Alright. Pray tell how a premium and deductible cap, and a public option with a federally-capped maximum cost, would increase the margins made by private insurance companies.The end result of Biden's plan would be nothing except a bunch of pork to energy companies, while no substantive advances are made and climate change proceeds apace regardless. Because Democrats always cave to their own right flank, let alone the Republican party, and Biden's plank by merit of its own weakness is pre-signaling that intent.
...Right, so you're just outright assuming the premium and deductible caps are lies, then?Yes, I do, because I can tell you exactly how Biden's plan would be enacted. It would be a public option in name only, it would be structured the same as TRICARE except as government-subsidized health care as administered by private insurance companies through contract. Which is the worst of all worlds, because not only would it increase market share, it retains private insurance corporations' overhead, certainly wouldn't include profitability caps or restrictions, and private insurers would soak the government through GSM status. The cost wouldn't be born by the individual consumer but rather the tax base, it would be inherently unsustainable, and we'd end up in the same situation we are now with SSA. That's if BIden were to somehow get everything he wanted, which he wouldn't because it wouldn't even survive the blue dogs.
Which is why you don't give away the store before it's even open.
Private insurance has to go, period.
I need to establish a baseline. If you're saying that the Dem platform isn't ambitious enough, but also saying that anything sufficiently ambitious must be a lie, then... we're at the point where nothing can get your vote.
Who has better success than Sanders over the last 8 years, pray tell? Ralph Nader?Fighting for it and losing, regardless of what Democratic platforms say or don't say.
The utter meaninglessness of that clip should speak for itself. It's a pure example of "gotcha" argumentativeness, almost puerile on Biden's behalf. There's nothing of substance there.Keep ignoring the thirty-eight years between then and when Trump took office, and Biden's vocal support between then and now. Including the proposed expansion in the crime bill, '98 expansion, and PATRIOT Act. Biden's on the record about this.
Oh, lord. If it's a comparison-free zone entirely, then I don't know how to possibly approach this line of argument. Keep hoping for a universally-accepted Rosa Luxemburg to bail out the American political system, I suppose. "Wish in one hand" taken to the absurd extreme, if you like.The assault weapons ban that did jack shit, you mean. Because the overwhelming percentage of firearm homicides are committed by weapons the AWB didn't cover in the first place, and the firearm homicide rate went down during the '90s because the violent crime rate altogether went down. All because the economy improved, not because of a nominal ban on polymer tacticool shit that has fuck-all to do with how firearms operate.
And fuck Bernie. This is a "but Bernie!"-free zone. But since you brought it up, why did Biden hold domestic violence victims hostage by nesting VAWA inside the crime bill?
Since I'm a strongly left-wing, exceptionally hostile person towards austerity economics and monetarism in general, I'd love to have that conversation, if it could move beyond internal recrimination for 20 minutes.Of course not. We wouldn't want to talk about the effects of austerity and the impact it might have had for the working classes, would we.