The Silver Lining of Trump beating Hillary

[LordKiran]

In other words, that person is both wrong and moronic.

... and President.

Yup. When you don't screen for incompetency, incompetency is what you eventually end up with. The funny thing is, our nation already abides a form of cursus honorum. Politicians are still largely expected to follow the path of starting local and working your way up. The problem is that this isn't codified into law so dumb idiots and their followers are able to bypass the career path in a way not unlike DJT inheriting his father's wealth/businesses.

 

[SimpleDon]

Have you all seen whats going on with Bernie's bill for single payer? Suddenly he's got a number of other legislators on board. This may just be the turning of the tide that could eventually actually get this taken seriously and be talked about on a mainstream level (and in the debates) and eventually bring the USA decent affordable healthcare.

I don't believe for a second that we would be seeing this had Hillary won the election. This is the silver lining. We'll see more like this, with Berniecrats taking over the Democratic party, all because Hillary failed so miserably. I see a silver lining starting to form here.

I've been saying since Hillary lost that Trumps win could turn out to be a good thing for America, as it shakes up the political landscape and creates an opening on the left. I am more confident now that this may happen.

You have much more faith in the ability of the left to take advantage of a political opening than I do. For forty years they have been passing up numerous opportunities to broaden their appeal beyond their base. They are firmly stuck in the 1960's and 1970's civil rights, anti-corporate, anti-war and anti-nuclear mindsets.

They take one step forward and then one step back and then wonder why they are in the same place, still fighting a large swing to the right in their own party as well as in the country as a whole. They trip over themselves trying to prove that everything bad the right says about them is true. They have been waiting for forty years for everyone else in the country to see the errors of their ways and to realize that the left has been right all along.

Take single payer for example, since you raised it. It has to come, even the ACA can't prevent it, it can only delay it. The huge cost of healthcare in this country is an anchor around our competitiveness in foreign trade. I don't know how to sell single payer though, against the headwinds of long standing and unchallenged lies from the right. The for profit "free" market isn't the solution for lowering costs in healthcare, it is the cause of the high costs.

The healthcare industry sector was so freaked out by Medicare and the prospect of the government taking over their industry that they turned to the insurance companies to fend off the government. It has worked out well since then for both the healthcare industry and the insurance companies, medical costs have gone through the roof since then, enriching both the industry and the insurance companies. The insurance companies quickly realized that the way to maximum profits was through rising medical costs and the ever increasing premiums that resulted and not through competition between the insurance companies. If you believe otherwise you have not been paying attention.

And no, the insurance companies don't charge so much because of the burden of government regulation, the mountain of regulations is the result of the lack of competition in the insurance industry, malfeasance and the insurance companies trying to cull the population so that they only insure the young and the healthy while charging them rates as if they were old and sickly.

For example, CNN calculates that single payer will require about 1.4 trillion dollars in new taxes. (This actually sounds a little low to me*.) But it is the go to argument for the opponents of single payer. What no one mentions, not the proponents or the opponents, is that the taxes will be more than offset by the elimination of most if not all insurance premiums and that the overall cost of health care will immediately go down. The government is much more efficient at administering health care insurance because they handle risk at a much lower cost than private insurance companies do.


* Let's see. The healthcare sector is about 17% of the nation's GDP. That is about 3.4 trillion dollars. Between Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, the military tricare, government employees, etc. the government pays for half of this which means that we already pay 1.7 trillion dollars in taxes for healthcare. For the government to cover everyone else for just 1.4 trillion dollars would mean that the government providing basically insurance would have to average more than 20% more efficient than the private insurance companies and self-insurance by the large companies while picking up about 20 million who are currently uninsured. 1.4 trillion dollars seems to be a little bit of a stretch. But even if it costs exactly what we pay now to private companies, the other 1.7 trillion dollars, it would be a gain because of insuring the current uninsured. We all pay for the uninsured in higher hospital and medical fees, in local taxes and other ways, but I don't recall any number of what the cost is. The biggest problem with single payer would be the widespread unemployment that it would cause.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

The biggest problem with single payer would be the widespread unemployment that it would cause.

I hear there are job openings in Mexico, but I also hear they may be building a wall.

 

[SimpleDon]

The biggest problem with single payer would be the widespread unemployment that it would cause.

I hear there are job openings in Mexico, but I also hear they may be building a wall.

I don't think that insurance executives and administrators would be much help in building the wall. Perhaps with their negotiating skills they could convince Mexico to pay for the wall!

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

The silver lining of a Trump win was simply not having to endure the microscopic nitpicking by the right-wing to criticize everything Hillary Clinton did. And I'm not talking policy or things she said. Whether she stumbled, asking about the heel length of her shoes being an indication she is dying from a terminal disease, being a woman...

 

[LordKiran]

The silver lining of a Trump win was simply not having to endure the microscopic nitpicking by the right-wing to criticize everything Hillary Clinton did. And I'm not talking policy or things she said. Whether she stumbled, asking about the heel length of her shoes being an indication she is dying from a terminal disease, being a woman...

But instead you have to deal with those same people insisting the pres. critics are being petty when they criticize him.

 

[SimpleDon]

Single payer would result in unemployment because many fewer workers would be required in the health insurance companies. And very few new workers would be required in the government to administer the expanded Medicare. This is because for the health care entities that currently accept Medicare the only difference is that they would bill everything to Medicare. It doesn't add to the Medicare administrator's workload to type higher numbers into the computer than they did before.

The deal that Medicare offered to the providers is that Medicare would pay much more quickly than the private insurance companies without questioning the amounts as long as the cost per patient doesn't exceed the norms, which are unpublished. But Medicare would pay less than the private companies do.

We could avoid this unemployment by allowing the health insurance companies to make a profit on the gap insurance, that pays the 20% not covered by Medicare. This would be make work to keep the health insurance companies in business because Medicare could sell gap insurance much more efficiently than the private insurance companies do. I have found gap insurance to be relatively worthless to me. I have Blue Cross-Blue Shield gap insurance and they routinely refuse to pay the 20% that Medicare doesn't pay by claiming that Medicare pays more than they consider to be the normal by more than 20% so that they don't have to pay anything. And the providers eat the 20% rather than to require me to pay it. This could be because I am disabled and living with a dire disease. I don't know, I don't question them.

 

[Bomb#20]

Take single payer for example, since you raised it. It has to come, even the ACA can't prevent it, it can only delay it. The huge cost of healthcare in this country is an anchor around our competitiveness in foreign trade. I don't know how to sell single payer though, against the headwinds of long standing and unchallenged lies from the right. The for profit "free" market isn't the solution for lowering costs in healthcare, it is the cause of the high costs.

No, it bloody well is not the cause of the high costs. There is no for profit free market healthcare in the U.S. If you know what medicine you need and you know a local high school chemistry teacher who can whip some up for you because what you need is no harder to make than meth, you can't buy it from him. It's against the law. If you want to buy it from a proven competent pharma corporation that charges a reasonable price because it's Canadian, you can't. It's against the law. If you want to buy it from an American pharmacy for only the monopoly price they charge for the medicine but not additionally hire a doctor for $500 to tell them you need it, you can't. It's against the law. If you want to hire your cabbie for $10 to tell them you need it and he wouldn't charge $500 to tell them what he knows because his medical license was issued in Karachi, he won't. It's against the law. And if a team of U.S. certified doctors want to do something in their own small way about the deliberate artificial scarcity that is U.S. healthcare, by opening up a new hospital, without first getting permission from their local community's existing hospitals to compete with them, they can't. It's against the law. American private healthcare is about as capitalistic as a medieval shoemakers' guild.

And no, the insurance companies don't charge so much because of the burden of government regulation,

Yes, they bloody well do.

the mountain of regulations is the result of the lack of competition in the insurance industry, malfeasance and the insurance companies trying to cull the population so that they only insure the young and the healthy while charging them rates as if they were old and sickly.

But the lack of competition in the insurance industry is itself because of the burden of government regulation. If you want to buy health insurance from a London coffeehouse full of underwriters, with a contract negotiated just between you and them and not the U.S. government, you can't. It's against the law.

Don't misunderstand -- this is not an argument for private for-profit free market healthcare. That would certainly massively lower the costs of healthcare, but it would introduce a slew of other problems. There are any number of legitimate reasons for medical care to be socialized. But pointing to the disaster that is the current American healthcare system and blaming capitalism for it is not one of them.

 

[SimpleDon]

The silver lining of a Trump win was simply not having to endure the microscopic nitpicking by the right-wing to criticize everything Hillary Clinton did. And I'm not talking policy or things she said. Whether she stumbled, asking about the heel length of her shoes being an indication she is dying from a terminal disease, being a woman...

Conservatives have an advantage in that obstruction serves their purposes because it maintains the status quo. It also means that they must make up lies about why they are blocking the operation of the government. They also have to make up lies to stop solutions to the obvious problems in the nation, for example, health care and the death panels that would result from the ACA, a total lie.

 

[SimpleDon]

No, it bloody well is not the cause of the high costs. There is no for profit free market healthcare in the U.S.

I agree, I was being sarcastic. This wasn't more than an offhanded statement in a lengthy post on another subject, single payer.

The self-regulating free market without government involvement doesn't exist because it can't exist. The mechanism of supply and demand doesn't set prices, virtually all of the prices in the health care sector as in the economy as a whole are set, not bartered prices, called administered prices. And even if supply and demand did set prices it is not a powerful enough mechanism that would be able to constrain bad behavior, that is monopolies, cartels, ineffective or dangerous products, false advertising, avoiding the  tragedy of the commons, etc. the list of bad behaviors that can short circuit the market setting prices is lengthy and constantly growing as people try to profit from the use of them. The very force that drives the virtuous behavior in the market, innovation to satisfy greed, also drives these bad behaviors.

The self-regulating free market has never existed in any place at any time in history. The government has always been involved with regulating the economy in all societies made up of more than a single family, all across history, all across the world. Regulating the economy is the first and the main reason that governments were first formed and why they exist to this day. Governments regulated the economy from the first time that a tribal chief divided up the rewards of the hunt and the foraging.

Except for the Austrian/Libertarian economists there are no economists who believe in the self-regulating free market. The Austrian/Libertarian economists have accepted the possible existence and superiority of the self-regulating free market as an article of faith, they offer no proof of its existence in the past and no explanation in theory that supports it.

Proponents of the self-regulating free market drift back and forth between talking about it as if it is something that we have now and are violating daily by the government meddling in it, to talking about it as an aspirational goal that we should be working toward, while presenting no reason why we should be except for vague assurances that it would be better, presumably because of the semantic argument that "free" has to be better than "not free."

Anarchy has a bad reputation because it deserves a bad reputation.

If you know what medicine you need and you know a local high school chemistry teacher who can whip some up for you because what you need is no harder to make than meth, you can't buy it from him. It's against the law.

Yes, the government prevents you from buying medicine from the random high school chemistry teacher who says that they can make the drug that you think that you need. The law requires that you buy drugs from a licensed pharmacist based on an order from a licensed doctor who has been trained to diagnose illness.

I don't deny that the drug from your chemistry teacher would be cheaper than the pharma produced drug prescribed by your doctor who spent a quarter of a million dollars and eight years of his life studying much more than he will ever use in his career, the drug dispensed by another overeducated licensed pill counter. But this is really the point, isn't it. Health care isn't driven by the money, this is why we had to find another way than the profit motive to run this part of the economy. The profit motive failed repeatedly as a mechanism to base the health care system on.

It is more profitable for your chemistry teacher to put milk sugar in the capsules that he gives you than to spend any time or money actually making the drug that you think that you need. As a person who believes that the profit motive is the best way to run the health care system you really can't complain. Your chemistry teacher is just maximizing his profits.

The drum beating patent medicine sellers relied on a simple fact of human biology, that 90% of all that ails us will get better with time. The problem is of course the other 10% when you do need drugs that work.

If you want to buy it from a proven competent pharma corporation that charges a reasonable price because it's Canadian, you can't. It's against the law.

Yes, there are problems with regulation. This one is called regulatory capture, the American pharma companies have an outsized political influence in the government that writes the laws and regulations and are able to benefit from that influence. But the solution for regulatory capture isn't to abandon regulation, it is to recognize the self-serving political influence and to reduce it and to balance it with the greater interests of the broader society.

If you want to buy it from an American pharmacy for only the monopoly price they charge for the medicine but not additionally hire a doctor for $500 to tell them you need it, you can't. It's against the law. If you want to hire your cabbie for $10 to tell them you need it and he wouldn't charge $500 to tell them what he knows because his medical license was issued in Karachi, he won't. It's against the law. And if a team of U.S. certified doctors want to do something in their own small way about the deliberate artificial scarcity that is U.S. healthcare, by opening up a new hospital, without first getting permission from their local community's existing hospitals to compete with them, they can't. It's against the law. American private healthcare is about as capitalistic as a medieval shoemakers' guild.

These are just variations of the arguments that I have already addressed.

And no, the insurance companies don't charge so much because of the burden of government regulation,

Yes, they bloody well do.

the mountain of regulations is the result of the lack of competition in the insurance industry, malfeasance and the insurance companies trying to cull the population so that they only insure the young and the healthy while charging them rates as if they were old and sickly.

But the lack of competition in the insurance industry is itself because of the burden of government regulation. If you want to buy health insurance from a London coffeehouse full of underwriters, with a contract negotiated just between you and them and not the U.S. government, you can't. It's against the law.

To believe that the regulations caused the problems that you list requires you to believe that the government is considerably cleaver than I am willing to concede. It would mean that they are capable of anticipating what behaviors the market will exhibit before the collective market even knows. But it is a weakness of government regulation that it can only be reactive to what the market does. There is always a considerable time lag for the government to recognize a new and innovative bad behavior, to decide that it does require new regulations, to study what form the regulation should take and to implement the new regulation.

This is no more obvious anywhere than it is in the financial markets. Because the financial markets are replica markets markets meant to represent our complex economic structures in a stylized and simple form they are subject to endless variations of manipulations to short circuit the markets and provide huge profits in a very short time, before the slow mechanism of regulation writing can catch up to them. Therefore the regulatory bodies that deal with the financial markets, the Fed, the SEC, etc. are given broad authority to stop these types of market short circuits without having to write new regulations.

This is where this insane belief in the existence of a self-regulating free market has done real damage to our economy and to our citizens. People who should have known better as adults to recognize this fantasy were put in charge of these critical regulatory agencies. They watched while the markets developed a new method of getting rich quickly involving highly leveraged and manipulated mortgage securities and while these idiots were sitting back doing nothing but waiting to be amazed by the self-regulation kicking in to correct this scheme the scheme predictably imploded and destroyed trillions of dollars of accumulated wealth, threw millions of people out of the homes that they wanted to live in and millions more out of the jobs that they needed to support themselves and their families.

Such is the power of faith and the reluctance to admit that they were wrong that the free market enthusiasts blame the regulations that hadn't been enforced and the people thrown out of their homes and their jobs for the problems and declared the banks the victims, and therefore worthy of being bailed out. And guaranteeing a new round of similar problems in the future.

Don't misunderstand -- this is not an argument for private for-profit free market healthcare. That would certainly massively lower the costs of healthcare, but it would introduce a slew of other problems. There are any number of legitimate reasons for medical care to be socialized. But pointing to the disaster that is the current American healthcare system and blaming capitalism for it is not one of them.

If you aren't arguing for private for profit free market health care you have somewhat missed the mark with the argument that you presented. You also read way to much into the statement that I made in passing. I have therefore presented a fuller explanation of my argument. I can only say that if it doesn't apply to you then I have no reason to do so and I am relieved. In the future please consider putting this paragraph closer to the beginning and I will promise to read all of the way to the end of the post before I start to answer.

I am not blaming capitalism for not being able to handle health care. I am blaming the people who believe that the for profit market is the best way to handle health care. It isn't.

In 1970 the US had about the same portion of GDP devoted to health care was about the average devoted to health care as in the GDP's of the other developed countries. But today health care has doubled in the portion of US GDP that it consumes while the average has slightly decreased in other developed countries, as you would expect as more costly technologies in health care itself are balanced out by non-heath care improvements like computers, in systems and better communications, education and infrastructure.

The only change in health care in the US that didn't happen in the other developed countries was the degree to which we turned it into a for profit business. In 1970 the health care sector was primarily a non-profit affair. Hospitals were owned by charities and government. Insurance was dominated by the large, community rate based, non-profits coops like Blue Cross-Blue Shield. Doctors salaries were middle class and a little better. That all changed to what we have today.

There was and still is a small number of influential people who wanted health care handled by the for profit market, other than those people who believe that the self-regulating free market can exist and is the best way to handle nearly everything.

Obviously the people who hope to make a profit by opening a new sector to investment and profit push the idea, irrespective of the unsuitability of running the health care system this way. They have been gifted a huge amount of capital available for investment by the neoliberals who they have encouraged. This new capital raised largely by suppressing wages is far in the amount of what can be absorbed in the traditional parts of the economy for the investment producing profits, providing products and services to consumers.

They need whole new sectors to be opened to absorb this new capital. Health care and government services are the obvious and really the only choices to absorb such a huge amount of money, about twenty trillion dollars over the forty years of supply side economic policies. A figure calculated by the extending the previous before supply side policies result of evenly dividing the gains from greater productivity between wages and profits.

To a very large degree the wealthy are the sole source of encouragement and the support for the now widespread belief that the government is evil and that the free market is capable of doing a better job of regulating the economy than the government can.

And by the free market they of course don't mean the self-regulating free market fantasy, they mean themselves.

The last people who would want a self-regulating free market are the corporations and the investors and the rentiers of the financial markets. They want to be able to set their prices and to guarantee their profits.

As always I drifted. I will stop now, time for a nap.

 

[Bomb#20]

The for profit "free" market isn't the solution for lowering costs in healthcare, it is the cause of the high costs.

No, it bloody well is not the cause of the high costs. There is no for profit free market healthcare in the U.S.

I agree, I was being sarcastic. This wasn't more than an offhanded statement in a lengthy post on another subject, single payer.

If that were the case then your reply would have ended right there. Instead it goes on for five pages of you explaining why I'm wrong even though you agree with me.

The self-regulating free market has never existed in any place at any time in history. ...
Except for the Austrian/Libertarian economists there are no economists who believe in the self-regulating free market. ...
People who should have known better as adults to recognize this fantasy were put in charge of these critical regulatory agencies.

I.e., it was more than just an offhand statement. You were misrepresenting the example of healthcare in order to yet again push your hobby-horse about how the libertarians are the cause of our woes because they somehow punch fifty times their 2% weight in the population.

If you know what medicine you need and you know a local high school chemistry teacher who can whip some up for you because what you need is no harder to make than meth, you can't buy it from him. It's against the law.

Yes, the government prevents you from buying medicine from the random high school chemistry teacher who says that they can make the drug that you think that you need. The law requires that you buy drugs from a licensed pharmacist based on an order from a licensed doctor who has been trained to diagnose illness.

I don't deny that the drug from your chemistry teacher would be cheaper than the pharma produced drug prescribed by your doctor who spent a quarter of a million dollars and eight years of his life studying much more than he will ever use in his career, the drug dispensed by another overeducated licensed pill counter. But this is really the point, isn't it.

Yes, that is the point. I.e., you agree with me that the for-profit free market is not the cause of the high costs.

If you want to buy it from a proven competent pharma corporation that charges a reasonable price because it's Canadian, you can't. It's against the law.

Yes, there are problems with regulation. This one is called regulatory capture, the American pharma companies have an outsized political influence in the government that writes the laws and regulations and are able to benefit from that influence. But the solution for regulatory capture isn't to abandon regulation, it is to recognize the self-serving political influence and to reduce it and to balance it with the greater interests of the broader society.

Your energies would therefore be better spent on proposing practical measures to counteract regulatory capture than on tilting at a libertarian windmill you make believe is the cost driver.

And no, the insurance companies don't charge so much because of the burden of government regulation,

Yes, they bloody well do.

the mountain of regulations is the result of the lack of competition in the insurance industry, malfeasance and the insurance companies trying to cull the population so that they only insure the young and the healthy while charging them rates as if they were old and sickly.

But the lack of competition in the insurance industry is itself because of the burden of government regulation. If you want to buy health insurance from a London coffeehouse full of underwriters, with a contract negotiated just between you and them and not the U.S. government, you can't. It's against the law.

To believe that the regulations caused the problems that you list requires you to believe that the government is considerably cleaver than I am willing to concede. It would mean that they are capable of anticipating what behaviors the market will exhibit before the collective market even knows.

Why on earth would you believe something that idiotic? Are you genuinely unfamiliar with the concept of "unintended consequence"? Why would the government need to anticipate some misbehavior in order to cause it? How the bejesus would they need to be clever in order to regulate competition out of existence?!? Seriously, where do you come up with such nonsense? All the government needs to do to regulate competition out of existence is either corruptly ban their campaign contributors' competitors from entering the market, or else well-meaningly dictate the terms of insurance contracts.

To channel Sam Rayburn, a well-functioning regulated market is a type of barn. It takes a carpenter to build one. Any jackass can kick one down.

This is no more obvious anywhere than it is in the financial markets. ... This is where this insane belief in the existence of a self-regulating free market has done real damage to our economy and to our citizens. People who should have known better as adults to recognize this fantasy were put in charge of these critical regulatory agencies. They watched while the markets developed a new method of getting rich quickly involving highly leveraged and manipulated mortgage securities...

But the question of whether a self-regulating free market has ever existed in any place at any time in history is irrelevant to the recent meltdown. If such a thing does exist, it self-evidently isn't in the U.S. financial markets. This is not rocket science: in a free market there can be no bailouts of too-big-to-fail operations. Are you old enough to remember the days when to get a loan you had to prove you didn't need it? That is how bankers behave when they don't have a well-founded expectation that the government will intervene on their behalf if too many loans go south.

Such is the power of faith and the reluctance to admit that they were wrong that the free market enthusiasts blame the regulations that hadn't been enforced and the people thrown out of their homes and their jobs for the problems and declared the banks the victims, and therefore worthy of being bailed out.

Oh for the love of god, I'm sorry, but that is complete drivel. You know better than to believe such nonsense; stop inventing motivations for your enemies in order to make yourself feel like a superior life form. Quote the people that were put in charge saying the banks are the victims. Quote them saying they were bailing out the banks because the banks are worthy of it.

No, they bailed out the banks because their econometric models told them letting the banks go bankrupt would make the recession worse.

And guaranteeing a new round of similar problems in the future.

Well, that at least is something you got right.

Don't misunderstand -- this is not an argument for private for-profit free market healthcare. That would certainly massively lower the costs of healthcare, but it would introduce a slew of other problems. There are any number of legitimate reasons for medical care to be socialized. But pointing to the disaster that is the current American healthcare system and blaming capitalism for it is not one of them.

If you aren't arguing for private for profit free market health care you have somewhat missed the mark with the argument that you presented. You also read way to much into the statement that I made in passing. I have therefore presented a fuller explanation of my argument. I can only say that if it doesn't apply to you then I have no reason to do so and I am relieved. In the future please consider putting this paragraph closer to the beginning and I will promise to read all of the way to the end of the post before I start to answer.

Dude, you're the one who wrote a 5-page screed, not me. That paragraph was right there on page 1 along with the rest of my post. If you couldn't be bothered to read it before you jumped to conclusions, that's on you. The rest of my post didn't even give you any reason to write what you wrote. You said something wrong so I told you why it was wrong; you've even admitted it was wrong. You took it to mean something different from what it said because you have a hobby-horse.

And no, I didn't read too much into your statement. Your fuller explanation proves it was exactly what it looked like: a poorly-thought-through attack on capitalism.

I am not blaming capitalism for not being able to handle health care. I am blaming the people who believe that the for profit market is the best way to handle health care. It isn't.

But there are a lot of different ways to construct a for-profit health care market. The people you are blaming are not the people who created the system we have; and the system we have is not the type of for-profit market the people you are blaming believe is the best. You are doing the ideological equivalent of blaming the Jews for child-molesting priests.