Trump Said Something True

(Bernie Sander's reaction to Donald Trump praising Australia's healthcare system)

It is really funny.  This is the kind of funny conservatives have a hard time getting, but it is really funny.  Yesterday, the President was doing the obligatory quick, post-meet-and-greet press conference with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, and he says to the PM, "I shouldn't say this to our great gentleman and my friend from Australia because you have better health care than we do."

Here's the simple wiki on the subject of Healthcare in Australia.  As you can see, they have universal healthcare, with most of the funding, about two-thirds, from their version of Medicare, or as they call it, Medicare.  It's a mixed system, public and private, but the tax scheme for the Medicare is pretty much of the opposite of what we do.  Instead of capping the payroll tax for Medicare so you only pay on your first $127,000 of income, in Australia the tax stays the same, and can rise with higher income, with a conditional 1-1.5% penalty added.  This is actually to encourage use of the private system by the wealthy.  If they use the private system, they don't have to pay the extra.   If you are making a lot of money, you could imagine that 1-1.5% being higher than what you'd pay for private insurance, but you'd have to be really raking it in, and here in America, you'd have to be well up in the six-digits, at least.

Here's the thing...

Australia's healthcare system, when it comes to costs, is far more efficient than ours.  They spend, per capita, almost half what we do.

The WHO ranking, which has really only to do with outcomes, puts Australia a little ahead of us, but in pretty much every category, they have it better than us.

The Australian government, the taxpayers, spend about the same as we do on healthcare, but it covers 2/3rds of all costs, the rest is private insurance and out-of-pocket.  We spend a fortune on private insurance, but our government only covers 45% of all costs, and that's only because getting old is expensive, and we only universally cover people 65 and over.  By covering everyone, you can see the effect of the offset on the higher costs for the elderly in those numbers.

So, we spend double what Australians spend, we live shorter lives, we die unnecessarily at twice the rate, even our infant mortality is higher, therefore I can honestly and with humility admit Trump said something true.

JMJ

Insecurity and Distraction

A couple days ago, Sean Spicer, our WH Press Secretary, was confronted in an Apple store by an admittedly "impolite" critic of the President, a young woman of Indian descent, born here, no discernible accent, seems like her heart's in the right place, who asked him some annoying and rude questions, saying Trump is a "fascist" and so forth, and at one point Sean Spicer said this:  "It's such a great country that allows you to be here."

Now, I understand how annoying it can be to visit one of those telecom stores.  My wife and I have a scheme for dealing with it.  We play sane shopper/insane shopper.  They can either deal with her quickly and give us the best deal they have, or, I act like a silly lunatic in the store, creating distraction and chaos, and getting the other customers to join in, without actually bothering anyone, just creating General Disarray, but forcing the salesperson to hurry up and get us the hell out of there.  Learned it from my Dad.  I am fun to shop with.

So, I can imagine being confronted in one of these stores, and getting a little flustered with the lady asking the rather crude, lumpy questions about Russia and Treason and Fascism, but Spicer's response was very telling...

Yesterday, Rep. Steve King, a Republican from Iowa long known being a One-Trick-Pony (immigrant-bashing), tweeted, "We can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies."  And he doubled down... 

And King himself refused to back away from the tweet. On CNN Monday morning, King said, "I meant exactly what I said," and that he'd "like to see an America that's just so homogeneous that we look a lot the same, from that perspective."

There have been large shifts in the demographics of the world over the past couple-thousand years.  We are still in the midst of this shifting.  The US is a very recent product of this shifting.  We are a country made up mostly of immigrants.  During certain periods in our history, we had unprecedentedly high levels of upward mobility, and most always more than the rest of the world.  We absorbed new, usually rather poor, immigrants as the last wave moved up.  Now that upward mobility is down, below that of Europe, irony, the Right blames the immigrants and minorities, irony of ironies, for that lack of upward mobility.  In case you don't know, immigrants and minorities, pretty much by definition, only hold so much power.  They are not politically capable of holding back those above the mobility-ladder from them, and it is not in their interest to hold down themselves.

The Grown-Up Question raised here should be, "How do we increase upward mobility?"

Well, here's how not to do it...

The Congressional Budget Office projects that 14 million people will lose coverage by 2018 under the Republican ObamaCare replacement bill.

“I’ve been telling you why don’t we wait, just let (Obamacare) implode and let’s not take the blame,” Trump said to Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price,... “I’ve been telling you that as an option. It’s not an option I like, frankly, but it’s certainly an option.”

..both the new president and some of his closest allies have expressed both a strong opposition to net neutrality and a profound ignorance of what the concept actually means.

 America's infrastructure is close to failing.

And it just goes on...

You can blame immigrants and minorities if you like, but if you don't want to have the babies, and you don't want to build the roads, and you don't care if you can get proper health care, maybe you should just get the fuck out of the way and let someone "else's" BABY take care of things.

JMJ 

Crazy Promises...

Donald Trump took Crazy Promises to a whole new level this past campaign season, but it's not like the GOP hasn't been playing the same game a long time now.  Well, now the GOP - and Trump is ostensibly one of them now - has majority control of the White House, Congress, the courts, and 2/3rds of the state governments.  So, what about all those Crazy Promises?

Crazy Promise #1:  The Wall

The other day, a Mexican politician climbed a section of wall that was already built and sat there, to prove a point.

“I was able to scale it, climb it, and sit myself right here,” (Mexican congressman) Guerra said in a video. “It would be simple for me to jump into the United States, which shows that it is unnecessary and totally absurd to build a wall.”

Tangentially, Trump also realized that there's no way we're getting rid of millions of people, most of whom have been here for a long time now, and it's time to start talking at least 'legal status,' if not citizenship.  Conservatives and are not happy with this.

The Wall itself is estimated at anywhere from 12-22 billion dollars, of which DHS has identified 20 million dollars so far to put toward it.  To pay for it, Trump floated a 20% tax on imports from Mexico, which lasted about a day, and then maybe just on exports, no, and then morphed into this BAT (border-adjusted tax) idea, which actually may be a very good way, in general, to compete with countries that rely heavily on VAT taxes (value-added taxes which, in a practical sense, often work the same way) instead of income taxes.  Of course, most all those countries also have universal healthcare too, so employers there still have a big edge.  Either way, Mexico will not be paying for this silly Wall - you will.

Crazy Promise #2:  Repeal Obamacare

During President Obama's terms, the Republicans in the House voted to repeal Obamacare 67 times.  They haven't voted on it since Trump's swearing-in.  Say's John Boehner (who shortly after a few rods with the Pope, quit his job), “They’ll fix Obamacare, and I shouldn’t have called it repeal and replace because that’s not what’s going to happen. They’re basically going to fix the flaws and put a more conservative box around it.”

Let's keep to these two for now.  Any more, and we'll have more comments than I could possibly address!

JMJ

"If you like..."

"But I like my health insurance company!"

"If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan."

If you click the "If you like your doctor" link, you'll see all the iterations.  It's the infamous "lie" Obama told us all to sell us Obamacare, the Big Government "takeover" of America's healthcare "system."  Of course, it was not a lie, but rather a very hopeful though politically careless thing to say.  Of course, some things were going to change, and Murphy's law has an exponential relationship with change.  And it was far from a takeover of far from a system.

All the ups and downs of Obamacare aside, here's a peek at what Paul Ryan (Rep, JackKempTopia, WI) and the GOP in the House, has in mind for us now...

Our proposal will then create a new, advanceable, refundable tax credit to assist with the purchase of health insurance on the individual insurance market. The legislation creates a new code section – 36C— to do this. The credit is:

•Universal for all citizens or qualified aliens not offered other qualifying insurance

•Age-rated

•Available for dependent children up to age 26

•Portable

•Grows Over Time

The credit is not based on income. This will help simplify the verification process and expand access for Americans who have been left behind by Obamacare. Additionally, a universal credit does not create the same labor market distortions and perverse incentives as President Obama’s law did: according to CBO, the Obamacare income-based subsidy system resulted in so many lost labor hours it would be as if 2 million full-time equivalent workers left the labor force in 2025. A universal credit fixes this unnecessary disincentive to work and makes sure our tax code is built for growth.

Older Americans will receive a higher credit amount than younger Americans, reflecting the higher cost of insurance for older Americans. Taxpayers can receive credits for their dependents – including children up to the age of 26. The credit, however, is limited only to citizens or qualified aliens. Incarcerated individuals are not eligible for the credit.

The link will bring you to their policy paper.  They want to retract Medicaid, put out "advanceable, refundable" tax credits (at one point is says "monthly"), have them flat for everyone and only progressively adjusted by age, oh and override state laws (?) to open insurance markets interstate.  That's really the crux of this.

I know I haven't been posting diligently, as I've been a little out-of-it, but I beg of someone out there to explain to me first, how this is not the federal government taking over healthcare by superseding state laws, second, how this will not lead to a few big, awful, national private insurance companies who survive the race to the benefits bottom, and third, finally, WHO THE FUCKING HELL LIKES FUCKING INSURANCE COMPANIES IN THE FIRST PLACE?  That last one, I will never understand, so you can skip that one.  The only thing I can make of it is that the American private health insurance raison d'etre is a hedge against labor inflation.  It serves no other purpose.  It has nothing to do with HEALTH.

JMJ