Won't help the horrible demands on our system in this crisis.

of losing your job, which under our current model generally assures you have no medical coverage at the same time you lost that job.

Edit: It's not necessarily about capacity or volume of the health care system, it's about access, and cost to the end user.

On edit: why does Bernie even mention "quality" care in the context of a pandemic?

My assumption is, a profit driven health care system does not place value on stockpiling things like public health response materials. Say, 5X your normal on-hand stock of masks/shields.

There's no profit in that, obviously, and so a hospital is likely to do that only by government grant or mandate. I believe making the entire financial side of the health care system a government-run entity opens the doors to simply fulfilling any CDC recommendation in this space.


But he may even mean more abstract than that, such as people not receiving all aspects of normal care, because they are trying to trim costs.

In fact, in order to be sustainable, a universal health care system must put in place a rigid hierarchy of priorities for everybody. Trying to rapidly adjust this hierarchy would be a bureaucratic and logistical nightmare. Under normal circumstances, stockpiling would be a very low priority, In emergencies, it would be nearly impossible to adjust those priorities in time for an effective response.

go away. The longer he stays in the less respect I have for him.

has provided Sanders a platform for his signature issue. I don't expect him to go away until the worst of the effects are over, or the DNC convention happens, whichever comes first.

....cooperation from Senators/Representatives from both parties, and that doesn't magically happen when the advocate doesn't belong to either and has made a career of bashing both.

It's kind of late to claim that his proposal would help this catastrophe inasmuch as it doesn't exist. The time to act was years ago. What happened?

and implement M4A with full funding tomorrow, and salvage THIS crisis, if suddenly all of the Congress and Trump together suddenly rallied behind it. It would take years to re-orient our entire health care system. It took years for provisions of the ACA to come online too.

...(that's DONE, not talked about) since then to try to avoid this today?

I think he's had recent success just building support around the idea, in a culture that is needlessly inimical to things even unfairly branded as 'socialist'. but that's about the meat of it. Legislatively he's not been able to accomplish much. M4A hasn't been a D party platform plank, and eliminating student debt hasn't been a party platform plank, AND of course those things are complete anathema to Republicans.

Doesn't mean he's wrong.

I would prefer Biden if he were leaning into the same issues, even if he was just as effective.

BTW, much of the "support" he crows about is ALL of the various universal healthcare proposal that he lumps together and misleadingly claims they're "medicare for all". They're NOT, and his "medicare for all" has a lot less support than he'd like us to believe.

There's Biden's plan, Warren's plan, Buttigieg's plan, Klobuchar's plan, etc., all different forms of "universal healthcare" that he aggregates together and claims they're "medicare for all".

Not going to argue that. My preference was Warren.

$$$$ Biden did to WIN

All that bullshit, one sided narrative from the corporate media conglomerates; about "people being afraid of losing their employer based "health" insurance" should we switch to Medicare for All.

Well today millions of Americans have lost or will be losing their jobs over the next year and to compound that tragedy their "health" insurance coverage as well.

I wonder if that will be covered by the CMC in equal measure as well?

That's what happens when a nation makes its' workers "health" insurance slaves to their employers, ultimately it's not good for anyone, even those unions with great coverage.

"dysfunctional system"
"corporate media conglomerates"
"health insurance slaves to their employers"

"Well today millions of Americans have lost or will be losing their jobs over the next year and to compound that tragedy their "health" insurance coverage as well."

....is addressing SOLUTIONS to the problems he talks about.

As we used to say when I was a child, "ACTIONS speak louder than WORDS". Where's the action?

"Well today millions of Americans have lost or will be losing their jobs over the next year and to compound that tragedy their "health" insurance coverage as well."

No buzzwords or catch phrases there. Millions have lost their jobs, and with it, their healthcare coverage. That's an issue without buzzwords or catch phrases. Jobs are a thing. People are losing them. Healthcare Coverage is a thing, and being tightly coupled to employment, it is a real thing being lost by millions.

And it's not polling from "corporate media conglomerates" as you are fond of calling anyone who doesn't walk lockstep with Senator Sanders...

And even supporters of M4A don't always quite understand what's actually in it:



The big picture: That doesn’t necessarily mean more information will turn supporters into opponents, but it shows that we’re still at an early stage in this debate, in which opinions about Medicare for All are often reflections of broader political alliances, not the details of a plan.

By the numbers: In our January tracking poll, more than half (59%) of Medicare for All supporters didn’t think Medicare for All would require people to give up their employer-based insurance; 34% knew it would.

Democrats have learned more about the plan over the course of the party’s primary — 41% now know that people with employer coverage couldn’t keep it, up from 25% in June.

Majority support for Medicare for All flips to majority opposition — 58% — if people think it would eliminate private coverage. And opposition rises to 70% if people think Medicare for All would lead to delays in care.

But support rises to 67% if people hear that Medicare for All would eliminate premiums and deductibles, and to 71% if they hear it would "make health care a right."

And unnecessary when there is an emergency response. Or would be if Trump would respond like all previous presidents have. Look, if you had M4A now. Trump would find some way to not let it work.

The distribution system is already pretty efficient for the task at hand.

Absent systems dedicated to murder as a goal (of which there have been one or two), it is the quality of the people who direct and administer the system that determines whether it serves the people well or not.

A bad system staffed by good people will produce at least a decent result.

A good system staffed by fools and knaves will certainly produce a wretched result.




"When things are not called by their right names, what is said cannot make sense. When what is said does not make sense, what is planned cannot succeed. When plans do not succeed, people become uneasy. When people are uneasy, punishments do not fit crimes. When punishments do not fit crimes, people cannot know where to put hand or foot."

M4A couldn't prevent a disaster

It is not the fact that their health care engine is something like M4A that resulted in the deaths, it was the surge in demand many multiples beyond the 'normal' level of care required.

Italy wasn't overwhelmed during H1N1, was it?

Are Italian citizens worry about access to care, due to insurance, like Americans are right now? Did Italian citizens lose health coverage when their jobs were quiesced as part of the social distancing? Will Italian citizens that needed care be saddled with personal medical debt as a result?

....during H1N1 either. Illnesses and deaths increased, but not to the degree that this disease will result in.

So you just contradicted your own argument.

Both countries were not overwhelmed by H1N1. Both countries ARE overwhelmed by Covid-19. M4A or National Healthcare of some form doesn't solve that specific issue.

It does solve a number of personally destructive problems that Americans are and will continue to experience, which Italy did not.

I am loath to spec race the capacity issue on terms of per-capita-dead as a political issue, but when this is all over, that's another thing we'll need to look at, given the current projections for America, and keeping in mind that Italy's population is older than ours, and this disease hits the elderly much harder. There are going to be some very unpleasant comparisons made, in about a year when the dust has settled, I fear.

“But it’s not about that...”

As evidenced by the post above mine.

Uh huh.

Forgive my tardy response, but I was occupied elsewhere, discussing things some fellow named Sanders wrote in the 'Vermont Freeman' when he was somewhere around thirty years of age. It really is very interesting stuff.







"From Bernie’s perspective, dropping out of a race once you have no chance of winning is peculiar behavior that can only be explained by the work of a hidden hand. For most politicians, though, it is actually standard operating procedure. Only Sanders seems to think the normal thing to do once voters have made clear they don’t want to nominate you is to continue campaigning anyway."





"When things are not called by their right names, what is said cannot make sense. When what is said does not make sense, what is planned cannot succeed. When plans do not succeed, people become uneasy. When people are uneasy, punishments do not fit crimes. When punishments do not fit crimes, people cannot know where to put hand or foot."

This pandemic is a public health nightmare. Medicare for all/Universal healthcare will take the profit out of health care but without adequate public health planning and change in American priorities and behaviors, there is no way it could provide quality care during a pandemic like COVID-19 to all that need it.

The issue here isn't about prevention, or standing idle capacity in the health care system, waiting for a disaster to occur. Both nations are going to take it on the chin deaths-wise. No models suggest otherwise at this point. We may take it harder than they are.

But the issues Bernie are talking about are ancillary. In the US, yes, people will get emergency care even without insurance, but after they've recovered, it may cost them their life savings, homes, etc. That's not the case for Italy.

People are losing their jobs all over, and that's horrible as-is, but medical costs/medical debt on top of that, is objectively worse than a M4A-like scheme to absorb at least that portion of this disaster.

I believe Congress was working on a solution to the medical debt surviving COVID-19 issue.

Even Medicare for all/Universal healthcare system would be in "debt" after paying for care during this pandemic. While I agree no one should go bankrupt paying for care to survive, the money will need to come from somewhere.

In the US, rescinding those permanent tax cuts to the wealthiest is a start.

either do not impress me, or might be a trade-off. I don't bank on the 'quality' aspect beyond, the care being delivered is done without the patient/insurance making cost-driven austerity choices. In essence, a higher probability under something like M4A that they will get all the care they need, rather than the bare minimum they think they can afford.

Shifting the debt from individuals, to a government cost center is still hugely beneficial. Instead of Joe Anybody walking out of the hospital with $30,000 in ICU costs (even though grateful to be healthy and alive or even still recovering, but alive) you might see those costs amortized for years across the entire population, offset by rainy day funding, offset by various taxes like capital gains from all the republicans that sold their stocks out one side of their mouths while reassuring the public nothing was wrong out the other side back in January, etc. Rescinding those tax breaks, as you mention, would absolutely help.

Government has a lot of ways to fund even a black swan like this event, that leave the individual that would otherwise be crushed by debt, in a MUCH better position. They still had to endure the illness, they still had to go through the process and recover, but the costs incurred are shared, and potentially financed in a way the individual can't support.

M4A is really just a way to break the back of that linkage between employment and healthcare. (It will also trim costs by reducing the profitability of notoriously inelastic health care.)

Medicare for all is insurance. It's about people's medical costs. As far as I can tell, it would do nothing to spur the manufacture of the critical items needed only in a pandemic, and would not provide more doctors and nurses, or more hospitals.

Responsible leadership in a crisis is what will help to provide the care that is needed in a crisis. Medicare for All would just mean everyone who could get care would have it financially covered. Getting the care would still be hard.

Pandemics require the responsible emergency leadership of an administration to expedite, through its various agencies and special means, the necessary medical and economic things necessary during a pandemic.

Medicare for all is merely insurance, to pay the bills. It’s mostly irrelevant to the crisis at hand.

So, God knows what would have happened if government has 100% total control of our health care system

So, basically, worst straw man argument ever

whether it be social security, Medicare or medicaid, the President is not a king or dictator.

Sending aid to his buddies in Florida while delaying or sending crap to NY, etc.

Medicaid has been reduced and trump's justice department is in the courts suing, claiming the ACA is unconstitutional.

So, what's that about people still getting their social benefits?

Yeah the system is showing its weakness. We aren't gonna get anything new in time to save us from this one. Right now we are trying to make Trump stop killing us.

things like supply chains for producing and delivering the necessary emergency protective equipment and testing supplies to millions of people, or rapid research, development and distribution of vaccines, or international cooperation necessary to deal with a pandemic, or rapid expansion of emergency hospital facilities.

In fact, M4A doesn't address any of the above at all. Furthermore, since the vast majority of the above is being funded by emergency federal and state appropriations of one kind or another. With a huge amount of government funds going into M4A, it is logical expect that other government appropriations will be reduced. For example, I can see FEMA, CDC and NIH competing for funding with M4A (admittedly this is speculation on my part).

Whatever the case may be, M4A will not solve the vast majority of the problems we face now. In the best of circumstances, it will give equal access to health care to everyone. This access does not guarantee the effectiveness of the system in place or its ability to handle emergencies like a pandemic. It is quite possible that M4A will give everyone access to the same shitty system that will crash and abandon them in the time of a pandemic. Just look at Italy for an example.

If we'd gone for the kind of massive spending Sanders vaguely hints at there would be no appetite in Congress for $2 trillion CV appropriations. We'd already have spent ourselves into bankruptcy.

Has Italy spent itself bankrupt? How about Germany? (Eh, Germany might not be the best example, because it ALSO allows private insurance, but certainly their minimum care covered by government is higher than ours.)

For instance, Medicare has tremendous bargaining weight. This will alter the profitability/nature of cost allocation by hospitals. That will have upstream impacts on what the hospital chooses to fund from the get-go. (like stockpiles of various PPE, which today doesn't drive any profit at all, and is maintained (or not) for different reasons.

I don't think your speculation about competition for funding is wrong, in fact, I tend to agree. But it also opens the doors for the CDC to earmark funds for certain things, like 'fill a warehouse with 300,000 of these masks, and establish an emergency distribution plan with this money' during 'good times' for use in events like this.

But yes, there are always points of competition in budgeting. I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
Italy's health care system has certainly been overwhelmed. They're the last player in the chain though. Public policy up front, has to stem the tide, and that's through things like the social distancing controls. A time-sensitive policy issue that was … late.

Without even arguing what issues among the ones that I raised are even conceivable to be addressed through M4A, Bernie's statement is as unequivocal as it is deceptive. There is no way in hell M4A can promise unconditional "quality care" during a pandemic.

when needed, because fears of cost, etc, then that speaks to quality as well.

In other ways.. 'quality' is debatable. I don't know that I assume that would be an outcome of M4A.

Bernie: "A Medicare for All system is designed to provide quality care for all to do preventive work in order to prepare for some types of pandemics, not simply to make huge amounts of money for the insurance companies and the drug companies,"

No, M4A is not "designed" to provide quality care for all, not to prepare for a pandemic anyway. Even Bernie's rosiest M4A projections in the vaguest of language do not provide for preparing for a pandemic, let alone spell out in the most general of terms even the basic provisions for such an event. M4A just doesn't address it, period. To claim that M4A is designed for something it doesn't address is disingenuous at best. And I am being generous in the choice of my wording here.

"designed to provide quality care for all"

Generally speaking, our current healthcare system does provide quality care, but not for all. Extending it to all citizens regardless of their financial situation would fulfill that sentence without any change whatsoever in quality.

If the system was equally effective in the face of things like H1N1, while maintaining that quality, the second part is fulfilled as well.


That said, I don't like weasel words any more than you do, I would guess. He's 'selling it', which I understand even if I don't like it.

issue of preparedness for a pandemic. That is the primary factor that is in play right now. Any healthcare system is likely to be overwhelmed by a pandemic, whatever its basis. No system is prepared for worst-case scenarios. Such preparations are simply not feasible under any system.

Once again, Senator Sanders is talking about the economics of healthcare, rather than the care itself. If there are insufficient supplies, tests, masks, ventilators when an unpredicted pandemic strikes those shortages are a reality that no amount of "quality care" or even money can overcome immediately.

Pandemics are disasters, and we are never fully prepared for disasters. If a tornado, for example, sweeps through your neighborhood, no preparations could have been sufficient to prevent its damage. A novel virus is something like that, but affects entire nations and even the entire planet. There are no preparations possible for such a thing.

Medicare for All will not prepare for the next pandemic. Why? Because we don't know what will be needed. Perhaps the next pandemic will be a hemorrhagic fever, for which preparations for a lethal respiratory virus would be useless.

Bernie is talking about economics, once again, when economics are not the issue.

Bernie needs to negotiate his exit from the primaries with Biden and they need to figure out how to bring his supporters along or we will have a Trump re-election.

completely useless and irrelevant now. And has been for quite a while.

Sanders trends to confuse the payment system of Medicare with the health delivery system which is extremely complex. He also ignores the political realities of dealing with that large part of the population which believes that any government-funded plan is "socialism"-- code for giving away my hard-earned tax money to undeserving wastrels who might actually be better off dead.

Since our health delivery system is presently overwhelmed by this fresh hell of a disease and a large part of the problem is a large part of the government being ineffective, how does this translate into a bigger federal checkbook being the answer?

Sanders is, at this point but probably much earlier, every bit the bullshitter Trump is.

Give up. This argument is bullshit.

No one promised M4A would make people immortal. They're making a case for economic and public health benefits of a national health care system, which are by any objective measure, fucking myriad. People are going to die. They don't need to go broke.

I don't know why this point seems to get lost in the noise.

A Medicare for all system under a Trump admin (for example) would probably be a universal shit show.

The argument, as I see it, is a bare-bones M4A plan vs a realistic course to Universal Healthcare. There is not one person on this board who thinks every American should not have healthcare. Maybe Bernie Sanders plan can be tweaked to cover infrastructure and staffing and shortages, including drug shortages. Which happen all the time. Normal saline, heparin, essential medicine

This is what happened with the roll out of the ACA. Nursing leaders everywhere, both management and union, understood there was going to be a profound lack of healthcare providers, especially in rural areas and immediately took steps to empower nurses through education. NPs are covering many areas that have a lack of physicians,but their prescriptive authority varies from state to state, despite the PhD program. We are still doing this, so often nurses in the ICUs and the Med-surg floors are planning on working their way to their NP,, leaving a gap in the number of floor nurses.

Less people are being called to medicine, the money isn’t that great, so young doctors often specialize. Some of these specialties, like nephrology, while guaranteeing a comfortable lifestyle, does not pay off hundreds of thousand of dollars in student debt, and does not create actual wealth. So you have people looking at the eight to ten years of intense training, and veering off into another direction. Or, once they get a doctorate, go into research.

This a very real problem. Forgiving school debt would help-it would help everyone who isn’t wealthy, but a lot of people are looking the years of their youth gone, for not enough pay and not choosing to practice medicine.

Nursing is a different discipline entirely, but one that works in relative harmony with medicine.

There are also PAs stepping up to fill the already existing gaps

In other words, Bernie is promoting a unworkable plan. I understand, I think, why he does it, but when the time for action happens, when we get Democrats back in power, cleaning up this utter disaster of a administration, what we are going to see as viable isn’t M4A

And don’t even get me started about Medicare itself

student debt issue as well. (And thank you, I like the thought you put into that post)

(My main preference was Warren, and this was a particular issue I wanted to see tackled, but she's out so..)

....("$100 billion in profits last year....&quot and what is that based on?

The FACT is that the healthcare insurance companies are working on a 3-5% profit margin. Know of any other business or industry that can survive on such a low profit margin?

Yes, there are "underserved areas", but that's because there are "underpopulated areas". Should we build a hospital in the middle of the Mojave Desert?

Kind of an unusual take, but then again it IS "The Hollywood Reporter"!

Bernie is not the presumptive nominee

And, it would be great if those that support bernie stop acting like they are the only ones with answers! Universal health care was first seriously floated by HRC. He is not the architect of universal health care even thou he seems to think so!

(fill in the blank)

Virtually no workable solutions, no route to resolution. It's like his claim last night, "there's still a route to the nomination", but no elaboration what that road actually is, if it really exists.

Universal health care is great, but it doesn't have to do with an emergency situation. The point is the hospitals are overwhelmed, which they would still be. Though at least no one would have to worry about bills as some may end up with them now, but relief is likely if it has to do with CV.

He's like the characters in The Sixth Sense - he'd dead but he doesn't know he's dead. And neither do his fans, apparently.

Link to tweet

The chief question is would the taxation necessary to finance a national system amount to a smaller sum than the premiums paid to private insurers. If the taxes required are a smaller sum than the totaled premiums, overall the national program would save money, though a number of individuals could wind up paying more in taxes. This would affect particularly younger people, who consider themselves 'bullet-proof' where health and safety are concerned. And there certainly are atmospherics to consider. People understand taxes are costs imposed on them, but most people view insurance premiums as a burden they shoulder voluntarily. The imposed costs of a national system would have to pay off noticeably in excess of the costs people voluntarily shoulder, if this disinclination to accept taxation is to be overcome.






"From Bernie’s perspective, dropping out of a race once you have no chance of winning is peculiar behavior that can only be explained by the work of a hidden hand. For most politicians, though, it is actually standard operating procedure. Only Sanders seems to think the normal thing to do once voters have made clear they don’t want to nominate you is to continue campaigning anyway."





"When things are not called by their right names, what is said cannot make sense. When what is said does not make sense, what is planned cannot succeed. When plans do not succeed, people become uneasy. When people are uneasy, punishments do not fit crimes. When punishments do not fit crimes, people cannot know where to put hand or foot."

if Sanders gets that 12th and hopefully last debate he so desperately craves he will use that opportunity to explain precisely where that $30 or $40 or $50 trillion his M4A plan would need over the next decade will actually come from?

Pretty sure Biden would shut up for 5 or 10 straight minutes if Bernie would humor us. Feel free to bring a whiteboard, Bern.

You have shown yourself better than that, otherwise I would not have suggested a serious exchange of views.

I repeat, the question is chiefly will the taxes needed to finance a national system total less than the total of premiums paid to private insurers? If the answer to the question is yes, they will total less, the question of where the funds will come from is answered. If the answer is no, then the measure would increase costs rather than reduce them. I make no pretense of having any deeply laid plans for how a national system would work in any detail. I noted one real political stroke against it, the difference in how people perceive paying taxes and paying insurance premiums, and also that younger voters would be the most likely to find their costs increased by taxes laid to fund a national system.

It was a "stump speech" reply because it is not my place to provide solutions to Bernie's proposals. My post was asking Bernie to provide us with his revenue sources because HE is the one who had made M4A the main theme of his campaign. Perhaps the reason many of us still don't know is because BS knows we may not like an honest answer. This is either dishonest or reckless and it bothers more people than just me...

Bernie Sanders is starting to get slammed on how he would finance Medicare for All

https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/bernie-sanders-slammed-how-finance-pay-medicare-for-all-healthcare-2020-1-1028860817

Asked directly about its cost, Sanders declined to provide an estimate, saying, "Nobody knows. This is impossible to predict."

Excuse me, BS??? If that isn't a Trumpian answer I don't know what is. Apparently this pressure got to him enough to actually start releasing some real numbers last month...

Bernie Sanders just unveiled how he'll pay for his biggest plans, from Medicare for All to erasing student debt

https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/bernie-sanders-unveils-plan-pay-medicare-for-all-student-debt-2020-2-1028936679

The numbers don't even come close to adding up. BS himself has admitted his M4A would cost at least $30 trillion with other estimates putting it closer to almost $50 trillion. Not bothered by where he will make up tens of trillions in shortfall he just goes merrily on his way and promises even more...

The Vermont senator also said in the document that making universities and public colleges tuition-free for students would cost $2.2 trillion over 10 years. And it would be covered by a 0.1% tax on Wall Street stocks and bonds to raise $2.4 trillion in that same period. Sanders also pledged to raise $16.3 trillion to fund the Green New Deal and combat climate change, relying on new taxes imposed on the fossil fuel industry and cuts to defense spending.

Ol' Bern needs to stop whining about how "sick and tired he is of millionaires and billionaires" and start looking for some trillionaires to help pay for all his promises. Sorry, Mag...I don't like bullshitters and I don't care for armwavers any more. Neither of them are the kinds of people who get stuff done.

To the degree he has offered anything specific at all.

I expect any national program to cost something on the order of the sum total being paid now for medical care. That total could be reduced somewhat by removing insurers' profit, and by reduction in administrative costs, but against that could be set the amounts now being 'expended' on what amounts to charity care, which is greater than I expect many people appreciate, and which would be reimbursed fully under a national program.

The costs of any national program would have to be raised by taxes, in one form or another. The question is still whether these would total less than people now spend on insurance premiums. Even if the overall amount extracted by a tax is less than the total paid now in premiums, it would be true some would pay more in tax than they now pay in premiums, even though some would pay less in tax than they do in premiums.

Reducing overall costs, or slowing the increase of overall costs, would have to come in large degree through measures unlikely to be popular with people providing medical care. For if the goal is reducing overall costs, reduction in fees charged by people providing medical care would have to be reduced. This is why medical associations have long opposed 'government' health care, and I say this not as a prelude to denouncing greed, but to recognize a genuine interest. They have a sound point, and few doctors and nurses are creatures of greed.

Various schemes to defray the costs of medical school tuition, so that new doctors do not labor under a burden of debt verging on classic peonage may prove of some help in reducing fees. The most likely and saleable might be a few years of national service after graduation in exchange for the government paying off tuition costs. It might be possible to achieve some overall savings, also, by reducing duplication of facilities for some hi-tech diagnostic testing, and perhaps a sort of medical 'Glass-Seagal' restricting doctors who prescribe the tests from owning some facilities which carry them out.







"When things are not called by their right names, what is said cannot make sense. When what is said does not make sense, what is planned cannot succeed. When plans do not succeed, people become uneasy. When people are uneasy, punishments do not fit crimes. When punishments do not fit crimes, people cannot know where to put hand or foot."

I just don't trust any political campaign to come up with honest estimates as to how much this or that program they're pushing might cost or where the money will come from to pay for it. Left-wing and right-wing and everything-in-between think tanks usually do a much better job but sometimes they too have ulterior motives and their results can at times be greatly biased depending on their political persuasion.

Whenever a candidate proposes any major policy that will cost megabucks, I would like to see them work out at least a semi-detailed plan and submit it to the guys and gals over at the GAO and/or CBO for formal scoring. Those folks are non-partisan straight-shooters who can usually be relied on to come up with the best estimates possible. If a proposed plan then comes back to a campaign marked "Totally Unrealistic Bullshit" then they can go back to the drawing board and either downgrade their goals or find more revenue. Once the GAO/CBO returns a "Numbers Balance" approval then they can go ahead and post it online so that everybody can look it over and decide for themselves if that policy is something they could get behind or is too prohibitively expensive.

At least that way a person could see that M4A might cost his family $10,000 a year or slowing climate change would require them to shell out 4 grand every year or whatever. Then each person can decide for him or herself if the cost is something they are willing to endure or might instead cause them too much financial hardship and they can then vote accordingly.

Democracy works best when the public is fully informed and folks vote for or against a person or a policy with their eyes wide open.

Partisans press all kinds of tricks.

One is treating multi-year projections as if they were start-up costs, or single year expenditures. Health care, as an example, runs close to a sixth of gross domestic product, if recollection serves. Which means total expenditures would run to something on the order of thirty trillions over a decade, assuming no further rise in proportion, which on past performance does not seem likely. Thus statements some new program might cost thirty trillions, if couched in a manner which does not make clear this is a decade's worth of projected spending, or that this is about the costs to be expected under the present system over the same time, conveys an exaggerated perception of the cost. An allied fudge is whether figures for a decade's expected expenditures are given in constant dollars or face value dollars including a projection of future inflation. All this is good enough for agitprop work against a program or person one opposes, but is not quite square shooting, either, and not appropriate en familia with one's fellows. On crude calculation at present the 'average family of four' could be said to be paying four thousand at least in premiums as matters stand now, without getting into the weeds of deductibles and such, which doubtless raise the costs borne by such a statistical fiction even further.

I agree running such things by a neutral civil service could be of benefit, though of course, as reality has a distinct liberal bias, results of this that to us were clearly honest and reasonable, doubtless would strike many as wildly out of whack. Enough people by now do not accept that neutral, objective analysis exists anywhere at all....





"When things are not called by their right names, what is said cannot make sense. When what is said does not make sense, what is planned cannot succeed. When plans do not succeed, people become uneasy. When people are uneasy, punishments do not fit crimes. When punishments do not fit crimes, people cannot know where to put hand or foot."

that goes something like "the mainstream media can't be relied upon because facts have a well-known liberal bias".

Paul Krugman has written about this on more than one occasion...

Facts Have a Well-Known Liberal Bias

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/08/opinion/facts-have-a-well-known-liberal-bias.html

On the Liberal Bias of Facts

https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/18/on-the-liberal-bias-of-facts/

This is after all why FOX News and conservative radio sprang up in the first place...to combat the truth and push Republican "facts" in its place. I'd say they've been pretty successful when you look at how much of the country believes in farcical nonsense. The way the right has increasingly rejected science is appalling and alarming.

Truth is the enemy of any democracy which is why ours is in such peril these days. And the one at the very top is the absolute worst one of them all.

...blathering clueless fool living in 1969.

From an article I just posted...

Sanders also pledged to raise $16.3 trillion to fund the Green New Deal and combat climate change, relying on new taxes imposed on the fossil fuel industry and cuts to defense spending.

Okay, let's crunch a few numbers and help ol' Bern out a little. Our projected total defense budget for 2021 is around $740 billion. Tell ya what, let's slash that to, oh I dunno...let's say ZERO. We can sell all our fighters to Russia and aircraft carriers to China to eliminate all those nasty storage costs. So over a decade that would save us around $7.4 trillion. Cool, as long as nobody attacks us because we ain't got no military any more to defend ourselves.

But Bernie needs $16.3 trillion for his Green New Deal (a hugely lowball number, BTW) so we're still almost $9 trillion short. Hey, let's tax them evil fossil fuel companies, Sanders says! Wait a second, we couldn't even get $9 trillion for 'em if we nationalized them and sold off all their assets, so taxing them ain't gonna cut it. Commence armwaving.

Duping people is not good for democracy.

A program aimed at reducing the size of an industry must have the effect of reducing the amount in taxes which could be collected from it....





"From Bernie’s perspective, dropping out of a race once you have no chance of winning is peculiar behavior that can only be explained by the work of a hidden hand. For most politicians, though, it is actually standard operating procedure. Only Sanders seems to think the normal thing to do once voters have made clear they don’t want to nominate you is to continue campaigning anyway."





"When things are not called by their right names, what is said cannot make sense. When what is said does not make sense, what is planned cannot succeed. When plans do not succeed, people become uneasy. When people are uneasy, punishments do not fit crimes. When punishments do not fit crimes, people cannot know where to put hand or foot."

"you can't squeeze water from a stone".

The amount Sanders needs is a bucket and at best he'll get a thimble.

I just want some realistic numbers that add up, is all. I don't think that's too much to ask from somebody. Call it a character flaw on my part...or just the nerdy engineer in me.

No matter what meaning one chooses to take from the phrase....





"When things are not called by their right names, what is said cannot make sense. When what is said does not make sense, what is planned cannot succeed. When plans do not succeed, people become uneasy. When people are uneasy, punishments do not fit crimes. When punishments do not fit crimes, people cannot know where to put hand or foot."

Bernie insists on keeping M4ALL in the conversation because it serves his agenda. If Bernie was serious he would be pushing for an Obamacare expansion. That would provide the best opportunity to expand coverage during the Pandemic for uninsured or under insured folks. The infrastructure is already in place.

And the cheap thug Trump reventing expansion of the enrollment window provides a read made opportunity to assail the real enemy.





"From Bernie’s perspective, dropping out of a race once you have no chance of winning is peculiar behavior that can only be explained by the work of a hidden hand. For most politicians, though, it is actually standard operating procedure. Only Sanders seems to think the normal thing to do once voters have made clear they don’t want to nominate you is to continue campaigning anyway."





"When things are not called by their right names, what is said cannot make sense. When what is said does not make sense, what is planned cannot succeed. When plans do not succeed, people become uneasy. When people are uneasy, punishments do not fit crimes. When punishments do not fit crimes, people cannot know where to put hand or foot."

Every time a rocket blew up (which was WAY more often than not at first) he'd want to totally scrap the design, go back to the drawing board and start all over again.

That's not how NASA met JFK's goal. When a rocket failed miserably and blew up spectacularly the engineers would comb over the data, figure out what what went wrong and fixed it. Then they'd launch another one and when that also ended up in pieces at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean they did the exact same thing. You do that enough times and eventually you wind up with a very reliable machine that will get you where you wanna go.

If everybody was like Bernie we'd STILL be trying to get to the Moon. We got a health care rocket that still has some bugs in it...rather than scrapping the whole shebang let's fix the parts that's wrong with it and move on. Think maybe Biden mighta made a good engineer. Bernie, not so much. The dude can't even add.

Distressing, certainly, as at the time it caused additional worry over evident Soviet capabilities, but still --- beautiful explosions!

Got to work on the Shuttle which was pretty cool but missed all the fun and excitement of those early pioneering days.

Obviously, you never want anything to blow up but to be honest failures are usually way more interesting than successes...especially if you enjoy troubleshooting and going through all the data and pieces figuring out what went wrong so you can fix it.

Don't understand why our government can't seem to do that...identify problems and just fix them. Too many lawyers, I guess!