the criminal health insurance industry. They will just have to accept single-payer, "Medicare for all," as the only reasonable, practical solution, which works for the common good in every major industrialized nation, in which the profit incentive of the greedy insurance companies is cut out from the healthcare system like the "cancer growth" that it is. We need to stop with the "circular firing squads" over amending the ACA.


Bernie & Elizabeth 2020!!!
Welcome the revolution!!!

Germany first offered public health insurance in the 1890s. But private insurance existed long before that, and people who had private insurance wanted to keep it, so they allowed it. I don't see why we can't do the same thing here for the same reason.

There is private insurance that supplements Medicare now.

>>you have to have folks on the other side firing back

imagine the HOWLS if Bernie Sanders had said that the centrists can't always get what they want and warned them about the "circular firing squad"

Name recognition polls mean diddley as far as "who can win"

If the country's survival is at stake, then it's not about "the math" in the Senate, it's about fighting for the country's survival.

If, after all the evidence of crime and corruption and incompetence, the Dems don't take a stand and say "this must stop now!", and instead take the timid approach of "we'll beat him at the ballot box", then the precedent is set for future Trump's, and the country is already lost.

Is this an emergency, or not?

Democrats should beware of cosplay socialists and Stein voters in their midst.

Sid

Every time something comes up, on Social media and divide up.

One reason I have quit paying attention to all the crap thrown at each of us. Turn off the media circus, quit listening,getting excited.

don't forget about the canadians.

Just like he was when he failed to put up a fight for Garland - a very moderate justice. Didn't matter that he thought Clinton would win. He really needed to go to the American people and fight for his man. Had he done that maybe more Democrats would have voted.

He was too cautious on more than one occasion, imo

Maybe those who couldn't get over emails should have considered the courts.

must get on an Obama thread and start blaming him because he's giving them damn good advice.

Many stayed home in 10 and we had six years of GOP SHIT as a result. And some helped elect Trump too. And now they want to dump on the ACA. Did these folks ever have a plan that could pass...no they didn't and still don't.

or President Obama would have made it happen.

He's speaking from experience about the "purists".

he knows what the hell happened in 2016 with the so called "purists" falling for jill stein LIES.

Link to tweet

and a stupid reason not to vote, too.

Misogyny and being overly in love with Bernie were a lot bigger.

And what was there to fight exactly? The Turtle was not going to cooperate and the Senate had a R majority.

I’d also recommend a refresher course in civics.

Unless Sanders just doesn't try very hard which I think is a possibility. I still don't believe Sanders is serious about winning, I think he's just in it to influence the debate and advocate for medicare-for-all.

and no on the body. The real goal is to damage the eventual nominee with flamethrowers.

Today's smear is "Biden caused the financial crisis of 2008" ... if my eyes could roll that much, I'd be seeing behind me.

The last Democratic President of the United States needs to destroy a Democratic candidate for President?

sickening

Bernie has reached his saturation point. The law of diminishing returns applies. He will not be the nominee, he will never be president. Obama doesn’t need to help to ensure that. It’s already happened only Bernie and his followers don’t know it yet.

Americans want.

agree with them.They don't. The midterms show we need moderate candIdates

but wisest? How wise was it to think he could make deals with Republicans? Ever?

who best represents them. And no group or person has the right to intimidate them into not running. This is a democracy.

We don't even have a true democracy where every vote counts let alone a perfect one. I wish we did, but until that day comes there is going to be political give and take or we lose even more and by doing so become insignificant. A better democracy is what we stive for, it's not something we actually have.

else is as good as voting for the other side.

See Jill Stein

dissing those running in the same party. Make your point but do not bash those also running on the Democratic ticket. Kind of like the rules of engagement on DU. Similar to a salesman talking up his products without just badmouthing the competition.

but I know they haven't.

Almost anyone else saying this will be met with implications that they are a RW troll, or some form of the "no true Scotsman" fallacy.

Miss this man.

Which policy/policies do you suggest we give up? Which demographic will have to "wait till next time"?

until Democrats are the majority.

by giving up on constituencies? Talk about circular...

people in red states to vote for Democrats? Forget about the Presidency...in their own state governments? And what kind of Democrat would be acceptable? Talk about constituencies.

We are the majority party in a center-left country that can't seem to hold a majority because we are too busy worrying about how to get a bunch of conservatives to vote for us. Truman told the truth:

When the Democratic candidate allows himself to be put on the defensive and starts apologizing for the New Deal and the fair Deal, and says he really doesn't believe in them, he is sure to lose. The people don't want a phony Democrat. If it's a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article, every time...."

Sometimes the other choice is so bad, we prevail anyway (not always, clearly). And what do we do then? We reach across the aisle, we push bipartisanship, we try not to offend, or to be strident, we behave like "the adults in the room"...and we give away what we just won.

You want to build a majority? Push for Democratic policies and enact them when in office, or try to--even if we lose we show how we are different, and better.

That's EXACTLY what Nancy Pelosi and the House are doing right now, btw. And what is required is to follow through once we win in 2020. That's what FDR did: he made Americans lives better and welcomed the hatred of his opponents instead of apologizing to them. The people kept electing him until he died. That's how we build a durable majority.

how your plan works to elect Democrats in Alaska, Alabama, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Minnesota, Michigan, New Hampshire, Oregon, South or North Dakota, South or North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia etc. State Governments that is. You can elect any President you want, dig up FDR, but without votes to pass legislation you get codswallop.

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And speaking for my state, you don't know Colorado very well, do you? (we have a Democratic House, Senate and governor.) You seem similarly challenged on some others. I agree Alabama and West Virginia are non-starters (unless they run pedophiles for the goopers, apparently), the Dakotas are almost as bad. Alaska is full of rugged individualists who also receive very socialistic kickbacks from the state Permanent Fund every year so they are a little hard to quantify, imo. Florida is...Florida. But Kansas, after a disastrous and recent experiment in trickle-down economics, is swinging back to at least the middle. Of the Carolinas, South is a stretch but North is probably within reach. Georgia almost elected (probably did) a black woman Democratic governor in 2018. Pennsylvania, Virginia, Minnesota and Michigan each voted for the Democrat in 3 of the last 4 presidential elections (I suspect all will be back in the fold in 2020); New Hampshire and Oregon did it 4 times out of 4.

With the right candidates, many things are possible. But not if we decide to throw in the towel before we start, and chase a bunch of unicorns (i.e. moderate Republicans), either before or after the election.

I don't know why this is so hard for people to understand.

Yes, certain states are probably lost causes. But despite the revisionist history after he was elected and started compromising before negotiations even started, President Obama ran in 2008 as a fairly left leaning candidate and managed to win quite handily. It's amazing how quickly we forget that.

Thank you.

It favors Republicans. Until those are changed (and that can only happen when the number of Republicans is decreased) none of what you say matters.

even if they cheat. So how do we get turnout? By appealing to mythical moderate Republicans? That didn't work too well in 2016.

you'd think that would be exciting enough.

Like healthcare.

out before we kick the progressives to the curb. The people can have a choice too.

stand in the way of progress". I wish people were as adamant about their own state governments, as they are about Presidential elections.

he knows what the hell happened in 2016 with the so called "purists" falling for jill stein LIES.

Link to tweet

A certain someone will have a team of hit-persons sent out to destroy ALL democratic candidates and between that and putin, rump is reelected.

And is quickly joined here as people step up ad take their shot.

Looks like its open season on the left in the democratic party.

Sad.

he was either a Moderate or Moderate-Center or Progressive. If he was in the Rust Belt he was and his stump speeches were that of a progressive. But when he was in an area like the moderate sections of NC or even VA of course he was a moderate. Obama's huge victories was a result of his oratory skills but also because he had a well organized campaign and a Ultra efficient Campaign staff.
In 2012 when the theft strategy was on from the Republicans his campaign reacted so efficiently that even Karl
Roves head was spinning.

I understand why all kinds of people voted for Obama. But now that its 2019 people want someone who is one thing and not many. That's why Bernie is even became a thing! He was/is one thing only, no matter where he goes or who he's talking to. Same short story(it's very short with lots of hand gestures). I see this election lots of people are turning into just "one thing" now. That is what the people want right now.

As for Trump I don't know what he is...He's had an evolution since 2016. Was he a "one-thing" kind of guy or not?

Great to see him on the stump, or talking about it at least!

… purity should not be surprised if they stay home while the Supreme Court gets more radical right judges and the courts rule their voting power out-of-order.