Potato Salad posted:

So, it looks like I need to swallow voting neoliberal. Well gently caress.

Gut instincts: is HRC going to eat poo poo for email shenanigans, will the FBI/DSS let her go setting a dangerous precedent, or some third option?

VirtualStranger posted:

There must have been some kind of mistake. The election maps on WaPo and NYT both showed him as the projected winner but they've been switched back now.

Shimrra Jamaane posted:

Thankfully white people don't have nearly the same demographic sway as they did in 1980.

gradenko_2000 posted:

I hope this isn't too off-topic, but I think we've lost the old US History thread.

What was Barry Goldwater's platform that was so ... extremist or purely ideological?

1337JiveTurkey posted:

I don't think it's just MBA programs. Nobody has ever said "My favorite part of working in corporate America is all the immoral backstabbing weasels." Honestly if they all got fired it probably wouldn't even increase our workloads all that much.

computer parts posted:

Oh I'm well aware, it's a tragedy that needs to be fixed instead of just going "gently caress the South" endlessly.

Fun fact: according to the following data - http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/poverty-rate-by-raceethnicity/ - the state with the lowest black poverty is Connecticut, at 15%. Now you would think the states with the worst poverty ranking would be in the Mississippi region, right? In Mississippi, the white poverty rate - which is the third highest in the nation for whites - is 16%.

In other words, the best case scenario for black people in the US is roughly equivalent to the worst case scenario for white people.

McAlister posted:

I usually phone post on my commute but I'll fire up the web browser for this one. So his bill is here: https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/senate-bill/1782/text

I spent a night reading through it before the town hall focused on healthcare. There are a lot of individual problems but the executive summary of the biggest problems would be that it destroys every current socialized medicine program we have by co-opting their funds for itself and prohibiting them from providing medical care, completely restructures medicare such that the resulting program is a block grant to the states program rather than proper medicare ( Medicare In Name Only if you will ), and is riddled with legislative loopholes that would let malicious legislators and jurists easily dismantle it or misuse it. So it tears down working programs serving tens of millions of people and replaces it with fragile bullshit. And even beyond its weakness to malice, berniecare has some serious problems just in its own workability. Bernie wrote this with no co-sponsors and personally read it aloud before the senate twice from beginning to end so even if his staff did a lot of the writing he has reviewed it without spotting any of these problems.

Here is one of the suicide switches/bad policies Bernie installed:


So this is a limit to how much funding can be increased each year, but no limit to how much it can be decreased. The way he set up the people who decide funding levels is a council of 6 with one new presidential appointee per year such that on the fourth year of President Cruz a majority of the council would be appointed by Cruz. Zero out the budget and you've just killed the program as a completely constitutional executive action. The following Dem president can't fix it because *increasing* the budget is restricted. Bernie has a clause in the section outlining the council of 6 that forbids the appointment of a majority from the same political party which ... I guess would prevent this if it was in any way enforceable? "Mr Scalia are you currently a republican?" "No sir!" "Carry On" And what the actual gently caress does GDP have to do with the population's medical needs? What if there was a plague and the GDP shrank even though medical costs spiked?

Here is another


These provisions in combination are devastating. While D.C. remains in control of what services must be covered, the individual states get to set the reimbursement rate for each service within the state. And participating providers must except that rate as their only payment. So if you were to, I dunno, set all the rates below the cost to provide then no provider in your state would be able to afford to participate in Berniecare so your Berniecare card ( the one you gave up your SCHIP, tricare, etc cards to get ) would be useless everywhere. This also opens up all sorts of room for state level fuckery with medical care that is predominantly used by people they don't like. Say for example that you are ok with fertility assistance, but have a deep objection to birth control. If you set the schedule for birth control to $0.01 then participating providers would be forced to either provide it at a loss or stop providing it at all. If my local Walgreens stops even carrying birth control then I can't buy it even with my own money.

It also appears to be missing the provisions in real medicare that let you go to a doctor that doesn't accept medicare, get their bill, then file the claim to medicare for reimbursement at the medicare rate. This makes sense as one of his main goals is zero patient-out-of-pocket expenditures for medical care and if it were permitted then providers could simply all refuse it making self-filing the way you have to use it while wriggling out of his cost controls. So a provider is either in or out, period. This takes the problem Medicare already has with regards to finding a doctor who will accept it and makes it significantly worse.

Furthermore, the provision fails to do even what it is ostensibly trying to do - reflect regional cost of living in reimbursement rates. The differences in COLA between urban and rural areas of the same state are generally greater than the difference in average COLA between a state and its neighbors.

Am I absolutely sure it dismantles existing programs?


Here is the clause repealing the ACA exchanges:


Here is the clause taking their money:


The swiss system, by comparison, is a lot more like the ACA than like this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Switzerland). And he likes the swiss system a lot. The point at which he declared Berniecare to be "rubbish" being when he hit my annotation noting that you could not go to any doctor you wanted. From wikipedia on the swiss system, "The insured person has full freedom of choice among the recognised healthcare providers competent to treat their condition (in his region) on the understanding that the costs are covered by the insurance up to the level of the official tariff." You want to go to Dr. Hausenpheper instead of the public hospital even though you have to pay a little out of pocket too since the public coverage isn't quite enough for that private doctor? You can! In Switzerland.

Now these were just the three problems that I think would resonate with the widest possible audience. There are many more provisions I could pick a bone with particularly with regards to its handling of prescription drug coverage such as allowing state officials to decline to support a specific variant provided they could tell Washington they were covering something they deemed functionally equivalent. It is impossible to decide, from the statehouse, what is functionally equivalent to what. An actual example I saw while working at a PBM ( a company that negotiates/frontloads rebates on drug prices that they take into account when Walgreens swipes your card so that you don't have to pay now and get rebated later ) was an Rx for a liquid version of a drug that was 50 times more expensive than the pill version. The patient had had throat cancer and was incapable of swallowing pills. She kept getting flagged with a Drug Utilization Review where the system went, "Um .. hey pharmacist, this ND11 is 50 times cheaper than that one ... are you sure you want this?" and the pharmacist had an override code to affirm that yep, totally sure. Took one phone call to get the override code and done. You can't do that with something cut from coverage by law.

It also imposes a 2.2% payroll tax on the very poor who currently receive care through the programs it removes - SCHIP, WIC, etc. Existing socialized medical programs are mostly funded through the general income tax which the very poor don't pay. And it drops an unfunded mandate on each state to cough up the money for any care that the block grant didn't cover - it estimates the grants would leave around 9% to the states to pay. In states with no income taxes it would have to raise that money through regressive sales taxes. This hits the impoverished in already empty pockets. 2.2% may not be much to you, [but 1/4th of Texas children faced periodic food insecurity last year](http://www.houstonfoodbank.org/hunger/hungerfood-insecurity/). And Texas is one of those "no income tax states". This is an easy fix - just make the first bracket start at 40K or so instead of $0. But what does it say about Bernie that it didn't occur to him to do that? Hillary has a much better grasp of desperate finances from all her volunteer and charity work with the impoverished and her tax plans are all very careful not to add to the burden on the poorest. Bernie is rather to free with new payroll taxes - he also has one to fund a parental leave program for example (http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/bernie-sanders-proposed-payroll-tax-hit/story?id=34546554). Its not that I don't completely support parental leave - I do! I just don't like his funding mechanism for it.

Dear god thats a wall of text. Enough for tonight.

His Divine Shadow posted:

I dunno what the news in the US say but over here they've been reporting the fears of the zika virus wrt damaging fetuses has been overblown and it's actually a pesticide in the water that are causing babies with microcephaly. Which as i gather has been the main cause of fear of Zika.

Either way it sucks about all those babies

Darth Walrus posted:

I guess this is another one of those cases where the state's two largest ethnic groups vote in different primaries, then?

Jonas Albrecht posted:

I can't imagine Rubio sticking it out after tonight. There must be enormous pressure from the GOP for him to drop out so Cruz can try to topple Trump.

Potato Salad posted:

How do you gently caress up by more than 21 points?

Do you just lie so the opposing voter base doesn't turn out?

Slate Action posted:

If trump got 53% of white guys in the general he would lose in a landslide. He needs something like 70%.

BI NOW GAY LATER posted:

This version of the bill included ways for the milk to have some degree of oversight.

Jonas Albrecht posted:

Not to interrupt Malkchat, but is there anything to SuperTuesday 2: 2sday being Trump's "waterloo", or is it all just more GOP desperation via political columnists?

Boing posted:

I'm a buck-toothed Englishman so I apologise for not knowing this, but could someone explain how your Senate works? I get that the House of Representatives is like our House of Commons, with candidates standing for their party across the 400-ish constituencies grouped by population, and when we say the Republicans control the House that means they have a majority of the seats. But I thought the Senate always had 100 senators, one from each party for each state, so what does it mean for the Senate to be "Republican-controlled"?

Pretty much my entire understanding of the US political system comes from House of Cards. It's still pretty weird to me that you can have the Democrat party running the country but be constantly hosed by the Republican-controlled House, although in retrospect I now wish we had something like that.

Munkeymon posted:

Welp there goes me thinking NE was just slightly better set up from the beginning.

Lemming posted:

Hi def video making Obama look old as fuk

DemeaninDemon posted:

Acceptable loses as it's Florida.

Boon posted:

While I was in Germany, I was thoroughly impressed at how much some progressive minded individuals I'd met absolutely detested the Turks.

Crabtree posted:

Florida is also one of the largest parts of the beef industry as its year long warm weather and plentiful feed and thus safe to let cows make more cows year round. Any loss of land in that area is an immediate hit to some of the east coast's food production, but hey. gently caress if Rubio cares about his own home turf.

Josh Lyman posted:

Lol your did is racist scum

The Brown Menace posted:

This is one of those things which makes Trump more appealing.

Popular Thug Drink posted:

yeah major airlines are desperate to move from a place with less than one snow day per year average to a place with a 1.25 months of average annual snow days

Jimbozig posted:

Exactly this. It's not important to know when precisely the French revolution occurred, but it is certainly relevant to know that it happened shortly after the American revolution to put it in context.

Ceiling fan posted:

This from a man bragging about the great deals he would get from Putin.

Actually, this is a good argument against Trump. Hitler screwed over the Russians, not the other way around.

Joementum posted:

Doctor Butts posted:

drat you!

CelestialScribe posted:

Tell me more about that Clinton landslide.


http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/22/us/politics/republican-democratic-voters-poll.html