Sunday AM

Medicare for All

Democratic naysayers are wrong on Medicare for All

Let's be clear on the central point. Medicare for All, as first proposed by Bernie Sanders and endorsed by Elizabeth Warren, is affordable precisely because it is cheaper, much cheaper, than the current system.

America's health care system relies on local monopolies (such as a health care provider centered at the sole major hospital in a city) and national monopolies, notably pharmaceutical companies holding exclusive patents.

In other countries, the government sets delivery prices and typically pays the health bills through the budget. In the US, the monopolists set the prices.

The sky-high revenues end up as huge corporate profits, wasteful administrative costs, useless and even harmful advertising and lavish salaries. Health care CEOs are making gargantuan salaries, many exceeding $10 million per year.

Who loses? Almost all Americans, whose insurance costs and out-of-pocket outlays inevitably lead to lower income because of unaffordable health care costs, untreated chronic illnesses, premature mortality and personal bankruptcies. Single-payer systems such as in Canada and Europe are cheaper, fairer and have better outcomes.

Ralph Nader: American Seniors Are Being Duped

How strange it is that AARP, with its Medigap insurance business run by UnitedHealthcare, doesn’t advise its members to go with the obviously superior Traditional Medicare. AARP reportedly receives a commission of 4.95% for new enrollees on top of the premiums the elderly pay for the Medigap policy from United Healthcare. This money—about seven hundred million dollars a year—is a significant portion of AARP’s overall budget.

The article is about how Medicare Advantage is all screwed up but the paragraph above gets at the root of why Medicare for All will be so hard to sell,.... everyone, except patients, are making piles of cash off the current system.

Impeachment

Will John Bolton fill in the gaps on Ukraine as an impeachment witness?  - No .. At least not as a witness to help Ds. I guess he might help if the D's promise to bomb some place full of brown people on the other side of the world.

Impeachment over foreign country meddling in US election worries foreign country that regularly meddles in US elections. Could Ukraine’s role in impeachment scandal hit U.S.-Israel relations?




Socialism

When a deep red town’s only grocery closed, city hall opened its own store. Just don’t call it ‘socialism.’   - People like a little socialism as long as it works for them and not "those" people.




The Decline and Fall

How America’s Elites Lost Their Grip

PLUTOCRAT ANNOUNCES PLAN TO SET MONEY ON FIRE - ... and that's are left-wing party!? Also, That 30 million is annual income for about 2,000 full-time minimum wage workers.






Media - Our Liberal Media Isn't

False Equivalence in the Age of Trump

It’s true that both cable outlets are essentially partisan outlets pushing their own party’s line—though ideologically, MSNBC and Fox each represent the right wing of their respective parties (FAIR.org, 6/30/17), which means the television “choose-your-own-news” world is hardly the free-for-all Grynbaum suggests. But at a time when one party adheres to an anything-goes strategy that has taken brazen lying to a new level, denies science, and regularly attacks journalists as “the enemy of the people,” painting a “both sides do it” picture of the partisan media environment glosses over very real and important differences.