The New York Slimes is getting aboard.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/16/opinion/david-brooks-elizabeth-warren-can-win.html?_r=0
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/16/opinion/david-brooks-elizabeth-warren-can-win.html?_r=0
Hey Hillary, Elizabeth Warren is coming for you!!!
- Thread starter wildchild
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Just one problem with your analysis young whippersnapper. You've lost your mind. "Single Payer"???. Just how do you think "Single Payer" would have fared in the Senate??? Have you forgotten about Max Baucus, Chair of the Senate Committee on Finance. HE IS A "DEMOCRAT!" There was no way the "public option" would have gotten by Baucus, except over his dead body, let alone "single payer". You're hilarious. Sure right, the democrats could have passed anything they wanted! Well Baucus is a Democrat, and he wanted the public option killed, and he certainly wasn't going to even pay lip service to "single payer." So they could have passed anything they wanted huh? Well, have you considered that Baucus wanted one thing and the majority of democrats wanted another? Don't be an idiot.
Nice straw man argument. Who is saying white males run everything better? I watch a fair amount of news and don't recall anyone making that argument.
Second of all, Mexicans have had the chance to run Mexico and the place is a complete shithole.
Blacks are in control of everything in sub-Saharan Africa and that place is a collection of shithole countries.
Hillary ’08 Backer Now Ready for Warren: ‘Clinton Is More of a 20th Century Candidate’
Former Hillary Clinton supporter and Connecticut attorney Audrey Blondin has thrown her support behind Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) to challenge Clinton for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination.
During a ‘Face the State’ broadcast on Connecticut’s WFSB Sunday, Blondin explained why she soured on the idea of a Clinton candidacy.
“I would like to say that Elizabeth, Senator Warren, is a 21st century candidate. Senator Clinton, Secretary Clinton, is more of a 20th century candidate,” Blondin said.
Blondin noted that in past Democratic primaries, both Hillary and Bill Clinton had failed to win Connecticut, making the “progressive” state more partial to a Warren candidacy.
“Remember, this is a state where jerry brown won the primary,” Blondin said.
“I think the issues that Senator Warren speaks to–the income diversity, the student loans and Wall Street corporation corruption–those are issues that really resonate here with Connecticut residents, I believe.”
Former Hillary Clinton supporter and Connecticut attorney Audrey Blondin has thrown her support behind Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) to challenge Clinton for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination.
During a ‘Face the State’ broadcast on Connecticut’s WFSB Sunday, Blondin explained why she soured on the idea of a Clinton candidacy.
“I would like to say that Elizabeth, Senator Warren, is a 21st century candidate. Senator Clinton, Secretary Clinton, is more of a 20th century candidate,” Blondin said.
Blondin noted that in past Democratic primaries, both Hillary and Bill Clinton had failed to win Connecticut, making the “progressive” state more partial to a Warren candidacy.
“Remember, this is a state where jerry brown won the primary,” Blondin said.
“I think the issues that Senator Warren speaks to–the income diversity, the student loans and Wall Street corporation corruption–those are issues that really resonate here with Connecticut residents, I believe.”
baucus was hand selected by obama to shepard the legislation.
it was Obama Reid and Pelosi who did not want single payer.
go watch this...please... you will see how dirty it was from the get go.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/obamasdeal/view/
To navigate the process of health reform, President Obama turned to his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, a consummate deal maker, who helped stock the West Wing with an all-star lineup of congressional insiders. But almost immediately, a key member of the team was forced to step down, and the country's greatest champion of health reform, Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), was sidelined with incurable brain cancer. The administration's hopes for reform rested with Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), the powerful head of the Senate Finance Committee, who also happened to be one of the Senate's top recipients of special interest money from the health care industry.
The White House encouraged Baucus to quietly negotiate deals with the insurance lobby, drug companies and other special interest groups, despite promises to run a different kind of White House. "The president said that having people at the table is better than having them throw stuff at the table," White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer tells FRONTLINE.
it was Obama Reid and Pelosi who did not want single payer.
go watch this...please... you will see how dirty it was from the get go.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/obamasdeal/view/
To navigate the process of health reform, President Obama turned to his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, a consummate deal maker, who helped stock the West Wing with an all-star lineup of congressional insiders. But almost immediately, a key member of the team was forced to step down, and the country's greatest champion of health reform, Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), was sidelined with incurable brain cancer. The administration's hopes for reform rested with Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), the powerful head of the Senate Finance Committee, who also happened to be one of the Senate's top recipients of special interest money from the health care industry.
The White House encouraged Baucus to quietly negotiate deals with the insurance lobby, drug companies and other special interest groups, despite promises to run a different kind of White House. "The president said that having people at the table is better than having them throw stuff at the table," White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer tells FRONTLINE.
Speaking of Single Payer:
Vermont’s Single Payer Washout
The left’s health-care ideal implodes over punishing tax rates.
Believe it or not, there really are liberals disappointed that ObamaCare does not involve more taxation and central planning of medicine. So be grateful for the state laboratories of federalism and in particular Vermont, where the purest progressive version of ObamaCare has imploded.
Last week, in a reversal that deserves more attention, Democratic Governor Peter Shumlin announced that Vermont would no longer create America’s first statewide single-payer health system. Vermont was seeking a waiver from the Affordable Care Act to abolish what’s left of the nominally private insurance market by 2017, but Mr. Shumlin’s budget gremlins concluded the plan was too expensive and would damage the state economy.
As crises of faith go, this is Mikhail Gorbachev circa 1991 territory. Mr. Shumlin ran in 2010 on an explicit single-payer platform in the most liberal state east of California, and the plan was conceived as a model for other states. He called his retreat “the greatest disappointment of my political life so far.” May there be others.
***
Single payer is the polite term for socialized medicine and the ultimate goal of the political left. President Obama has often extolled such a system as his ideal, were the politics not so messy; and many Democrats such as Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reidfrequently aver (or threaten) that ObamaCare is a way-station toward uniform government coverage for everyone and tax dollars replacing premiums as payment for doctors and hospitals.
The Vermont plan was far more developed than such bumper-sticker sentiments. Health and Human Services bestowed a $45 million grant for planning, and since 2011 Mr. Shumlin’s team has worked closely with HHS, the Treasury and White House budget office.
They hired William Hsiao of Harvard and Jonathan Gruber of MIT as policy architects. The former economist created Medicare’s price controls in the 1980s and as for the latter, well, he’s the guy who famously thinks you’re stupid.
Under the Vermont plan, all 625,000 state residents were to be automatically enrolled in the government plan, with the same benefits for all. As with Medicare, employers would be subject to a payroll tax that would reduce wages, and workers would pay a premium based on a sliding income scale.
Though businesses were allowed to continue to sponsor insurance or buy more generous supplemental benefits, in practice few could have afforded to do so.
If Mr. Shumlin would give to each according to his need, he would take from each far more than his ability to pay. The state accountants estimated that his plan required an 11.5% tax on worker payroll, with no exceptions.
Individuals, meanwhile, would have paid as much as 9.5% of earnings, which would have applied to everyone making more than four times the poverty level, or $102,220 for a family of four—hardly the 1%. The full $2.59 billion in necessary funding would roughly double current state revenues (about $2.85 billion today).
Even Mr. Shumlin called such a tax wallop “in a word, enormous” and “the risk of economic shock is too high at this time to offer a plan I can responsibly support.” Vermont already collects a top income tax rate of 8.95% that is the country’s seventh highest, as well as a 6% sales tax and 8.5% on corporate income.
Vermont is growing more slowly than projections, meaning that “every percent of tax raises fewer dollar than we anticipated, requiring higher tax rates than we had hoped to fund this system,” Mr. Shumlin added.
The promise of single payer is that governments can save money by eliminating the profit motive and administrative costs. Messrs. Hsiao and Gruber assured Vermonters that these efficiencies could cut costs by between $870 million and $1.35 billion in 2019, rising to as much as $2.1 billion by 2025, or by 25.3%. Yet Mr. Shumlin’s accountants concluded these gains are “not practical to achieve.”
***
This surrender is all the more remarkable because the Green Mountain People’s Republic is the ideal socialist laboratory. Beyond the Democratic supermajorities in the legislature, Vermont’s small size and population make regulation easier to impose. There are only 14 hospitals, and providers are already divided into nonoverlapping “service areas” meant to reduce competition. The nonprofit Blue Cross Blue Shield of Vermont controls 80% of the commercial insurance market.
Then again, maybe Vermonters are smarter than their politicians. Republican Scott Milne ran for Governor against single payer this fall and lost by 2,095 votes. Had Mr. Shumlin disclosed the true costs before the election, he’d have been turned out.
At least the Governor deserves credit for admitting failure. His ideological comrades are rarely dissuaded by the prospect of economic damage, as ObamaCare proves. But Mr. Shumlin has succeeded in making Vermont a national model: By admitting that single payer will make health care both more expensive and less efficient, he has shown other states what not to do. (WSJ)
Jem, You're a good man, or woman!, but you are so politically naive sometimes that it astounds me. Obama, Pelosi and Reid wanted what they thought they could get passed through both houses. It is as simple as that young man. They represented the party's leadership and their job is to get legislation through a cantankerous Congress. The only thing you will see presented for public consumption is what their strategy is calling for at the moment. Early on there was some push for the public option, particularly from his nibs. That's because the public option is code for "single payer". But once it was recognized that that would be impossible to get through both houses, that feature was abandoned. It was recognized from the outset that single payer would have zero chance, so let's try it by the back door and call it the "public option". We are against single payer but for a public option! This is just politics, pure politics!
The only way you will ever truly find out what these leaders really would have preferred is to read it in their autobiographies long after they have retired! Neither of us is privileged to know what is said behind closed doors. On the other hand those members not in a leadership position, not responsible for pushing legislation through, and serving a small focused constituency may speak with much greater candor. So we have the Paul Ryans, the Rand Pauls, and the Elizabeth Warrens.
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Yup, and it was mainly the GOP that stood most firmly against single payer.
What's wrong with the US today is the GOP. Bunch of do-nothing obstructionist apologists for plutocracy.
What's wrong with the US today is the GOP. Bunch of do-nothing obstructionist apologists for plutocracy.