Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign megathread v2 (pg 77 - declares victory in Iowa)

[TheLaRocca]

love how "how you gonna pay for it" only applies to anything left-of-center LOL.

[Beet]

love how "how you gonna pay for it" only applies to anything left-of-center LOL.

It doesn't have to, but the Democrats seem obsessed with giving Trump a pass on his massive deficit. Which is ironic because it's going to come back to bite them in the ass and the Republicans won't hesitate to use it against the next D president.

[Hindsight was 2020]

via Imgflip Meme Generator

[Sbane]

• Medicare for all:  $34T over ten years in new federal spending according to the Urban Institute

Overall health spending in the US was $3.6 Trillion in just 2018 alone....

https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Statistics-Trends-and-Reports/NationalHealthExpendData/NationalHealthAccountsHistorical

So I guess vote for Bernie if you want to lower health care costs?

[GeneralMacArthur]

• Medicare for all:  $34T over ten years in new federal spending according to the Urban Institute

Overall health spending in the US was $3.6 Trillion in just 2018 alone....

https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Statistics-Trends-and-Reports/NationalHealthExpendData/NationalHealthAccountsHistorical

So I guess vote for Bernie if you want to lower health care costs?

Yes, that's the talking point.  Let's ignore all the complications and assumptions made in comparing these two numbers (for starters, that $3.6T includes current government spending) and pretend it's a simple $3.6-to-$3.2 annual comparison.  That doesn't mean you don't have to pay for it.  When you shift costs from the private sector to the government, the government suddenly has to single-handedly produce revenue that was otherwise procured by the private sector.

That means raising taxes.  Specifically, raising taxes on the middle class, since corporations and the wealthy don't have enough to pay for it under even the most punitive of tax plans.  And since you can't micro-target taxes to be precisely what everyone was paying previous for their health insurance, that means many people are going to pay more in taxes than they paid for private insurance.  Probably most people, since an inordinate share of the costs in a free-health-care-for-all system would go towards care for the elderly, the chronically ill, drug addicts, etc.

So, how is Sanders going to pay for it?  Does he have a plan to raise $3.2 trillion dollars a year in addition to existing taxes?  That's a huge lift.  It's a massive shift of money from the private sector to the government.  It's a far more dramatic shift than the tax-bracket-twiddling of the other candidates.  Essentially, it's a massive step towards a true socialist economy, where people pay a 60-70% tax burden and in return all services and utilities are provided singularly by the national government.  And that's even before you add in all the other stuff Sanders wants to do, which is even more expensive.

The real problem at the root of all this is that health care spending itself continues to explode.  Medicare and Medicaid alone threaten to annihilate the federal budget within the next thirty years.  Plenty of experts have suggested a wide variety of plans to address this, many of which are contained in the health care platforms of the other candidates.  No serious person believes that nationalizing the entire health care industry and fully-guaranteeing top-rate health care to everyone for free is the solution.

This is one of the many things I find irritating about the whole Sanders revolutionary movement.  Before he came along this was one of the most thoroughly discussed issues in the country and tons of different ideas and plans had been thrown out there, many of which found their way into the ACA.  We could be having a productive conversation right now about a comprehensive package to address our very real challenges.  Instead, the Republicans are dead-set on repealing Obamacare as the end-all-be-all, and the Democrats are consumed by a debate over full-scale nationalization.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Can you people PLEASE stop feeding the troll? Just put him on ignore. I assure you your Atlas experience will be much improved.

[It’s so Joever]

Can you people PLEASE stop feeding the troll? Just put him on ignore. I assure you your Atlas experience will be much improved.

Anyone who disagrees with Bernie is an evil troll.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Can you people PLEASE stop feeding the troll? Just put him on ignore. I assure you your Atlas experience will be much improved.

I've written two high-effort posts on this page.  You can't just dismiss that as trolling.  That's not what trolling is.

Hiding under the covers and saying "he's just a troll, he's just a troll" won't make a funding plan for Sanders' projects magically appear.  This is a real thing that has to be solved in the real world.  $64 trillion in additional revenue won't just appear in the federal coffers because you accused someone else of trolling on the internet.

If you were to wake up tomorrow in some Twilight Zone episode where Sanders has become president and enacted his entire agenda, you would immediately regret it because your entire paycheck would go to Uncle Sam.  Making lazy template memes with the D-WA avatar and writing nasty responses on Atlas won't change reality.

[Sbane]

• Medicare for all:  $34T over ten years in new federal spending according to the Urban Institute

Overall health spending in the US was $3.6 Trillion in just 2018 alone....

https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Statistics-Trends-and-Reports/NationalHealthExpendData/NationalHealthAccountsHistorical

So I guess vote for Bernie if you want to lower health care costs?

Yes, that's the talking point.  Let's ignore all the complications and assumptions made in comparing these two numbers (for starters, that $3.6T includes current government spending) and pretend it's a simple $3.6-to-$3.2 annual comparison.  That doesn't mean you don't have to pay for it.  When you shift costs from the private sector to the government, the government suddenly has to single-handedly produce revenue that was otherwise procured by the private sector.

That means raising taxes.  Specifically, raising taxes on the middle class, since corporations and the wealthy don't have enough to pay for it under even the most punitive of tax plans.  And since you can't micro-target taxes to be precisely what everyone was paying previous for their health insurance, that means many people are going to pay more in taxes than they paid for private insurance.  Probably most people, since an inordinate share of the costs in a free-health-care-for-all system would go towards care for the elderly, the chronically ill, drug addicts, etc.

So, how is Sanders going to pay for it?  Does he have a plan to raise $3.2 trillion dollars a year in addition to existing taxes?  That's a huge lift.  It's a massive shift of money from the private sector to the government.  It's a far more dramatic shift than the tax-bracket-twiddling of the other candidates.  Essentially, it's a massive step towards a true socialist economy, where people pay a 60-70% tax burden and in return all services and utilities are provided singularly by the national government.  And that's even before you add in all the other stuff Sanders wants to do, which is even more expensive.

The real problem at the root of all this is that health care spending itself continues to explode.  Medicare and Medicaid alone threaten to annihilate the federal budget within the next thirty years.  Plenty of experts have suggested a wide variety of plans to address this, many of which are contained in the health care platforms of the other candidates.  No serious person believes that nationalizing the entire health care industry and fully-guaranteeing top-rate health care to everyone for free is the solution.

This is one of the many things I find irritating about the whole Sanders revolutionary movement.  Before he came along this was one of the most thoroughly discussed issues in the country and tons of different ideas and plans had been thrown out there, many of which found their way into the ACA.  We could be having a productive conversation right now about a comprehensive package to address our very real challenges.  Instead, the Republicans are dead-set on repealing Obamacare as the end-all-be-all, and the Democrats are consumed by a debate over full-scale nationalization.

First of all that $34 trillion was your number, not mine. I just pointed out that we already pay $3.6 trillion a year in health care costs already. Yes, it would be paid for differently than we do now, but somebody pays already. People would pay a little bit more in taxes, but they would get a lot back in return.

In addition, no matter who wins, I hope we move towards a system with no deductibles and copays. All that does is it prevents people from accessing healthcare. Thus, they don't see the doctor regularly, don't get the tests they need to get and don't take the medications they need to take. Eventually, their condition deteriorates and they end up in the hospital. Perhaps, when they are in the hospital they contract an infectious disease which ends up extending the stay and adding to healthcare costs.

One of the reasons healthcare costs are so high in the US is due to an under utilization of primary care and an over utilization of hospitals and end of life care. The latter is more expensive. We can provide better health outcomes for the country if we had cheaper and more accessible primary care in this country and what Sanders is proposing is a good way to get to that.

Edit: I hope the technocrats who designed the Medicare Part D plan don't have any part in designing any future healthcare plan. It's a system designed to encourage seniors to not take their brand name medications. Sometimes that is a good thing if it encourages someone to switch to a lower cost alternative. Unfortunately for these technocrats, most people do want the lowest cost option so if possible they are already on those options. In the real world, sometimes people need to take brand name drugs to stay healthy. If they do not take those drugs such as Eliquis, which prevents embolisms, or Spiriva which manages COPD symptoms, they may end up in the hospital. Where even one day of care may cost more than the yearly cost of these medications.

Another thing we could do when most people have Medicare is negotiate drug prices of brand name drugs. If they want access to the Medicare market, make the drug companies rebate back the difference of what they charge Medicare and what they charge the OECD countries.

[GeneralMacArthur]

First of all that $34 trillion dollars was your number, not mine. I just pointed out that we already pay $3.6 trillion a year in health care costs already. Yes, it would be paid for differently than we do now, but somebody pays already. People would pay a little bit more in taxes, but they would get a lot back in return.

In addition, no matter who wins, I hope we move towards a system with no deductibles and copays. All that does is it prevents people from accessing healthcare. Thus, they don't see the doctor regularly, don't get the tests they need to get and don't take the medications they need to take. Eventually, their condition deteriorates and they end up in the hospital. Perhaps, when they are in the hospital they contract an infectious disease which ends up extending the stay and adding to healthcare costs. One of the reasons healthcare costs are so high in the US is due to an underuse of primary care and an overuse of hospitals and end of life care. The latter is more expensive. We can provide better health outcomes for the country if we had cheaper and more accessible primary care in this country and what Sanders is proposing is a good way to get to that.

The $34 trillion dollars is additional spending.  $3.6T includes medicare and medicaid that is already paid for by the federal government.  If you include the $21.9T in projected 10Y spending on current government health programs, you're talking about $56T in total spending. 

Here is the Mercatus paper that gives the $32T number everyone uses:  https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/blahous-costs-medicare-mercatus-working-paper-v1_1.pdf

You can look at the math yourself but in 2030, for instance, the estimate is $6.95T in total expenditures, $2.71 of which would have been medicare/medicaid/etc. and $4.241 of which would be new spending.  And the paper has a big warning on page 1 that this is an unrealistically optimistic number for a wide variety of reasons.  The most obvious is that Medicare is projected to pay 60% of the private insurance rate to physicians by 2030, and the paper uses the Sanders claim that, in spite of this, you can pay the Medicare rate across the board.  In reality, this would cause physicians to go out of business, hospitals to shutter, and reduced quality of care overall.  If you take away just that assumption, you add $5.31 trillion over ten years.

This whole debate is really beside the point, though.  Neither of us is seriously disputing that M4A would cost, at minimum, $32T over ten years.  Nor are you, I take it, disputing any of the other numbers I gave, since they are directly on Sanders' website.  My point is that when you add all these expensive plans up you get a truly extraordinary amount of money that exceeds the sum of all household wealth in the United States.  For Sanders to propose all of this and then insist he doesn't need to pay for it is a con, plain and simple, and such a patently obvious one that I find it frustrating that more people don't see through it.  It's like someone offering to send you to Saturn, or turn you invisible, and then hand-waving when you ask them how.

Where will $64T come from?  If it comes from anywhere at all, it's going to come from you and me.  You can get away with hand-waving and "we'll take it from the rich" when you're talking about $1T.  When you're talking about $64T, you can't.  Or at least, you shouldn't be able to.

[Sbane]

I don't know man, how do you think the Europeans do it? If we used a little common sense and cracked down on drug manufacturers, medical device manufacturers and certain hospital chains, we can crack down on costs some. What is really required in my opinion is to encourage people to access healthcare when the disease is more manageable. You can't do that if people don't have coverage or have high deductibles and co-pays to pay. In the long run it will pay off but yes it will be expensive at first. Middle class taxes will have to go up but that is fine if people don't have to pay deductibles, co-pays and premiums. People aren't stupid. If you deliver the product, they will gladly pay their share.

Also the study you cite forecasts $3.8 trillion in spending in 2022. That's not something that is scary....just the same amount of spending that is already occurring currently.

[GeneralMacArthur]

I don't know man, how do you think the Europeans do it? If we used a little common sense and cracked down on drug manufacturers, medical device manufacturers and certain hospital chains, we can crack down on costs some. What is really required in my opinion is to encourage people to access healthcare when the disease is more manageable. You can't do that if people don't have coverage or have high deductibles and co-pays to pay. In the long run it will pay off but yes it will be expensive at first. Middle class taxes will have to go up but that is fine if people don't have to pay deductibles, co-pays and premiums. People aren't stupid. If you deliver the product, they will gladly pay their share.

Also the study you cite forecasts $3.8 trillion in spending in 2022. That's not something that is scary....just the same amount of spending that is already occurring currently.

They don't do it.

This is a common American myth that Sanders propagates, falsely, because it benefits him.  It is a lie.

The only European country that has a single-payer national health insurance system is the United Kingdom with its NHS, and even that is regularly under threat of privatization and allows for private insurance (it also has long waiting times, and medical tourism is common).

There are a variety of different systems in place in Europe.  France, for instance, allows insurers to operate as non-profits and has an individual mandate.  Fees for visits are reimbursed at rates determined by the government.  This is totally, fundamentally different from what Sanders is proposing.

Germany has a mix of private and public insurance along with an individual mandate.

Switzerland has private insurance and an individual mandate similar to Obamacare.

Denmark and Sweden both have private health insurance that competes with the government in a model similar to Buttigieg's "Medicare for all who want it" model.

Go look at every single European nation and you won't find a single one where the government pays for 100% of the health care costs, private insurance is banned, and individuals pay nothing.

That's another really frustrating aspect of this whole primary is you have mainstream Democrats proposing rational, affordable, achievable health care schemes similar to what European nations actually have, and Sanders proposing a ludicrously-expensive fantasy scheme that matches what Americans think Europe has.

[NOVA Green]

Are there any other DEM campaign threads, where effectively one poster is trolling the thread and making it about their personal positions on policy issues?

Get it that DEMs and DEM leaners wanna debate policy points, but when does it become a time where maybe a new thread should be created so one dude isn't literally hogging >50% of the airtime with his own positions and sucking all of the oxygen out of the room?

General Mac wants to debate Health Care fine... stop clogging the thread.

This needs to go elsewhere bcs it's making it virtually unreadable anymore....

[Sbane]

I don't know man, how do you think the Europeans do it? If we used a little common sense and cracked down on drug manufacturers, medical device manufacturers and certain hospital chains, we can crack down on costs some. What is really required in my opinion is to encourage people to access healthcare when the disease is more manageable. You can't do that if people don't have coverage or have high deductibles and co-pays to pay. In the long run it will pay off but yes it will be expensive at first. Middle class taxes will have to go up but that is fine if people don't have to pay deductibles, co-pays and premiums. People aren't stupid. If you deliver the product, they will gladly pay their share.

Also the study you cite forecasts $3.8 trillion in spending in 2022. That's not something that is scary....just the same amount of spending that is already occurring currently.

They don't do it.

This is a common American myth that Sanders propagates, falsely, because it benefits him.  It is a lie.

The only European country that has a single-payer national health insurance system is the United Kingdom with its NHS, and even that is regularly under threat of privatization and allows for private insurance (it also has long waiting times, and medical tourism is common).

There are a variety of different systems in place in Europe.  France, for instance, allows insurers to operate as non-profits and has an individual mandate.  Fees for visits are reimbursed at rates determined by the government.  This is totally, fundamentally different from what Sanders is proposing.

Germany has a mix of private and public insurance along with an individual mandate.

Switzerland has private insurance and an individual mandate similar to Obamacare.

Denmark and Sweden both have private health insurance that competes with the government in a model similar to Buttigieg's "Medicare for all who want it" model.

Go look at every single European nation and you won't find a single one where the government pays for 100% of the health care costs, private insurance is banned, and individuals pay nothing.

That's another really frustrating aspect of this whole primary is you have mainstream Democrats proposing rational, affordable, achievable health care schemes similar to what European nations actually have, and Sanders proposing a ludicrously-expensive fantasy scheme that matches what Americans think Europe has.

This will be my last post in this thread regarding healthcare.

You obviously don't understand how the NHS operates. It owns all the hospitals and all health care providers are government employees. That is not what Sanders proposes and I would strongly oppose such a system were it being proposed.

What Sanders is proposing is similar to the Canadian system. If Canada can do it, I do believe America can as well. I also favor the "Medicare for all who want it" plan but it could lead to adverse selection if it's not designed right. I would make the Medicare system very generous but allow a private health insurance system to supplement Medicare and pay for things Medicare does not pay for.

[GeneralMacArthur]

This will be my last post in this thread regarding healthcare.

You obviously don't understand how the NHS operates. It owns all the hospitals and all health care providers are government employees. That is not what Sanders proposes and I would strongly oppose such a system were it being proposed.

What Sanders is proposing is similar to the Canadian system. If Canada can do it, I do believe America can as well. I also favor the "Medicare for all who want it" plan but it could lead to adverse selection if it's not designed right. I would make the Medicare system very generous but allow a private health insurance system to supplement Medicare and pay for things Medicare does not pay for.

Last post as well.  I didn't intend for this to become yet another M4A discussion.

The point isn't what the NHS or Canada does or doesn't do.  Canada isn't even in Europe.  The point I was making is that Europe, contrary to popular myth, doesn't have single payer in every country.  In fact, the opposite is true; no European country has single-payer health care except arguably the UK.  And none of them have anything remotely resembling Sanders' plan.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Can you people PLEASE stop feeding the troll? Just put him on ignore. I assure you your Atlas experience will be much improved.

[John Dule]

Can you people PLEASE stop feeding the troll? Just put him on ignore. I assure you your Atlas experience will be much improved.

The ignore button is for the weak.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Can you people PLEASE stop feeding the troll? Just put him on ignore. I assure you your Atlas experience will be much improved.

The ignore button is for the weak.

I used to think so too when I was your (forum) age. I held out for years and years. Eventually I broke. We all break eventually.

[Adam Griffin]

.

[Vaccinated Russian Bear]

https://twitter.com/Redistrict/status/1226748578103799811

https://twitter.com/ForecasterEnten/status/1226785007512977408

[2016]

https://twitter.com/Redistrict/status/1226748578103799811

https://twitter.com/ForecasterEnten/status/1226785007512977408

If Biden finishes below Buttigieg & Klobuchar in 4th he is in serious trouble and that might make life for Sanders much easier.

We really need a Nevada Poll! I bet Sanders is either tied or slightly ahead there.

[American2020]

Is It Bernie’s Party Now?

“A candidate who will fight for the working class,” said Mike Bizier, 27. “A candidate who has been consistent for 50 years.”

“I never really paid attention to politics,” said Cara Ciminello, 24, with her fiancé, Peter Sughrue, 25, “and then we heard Bernie, and we were, like, ‘He’s actually giving us a voice. He’s actually saying what we want to hear,’ so then we got behind him—and now we won’t stop till he’s in the White House.”

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/02/10/bernie-sanders-new-hampshire-2020-campaign-profile-112173

[Vaccinated Russian Bear]

https://twitter.com/WSJ/status/1226728758398390272

[Hindsight was 2020]

Russian Bear’s unbearably (pun intended) arrogance about how Bernie can’t beat Trump will make his glorious victory over Cheeto Mussolini all the more sweeter

[junior chįmp]

https://twitter.com/WSJ/status/1226728758398390272

Please dont stop my corrupt gravy train!

The growing list of corrupt Cuomo associates

Steve Pigeon pleaded guilty Tuesday to funneling an illegal donation to the governor’s campaign.