2020 Democratic Primary

[Pamela]

Barack needs to be a SC Justice.

 

[Free]

George Conway group endorses Joe Biden

An anti-President Trump conservative group that includes George Conway, husband of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, endorsed Joe Biden on Wednesday in the 2020 presi…

thehill.com

An anti-President Trump conservative group that includes George Conway, husband of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, endorsed Joe Biden on Wednesday in the 2020 presidential race.

The Lincoln Group endorsed the former vice president’s campaign shortly after Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) withdrew from the contest, paving the way for Biden to become the Democratic nominee.

 

[bubblesort]

This article is crazy. The idea of Biden picking Hillary as VP is absurd, but on the off chance that he does, and Biden somehow wins, I just want to be the first to say...

Biden didn't kill himself.

Hillary Clinton refuses to rule out becoming Vice President after Nov

The ex-Secretary of State, who ran two unsuccessful presidential campaigns, told Ellen DeGeneres that she 'probably' wouldn't be asked to be US Vice President - before adding: 'Never say never.'

www.dailymail.co.uk

 

[Aribeth Zelin]

"He"? Who are you talking about? Barack or Michelle? Michelle said she has no interest in running for office, many times. And I don't think Barack CAN be VP. He had his 2 terms as 44. If something happens to the President, the VP needs to be able to step into that role. President Obama can't serve any additional time as President.

Barack. I was mentioning the current movement on Twitter to draft him for VP. Also, the rule is only that you can't be elected three times. There's actually no rule about a former president becoming VP. I feel like I need to again mention this isn't my hope. I was just commenting on it.

This.... if Ford had been more popular, he could have run for two full terms even after serving a partial term. Same with Barack - he could be VP, and then step back into office.... but I rather think he's done, himself.

 

[bubblesort]

Oh, and I almost forgot...

Congratulations to the Biden supporters. Your guy ran a better campaign. You deserve this win.

Good luck in the general!

 

[Salome]

Barack. I was mentioning the current movement on Twitter to draft him for VP. Also, the rule is only that you can't be elected three times. There's actually no rule about a former president becoming VP. I feel like I need to again mention this isn't my hope. I was just commenting on it.

While I guess the 22nd does use the term “elected” giving these people technicality fantasies, they’re forgetting the 12th which says no one can serve as VP who is ineligible to serve as president.

 

[Cristiano]

This article is crazy. The idea of Biden picking Hillary as VP is absurd, but on the off chance that he does, and Biden somehow wins, I just want to be the first to say...

Biden didn't kill himself.

Hillary Clinton refuses to rule out becoming Vice President after Nov

The ex-Secretary of State, who ran two unsuccessful presidential campaigns, told Ellen DeGeneres that she 'probably' wouldn't be asked to be US Vice President - before adding: 'Never say never.'

www.dailymail.co.uk

As much as the idea of Hillary as VP makes me happy, I don't want to see it happen. I don't want to see her put through all the bullshit again, and it would just become a distraction.

 

[Eunoli]

Barack needs to be a SC Justice.

I think he needs to be an elder statesman doing good in the world. There's so much more he can do if we don't lose democracy to Russian supported voter fraud or an outright end to real elections in the fall.

 

[Eunoli]

So, Twitter (why am I looking at it???) is full of people declaring they'll vote for Trump over Biden if they can't have Bernie today. #VoteBlueNoMaterWho was just..all that when I looked hoping for an uplifting sense of unity... (I know..I'm just that naive).

But, I also came upon this which I think is in full force again for this election and far more sophisticated than 2016:

 

[Free]

Trump Mocks Sanders After He Ends His 2020 Bid: 'Come To Republican Party!'

President Trump sarcastically reacted to Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) suspension of his 2020 presidential campaign in a series of tweets...

talkingpointsmemo.com

And it will work on some.

 

[Pamela]

Two things:

Trump is Putin’s Useful Idiot.

The Wisconsin voters have shown the rest of us how to get it done.

 

[Eunoli]

 

[Eunoli]

I've decided that Katie Porter would be the perfect VP candidate. She's not got so much public history that she's as vulnerable as any of the more well known candidates, but she plays no games and takes no prisoners. She's smart. She's got clout with anyone who hates big banks or big..anything, really. She's likeable. And though we really aren't going to have any debates this year (there's no way they don't use the virus to get out of that), she would literally slaughter Pence if there was one.

 

[Pamela]

I've decided that Katie Porter would be the perfect VP candidate. She's not got so much public history that she's as vulnerable as any of the more well known candidates, but she plays no games and takes no prisoners. She's smart. She's got clout with anyone who hates big banks or big..anything, really. She's likeable. And though we really aren't going to have any debates this year (there's no way they don't use the virus to get out of that), she would literally slaughter Pence if there was one.

I love her, but we really must choose a person of color —- to send a message to the Black community and to the Trumpists.

 

[Aribeth Zelin]

So, this morning I saw someone make a good point about the Bernie or Bust crowd; they are mostly white guys. I mean, you kind of have to think you're in a strong enough position that it doesn't matter if we get four more years of Twitler.

----------

And it is FAR more important to pick a woman; because we're half the population - and it still sends a message to Trumpists. We've had a black president [at least in that he's half African, anyway] but we've never had a woman as president or vice president. I'm perfectly fine on her being a minority woman, but it needs to be a woman. But I think half of the female support for Biden is that he's indicated he's looking at a woman for his running mate.

Also, she needs to be progressive.

 

[Couldbe Yue]

I completely agree.

While I think a universal, state funded, public health service is an unmitigated good and can't understand why it's at all contentious in the USA, it's a hugely complex and expensive undertaking, which raises all manner of problems and challenges which we've been trying to get right ever since the NHS was founded in 1948 and still haven't fixed to everyone's satisfaction, so the idea that any candidate's ideas can have much relationship to what would eventually transpire is fanciful, at least to my mind.

I wish Couldbe Yue was watching this thread -- she has direct personal expertise in how complicated NHS funding and management are, and I'm sure she'd confirm it's way, way more complex than we think it is to deliver a high quality public health system, free at the point of delivery, to patients based solely on their clinical need.

It's not as poor value for money as the current system the US has. I've never understood why people put up with such an expensive system that has somehow managed to enslave people into jobs they hate just so they have health cover. Why in heavens name would you want to bankrupt yourself so health insurers can pay hefty dividends to their shareholders?

I don't know a lot about the detail of the structure of health care provsion in the US but in the UK the biggest problem when the NHS was set up was getting doctors to agree to join it. The biggest mistake (and still gives the NHS problems today but that's another story) is that the Doctors didn't want to give up their income, so in the end the government had to appeal to their baser natures and give them a financial incentive along with some independence, which in the almost bankrupt, post war Britain led the founder of the NHS to say he had 'shoved gold down their throats.' These days it's completely different and the staff are almost obsessively fixated on being medics despite their (relative and actual) low pay.

The biggest costs for the US if it moves to universal provision looks to be the cost of IT and bringing of hospitals onboard. The US providers do not have any kind of integrated clinical systems, all it has is hundreds of billing systems where the actual clinical information is an afterthought (I have bitter experience of working with teams trying to make an apple into an orange for the NHS). Which currently makes continuity of care quite difficult if you change providers. If you're afraid of non residents taking advantage of it (they're called health tourists here) then our numbers of tourists have always been in single figures and a lot of them are tourists who damage themselves whilst here, get treated and we never billed them. It should be easy enough to restrict to people who have the social security number (I think that's the one everyone has). It works, the oveheads for billing people and managing who is entitled to care is far more than the cost of making it free at the point of use.

In the great scheme of things the choice of living or dying is moved from the person (do I have insurance? can I afford it? will my insurer actually pay for the treatment?) to the clinicians - who given a choice will do everything they can to keep you alive with the skills and resources they have - until it gets to the stage where the treatment is worse than the outcome (think CPR - if you're old an frail, if you need CPR you'll probably die as they don't have a high survival rate but if you do you'll probably have broken ribs, terrible bruising etc etc).

Which is why you'll see both medics and the public getting seriously unhappy here that because of the serious underfunding of the NHS, this pandemic has overwhelmed the NHS and they're making blanket DNRs for people who would survive it but aren't as likely as younger, more economically active people.

FWIW, the NHS costs less than the European average health spend, it's about 50% cheaper than the US with universal coverage and has better outcomes than the US. It would free people from the stress of trying to fund their health costs, it would mean you're covered whether you're working or not, if you get sick, you're not excluded from future coverage and your premiums don't go up. On top of that, it frees doctors from the constraint of having to deny people treatment because of limitations or lack of insurance and they can focus on doing what their hypocratic oath requires. If you really feel the need to be screwed over by medical insurance then exclude optical and dental like the UK does.

So it's cheaper, easier to manage and has better outcomes. Why wouldn't people want it?

As an aside, I had a chat to someone working on a universal system for Texas a couple of years ago. It surprised me because I would've thought that kind of state (forgive my snobbery but I thought they were rednecks) wouldn't be interested but even if it's not likely to happen at a federal level, it looks like some states are seriously considering it.

and one more thing you may not know but if you go into a private hospital here in the UK, if you end up with something tricky or critical, the private hospital will send you over to the NHS to deal with it. As always it's private profit and taxpayer risk but when all is said and done and despite the government's best efforts down the last decade, the NHS is still best of breed.

anyway, that's my tuppence but I'll leave you with the thought that the poor lad who died in california from covid-19 because he didn't have health insurance, would've cost every taxpayer a small portion of one cent to save, had you had universal coverage. I would think you'd all want that kind of universal insurance for your loved ones and it is far cheaper than the premiums you pay now.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Thanks so much, Couldbe! And good to see you again!

Do you have any views on the sort of management structure a US NHS might have?

You'll know far more about this than do I, of course, but my impression is that the NHS has been through so many structural changes and reorganisations over the last 30 years or so that I've lost count, and that's only in one country (albeit a very densely-populated one, in comparison with much of the USA).

A US NHS, it seems to me, would be spending the taxpayers' money at national, regional, state, county and district level, and would have to set up management and decision-making structures involving all the relevant stakeholders at each tier in order to do this.

That seems to me a huge undertaking -- simply getting all the money from the US treasury to where it's supposed to be, on time, and accounting for it all transparently, even before all the various bodies start arguing about how much they should have (more) and what they should spend it on.

 

[Couldbe Yue]

Thanks so much, Couldbe! And good to see you again!

Do you have any views on the sort of management structure a US NHS might have?

You'll know far more about this than do I, of course, but my impression is that the NHS has been through so many structural changes and reorganisations over the last 30 years or so that I've lost count, and that's only in one country (albeit a very densely-populated one, in comparison with much of the USA).

A US NHS, it seems to me, would be spending the taxpayers' money at national, regional, state, county and district level, and would have to set up management and decision-making structures involving all the relevant stakeholders at each tier in order to do this.

That seems to me a huge undertaking -- simply getting all the money from the US treasury to where it's supposed to be, on time, and accounting for it all transparently, even before all the various bodies start arguing about how much they should have (more) and what they should spend it on.

This is a bit of a hijack of the thread now, isn't it? This lot are talking about a choice now between two old, white men who both have problematic history with women and aren't always lucid when they speak. Neither of them are going to go down the medicare for all route, as they're establishment and there's no benefit for them or their networks.
We can talk about it but it's probably better off somewhere else as my guess is the time for this has passed.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

This is a bit of a hijack of the thread now, isn't it? This lot are talking about a choice now between two old, white men who both have problematic history with women and aren't always lucid when they speak. Neither of them are going to go down the medicare for all route, as they're establishment and there's no benefit for them or their networks.
We can talk about it but it's probably better off somewhere else as my guess is the time for this has passed.

I completely agree.

All I was trying to suggest is that "medicare for all," while clearly necessary, is but a small part of the overall solution, since a President Sanders would rapidly have discovered he needed a management structure to ensure that the funds weren't syphoned-off and wasted as they under the present US arrangements.

 

[Couldbe Yue]

I completely agree.

All I was trying to suggest is that "medicare for all," while clearly necessary, is but a small part of the overall solution, since a President Sanders would rapidly have discovered he needed a management structure to ensure that the funds weren't syphoned-off and wasted as they under the present US arrangements.

The states already have the infrastructure in place, as does the federal government (it runs vets hospitals and has a medicare/medicaid programmes anyway). I would think that he would've had a high level plan, that would've included staging the rolling out. I never went looking for any detail but there's many ways it could be done - they'll all be expensive as the vested interests would make sure of it but the actual rolling out of a basic plan wouldn't be much more difficult than it was to roll out the medicare /medicaid.
As it is, the CDC have said they'll pick up the tab for covid testing, so the infrastructure is there - it just needs expanding.