House declares war on Massachusetts, other states

People in Massachusetts talk big, but they will freak out if you suggest raising their taxes. Including the "Progressives".
Forget the country, you're living in a state that does the same thing.

Many have questioned why Baker didn't stand up at some of the earlier protests. This is why. He's the only link we have to Washington. A Republican gov has LOTS of pull in DC, especially with his popularity. Technically, no. But behind the scenes he can do more than Markey and Warren combined times two.

When it is them receiving it. Just don't let it go to those that actually need it. Most red states are straight up welfare states propped up by the coastal elites' taxes.

We'll just deduct it from our federal tax contributions.

Really? I'm not a tax accountant, so maybe you can point me to where that line item is in all the IRS forms. There's a possibility this might work out for me, because I'm employed and I pay taxes. Of course, for someone who isn't employed or who earns shit wages, if you deduct the cost of health insurance from their taxes, you'd get negative numbers, so there goes that idea.

I am all in favor of pointing out, loudly and often, how states like Massachusetts contribute more to the federal government than we get back, all while being at the shit end of the stick in terms of national priorities. But you don't get to simply say "fiddle dee dee we just won't pay our taxes" -- not without some heavy consequences. Tax resistance is a thing, people have done it, but you pay up front for that battle and you're not likely to win it. You'd need much more widespread tax resistance, and for that you need a mass movement. So, if you've questioned the usefulness of all those marches, this is part of what they're accomplishing: creating that mass movement. Is it slow? Yes. Is it messy? Yes. But I don't know another way to do it.

TPTB? Like these people?

Yeah, they're all about single payer, you bet.

If your objective is to put more money in the Treasury s pocket. Personally I'd like to see entitlements reduced to a more affordable level and the COST of health care reduced. That's far more sustainable than the death spiral governments of all levels are in.

We should have universal coverage. The debate we need to have is do you go with single payer which likely means a totally government run system or a true insurance system with shared risks and costs.

Pros and cons to both.

If your objective is to put more money in the Treasury s pocket. Personally I'd like to see entitlements reduced to a more affordable level and the COST of health care reduced. That's far more sustainable than the death spiral governments of all levels are in.

We should have universal coverage. The debate we need to have is do you go with single payer which likely means a totally government run system or a true insurance system with shared risks and costs.

Pros and cons to both.

I think you're giving the House and Trump too much credit, thinking they have a long term game plan all thought out. I don't think they've thought past "how do we line our pockets more, while still remaining popular with our core constituents?"

There's so much money in politics, it's absurd. Until we do something about that, politicians on both sides of the aisle basically can't be trusted to work in the best interest of the people. They are literally being paid to think in the best interest of big pharma, or tobacco, or banks. It's their job.

people that disagree with your political perspective are idiots

thats good how long did that one take you

straight from the Heritage Foundation, I see. I'm at work, so I can't give this the ten thousand words of mockery it deserves, but I'll give it the ol' college try.

Health care is neither a right nor a privilege; it’s a commodity.

True, if you're an amoral sociopath or a contemporary conservative Republican (but I repeat myself). If you have ever looked at your fellow human beings with greater respect than a kid frying ants under a magnifying glass, you'd be so appalled by the previous statement that you'd be ashamed to express it publicly, because you're actually calling for misery and death among people who aren't independently wealthy. Also, if you're in literally any other first-world industrialized democracy in the world, single-payer healthcare of some sort has been the standard for between ten and sixty years, is universal, more effective, and less expensive than in the United States.

Coverage is not access. Democrats like to pretend that giving everyone a piece of paper called insurance guarantees them access to the care they need. For example, take Medicaid, which is responsible for more than half the increase in coverage under Obamacare. Nearly a third of primary-care physicians won’t accept Medicaid patients.

OK, so let's fix Medicaid, or revoke the medical licenses of practitioners who won't accept Medicaid, because they're part of the aforementioned bloc of amoral sociopaths.

But for someone who, say, has cancer, there’s no risk to spread, just cost. That’s not insurance, it’s paying for health care.

This is the dumbest thing I've read all day, and I just finished up reading the comments on the Globe's coverage of racist baseball fans. When you force everyone to carry coverage, you spread the risk and the cost over a large pool of people, such that the cost of a couple of cancer patients gets absorbed by the relatively healthy remainder of the pool. Every attempt to paint this reality as something else is an effort by aforementioned conservative Republicans to convince you that you're paying for freeloaders, when in fact you are part of a risk pool that is structured exactly the same way as homeowners' or auto insurance. Catastrophic costs are always a risk, and you control them by enforcing mandatory coverage. The closes thing we have to "mandatory coverage" in the American system of government is the individual mandate, which just had the rug pulled out from under it by a bunch of white guys who played the Rocky theme and drank beers to celebrate condemning tens of thousands of Americans to slow and painful deaths.

Medicare is not a success. Faced with the wreckage of Obamacare, Democrats are increasingly embracing the once controversial idea of “Medicare for all.” Most of them would start slowly, with a Trojan-horse “public option,” a taxpayer-subsidized plan that would undercut private insurance, but the result would still be a government-run national health-care plan based on Medicare. Medicare is undoubtedly popular, especially with its beneficiaries. It should be. The average two-earner couple pays about $150,000 over their lifetime in Medicare taxes and premiums, while collecting almost $450,000 in benefits. Jackpot! But that disparity is one of the reasons why Medicare is running some $58 trillion in the red, after totaling all projected future liabilities. About 15 percent of doctors don’t accept Medicare, and as many as a third limit the number of Medicare patients that they will treat.

Excuse any typos here, as my eyes have just rolled so far back in my head that I fear I may be seeing double for the rest of the day. The "wreckage of Obamacare," as quantified by a 50% drop in bankruptcy filings since the ACA passed, along with improved health care outcomes along every measurable axis in existence, is indeed a positive indicator that a modified system of universal Medicare would be a successful approach. The cost controls that it permits (see: every other industrialized first-world democracy in the world, which pays an average of 30-70% less per person in total healthcare costs despite supplying universal coverage) would probably more than pay for the program's expansion, but on the offchance that it didn't, then we should raise the Medicare tax we all pay, and use the tens of trillions of dollars in health care premiums we save every year to absorb the extra 1% tax hike. Or we could pay for it by raising the upper tax bracket back to where it was in the halcyon days of the 1950's, when men were men, economic growth was unprecedented, and you paid 90% of every dollar past the first million to the tax man.

No, we didn’t have a “free market” health-care system before Obamacare. Suggest free-market reforms to our health-care system and critics will inevitably suggest that you want to go back to the flawed system we had before Obamacare.

No one is suggesting a free-market solution to health care. Free-market solutions lead to health insurance company executives living in giant houses while poor people die of preventable diseases.

Actual health-care consumers paid barely 13 cents out of each dollar spent on health care, while the government directly paid for more than half of all health-care spending.

I'll bet you a Galway chicken dinner that that number is horseshit, because it's primarily private businesses who pay those subsidies, but sure, let's assume it's true. Where do you think the government is getting the money to subsidize those costs? (Hint: think "April 15th") Let's bump it to 100%, and make it single-payer.

You are never going to make everyone happy. Obamacare is unpopular.

[citation needed]

The GOP replacement was unpopular.

Who would have guessed that cutting off access to 24 million of the poorest, sickest people in the country would be unpopular? I for one am shocked, SHOCKED

Single-payer in unpopular.

I'm beginning to wonder if you even understand what the words you're using mean.

In fact, one searches in vain for a health-care reform that voters will love.

Ah, yes, the old "we can't make every last person, including the amoral sociopaths who would happily leave their grandma out to starve in the cold if it allowed them to pay $100 less in taxes a year,happy, so we'll have to keep looking until we find something we can all agree on." I'd usually give this a more thorough dissection, but I have a 23-day-old infant at home and haven't slept in weeks, so I will leave this at "stop concern trolling, the enemy of the perfect is not the good, we have a reasonably well-functioning system in place in the ACA, and a bill that just passed the house which is wildly, toxically unpopular among every demographic aside from insurance execs and GOP senators who appear to actually derive sexual pleasure from fucking over poor people."

Americans want widely contradictory things from health-care reform.

No they don't.

They want the highest-quality care for everyone, with no wait, from the doctor of their choice. And they want it as cheap as possible, preferably for free.

Yes, that would be nice.,

At the same time doctors, trial lawyers, hospitals, insurers, pharmaceutical companies, and government bureaucrats are all trying to protect their fiefdoms, hold onto their gains, and shift costs to others.

Fuck them and their rent-seeking selves in the ear. We out number them 100-to-1, and they should be worried about mobs with pitchforks.

There is simply no way to satisfy all these special interests and produce a health-care plan that will be hugely popular.

Except, once again, for every other country in the world that just magically happened to stumble upon a functioning system of single-payer, government-backed health care that produces better outcomes along every measurable axis, costs less, and has higher approval ratings than the American system.