Nothing left
Arwa Mahdawi on the conservatism of the Dems:
Some top establishment Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi, have been very busy throwing their weight behind Henry Cuellar, the last anti-choice House Democrat, in the primary for Texas’s 28th congressional district. I’m not sure exactly what makes the gun-loving, abortion-hating Cuellar a Democrat, because he seems to have basically all the same policy positions as a Republican, but he has a (D) next to his name. Even when they knew Roe was on the verge of being overturned, top House Democrats chose to help Cuellar – the incumbent – fend off a challenge from Jessica Cisneros, a pro-choice progressive. In the end Cuellar won by just 289 votes. The Democrats have the gall to send out fundraising emails demanding people vote for them so they can safeguard our reproductive rights while simultaneously spending donor money to help prop up an anti-choice Democrat. It truly beggars belief. As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stated on Twitter, Democrats rallying for “a pro-NRA, anti-choice incumbent … was an utter failure of leadership”.
It’s strange that Republicans keep marching ever farther to the right while Democrats…keep trying to catch up with them. Wrong direction! Your team’s goal is over THERE!
The race in Texas’ 28th Congressional District pitted one of the most conservative Democrats in the House against a challenger backed by progressive stalwarts, including Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Cuellar, who has held the seat since 2005, had the endorsements of top House Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and Majority Whip Jim Clyburn.
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Cisneros ran on a distinctly progressive platform, with support for Medicare for All and pro-labor legislation.
Cuellar, who holds more conservative views on abortion, immigration and gun control, painted Cisneros as a far-left candidate who wouldn’t be effective in Congress. He touted his deep ties to the district and ability to get things done.
We have a choice between Republicans and rabid Republicans.
I still fail to see Medicare for All as a progressive position. My husband has been on Medicare for about two years now. He pays more for his medication than I do, pays a higher co-pay, has a higher premium, and has to pay extra for all the things Medicare doesn’t cover.
I don’t like ACA much; I have been in the position many of the poorer people are in, and I would not have been able to pay for insurance at that time; I was on Medicare then, but the premium was much, much lower. The co-pays were lower. It didn’t pay for medication at all. I could not afford the co-pays. I had no choice about the premiums because I was on disability, and they took it out of my monthly check without me being able to decide if I wanted it. ACA is a highly flawed insurance program where people have to pay premiums and then won’t have money for deductibles or co-pays. It is essentially useless to the people it was passed to help.
Still, ACA is better than Medicare for all. When I mention this to most of the progressives I know, they are shocked to find out that Medicare has premiums, and how high they are. They assumed it was free, and that there were low or no co-pays. My husband pays more for his medication each month than he ever did; the other day, he dropped over $400 on one medication. If I am in that situation, some of my medicines rum over $800 a month; with the Medicare donut hole, I would be unable to fill them. These are vital medicines, needed to keep us alive.
Far better would be single-payer (I know, political non-starter) and medication price controls. Also price controls for medical care, and free preventive care would be most devoutly to be wished. The Ds have allowed the Rs to control the narrative for too long. Can this country afford it? Not without price controls…but then, price controls are commonplace in other countries. Every proposal I’ve seen uses our current cost of health care to determine the costs, never considering that it is possible to bring those costs down.
The main cost for drug companies is advertising. If they got rid of advertising directly to the consumers, drug companies could sell the drugs for much lower while still making a huge profit (they make huge profits now). Of course, the companies would likely keep the prices high, so their profits would become even more obscene.
Anyway, I do wish people would have some idea what Medicare is all about before they start to spout about Medicare for All. It is not progressive. It will harm almost all of us, and the poorest most of all.
And before you step in and point out that single payer is a non-starter politically, please note that I know that, and have said we need to change the narrative. We won’t as long as drug companies continue to give large campaign donations to both sides.
I think the draw for MfA is that it’s leveraging an existing government-funded medical insurance mechanism that applies to a wide spectrum of people, and expanding it to apply to a much wider spectrum of people. It’s easy, it involves little new infrastructure. That’s appealing. It almost sounds like an easy implementation of single-payer. But it’s not single-payer, not really, and people are being confused. There are a lot of campaigns via slogans (Green New Deal, anyone?) where the details matter but are being ignored.
I’m on “Medicare” (a so-called “Medicare Advantage” plan that is private insurance funded partly by Medicare, hence the scare quotes), and I’m happy with it. Basic Medicare itself is rather minimal insurance. I wish it were better. I wish the government would allow Medicare to be better, instead of making these private insurance options so attractive. (I believe Republicans wish to do away with Medicare and turn the whole thing into “Medicare Advantage” private insurance, eventually.)
“Medicare for All” as a slogan is not good because what single payer health care really is, is more similar to Canadian style system than what we have now. Insurance companies should have no part of it. They are evil. Every single advanced country in the world has a better system than we do. We should study them and choose one, because the system as it exists is completely unsustainable. The ACA was supposed to help, but of course it is too badly compromised to do anything. Now, I have no idea how we get to something better, but it would have to start with getting lobbying money out of government. Democrats are bought and paid for, just like the GOP. They are beholden to different corporations, but beholden nonetheless.
As for propping up people like Cuellar, this is where I lose patience with the “vote blue no matter who” crowd. It is complete abandonment of principles to prop up these stooges. In this particular case, he is no better than a Republican, so what is the point? What I would like to see is the GOP completely crushed, so for the moment we have to tolerate the Cuellars of this world. I like that young people are continuing to challenge these folks. Some will win, some will lose, but eventually we will be rid of these old fossils.
To the best of my knowledge, only two countries permit direct-to-consumer advertising – USA and New Zealand. From memory, most of the DTC advertising in NZ was items like Viagra and Asthma inhalers.
The massive difference though is New Zealand has Pharmac, a government body that goes to the marketplace and bulk buys most of the nation’s drugs. These are still dispensed by pharmacies, but the price the patient pays is NZ$5.00 for a 3-month supply. There is no charge for children under 13, and there are higher fees for some medications.
It’s a phenomenon I keep having to explain to people, even though it’s not surprising at all. At least, it isn’t once you combine two things: lesser evil voting and a de facto two party system. As long as voters can be consistently scared into voting for the lesser evil, the absolute orientation of a candidate is irrelevant. All the matters is whether you’re not as far in one direction as your opponent. It’s like the old saw about not needing to be faster than the bear, just faster than you. This means you actually want to be as close as possible to your opponent, so you can get the voters otherwise in between, while still differentiating yourself, or at least posturing, on select issues that let you paint your opposition as an intolerable evil.
For the Dems, this shakes out as taking as given that they’re entitled to and going to get the vote of everyone to their left, because what are you gonna do? Throw your vote away on a third party? Might as well move right and pick up the so-called swing voters.
It’s really basic game theory.
iknklast:
I mean, that’s kinda the point of M4A: build upon Medicare and reshape it into the universal, single payer system to which all belong, allowing it to act as unified risk pool and monolithic price negotiation bloc. M4A isn’t just, “Hey, by golly, why don’t we just expand Medicare coverage to everyone. That’ll fix everything!” Of course, it requires altering more than that; e.g., the fact that Medicare isn’t allowed to negotiate prices.