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April 26, 2019 07:04 AM UTC

Friday Open Thread

  • 23 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

“Passion provides purpose, but data drives decisions.”

–Andy Dunn

Comments

23 thoughts on “Friday Open Thread

  1. Single-Payer Advocates Worry ‘Medicare For All’ Hearing Could Be A ‘Farce’

    It’s supposed to be the first congressional hearing ever on “Medicare for All” ― a huge win for single-payer advocates and progressives in Congress. But next week, when the House Rules Committee holds that landmark hearing on the expansive health care legislation, Medicare for All advocates may actually be getting screwed.

    There are four people testifying for Democrats: Sara Collins from the nonpartisan Commonwealth Fund; Dr. Doris Browne, the former president of the National Medical Association; Dr. Farzon Nahvi, an emergency physician and professor in New York City; and Dean Baker, the co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

    Of those four witnesses, perhaps only Nahvi is actually an advocate for Medicare for All, the single-payer health care system that would transition everyone to Medicare. And even then, sources tell HuffPost that Nahvi’s testimony is supposed to be limited to how patient experience would change. That means that when the Rules Committee convenes this hearing on Tuesday, there may not be any witness testifying who will make the case for Medicare for All over other health care plans.

    It’s unclear who decided which experts would testify before the Rules Committee. Staffers on the Rules Committee say no one in leadership directly told them this person or that person couldn’t testify, but sources involved with the planning of the hearing say three criteria were applied to potential witnesses: (1) Is this person a leader of a single-payer group? If so, that person could not testify ― meaning Gaffney was out. (2) Is this person an activist? If so, they couldn’t testify. That meant people like Dr. Sanjeev Sriram, who has repeatedly advocated for Medicare for All, were ruled out. And (3) Has this person said anything negative about the Affordable Care Act?

    1. WOTD2 from Vox: "The health care industry is betting on Joe Biden in its war against Medicare for all"

      The health care industry — doctors, hospitals, insurers, pharmaceuticals — has united in the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future, a lobbying coalition, to stop Medicare-for-all. That organization aggressively denounces single-payer at every opportunity, and has condemned proposals like a public option or letting people 55 and older buy into Medicare.

      What side are you on?

      1. It is fair to wait and see his plans before deciding. 

        An equitable, thoughtfully designed public option seems a good place to start. The average executive pay packages and profit margins for health insurance companies is obscene. There will always be a need for private insurers, but the industry bulges at the top. Providing an affordable option available to anyone will help to pop that bubble.

        The most important thing to establish is that access to expert, responsible, healthcare is available to every member of every community in this nation and establish that principle as a right, not a privilege.

        1. Mandating insurance, subsidizing it so everyone can participate, regulating to make certain key elements are included are IMHO, minimums. 

          Comprehensive "usual care" and catastrophic insurance would solve a huge number of problems.  Figuring out how to deal with the "last year" costs which are about 40% of spending (or more) needs to be next.

           

    2. Democrats Add Single-Payer Champion Ady Barkan To ‘Medicare For All’ Hearing

      A day after HuffPost reported on the controversy over the lack of pro-single-payer voices at the upcoming hearing on “Medicare for All,” the House Rules Committee announced Friday that a hero among single-payer advocates would now also testify: Ady Barkan.

      Barkan, who has ALS and is an undisputed champion of Medicare for All, will be a strong voice for a single-payer health care system and will put to bed the concerns of many activists that there wasn’t a forceful enough proponent of Medicare for All on the witness panel.

  2. WOTD from Ashley Jardina via Vox: "White Identity Politics is about more than Racism".

    When we often talk about white racial attitudes, we talk about prejudice as this antipathy for people who aren’t white, and usually that means white antipathy for black Americans or Muslim Americans or Latino Americans or whoever. But what I’m suggesting is there’s this other force that’s independent of that, and it’s about the desire of white people to protect their group, to preserve their group status. This isn’t the same as racial prejudice, but it absolutely helps maintain a system of racism.

  3. WOTD3 from Frank Wilhoit via Brad DeLong: "Conservatism".

    …it is necessary and sufficient to characterize conservatism. Fortunately, this can be done very concisely. Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: "There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect"

    …There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time. For millenia, conservatism had no name, because no other model of polity had ever been proposed. “The king can do no wrong.” In practice, this immunity was always extended to the king’s friends, however fungible a group they might have been. Today, we still have the king’s friends even where there is no king (dictator, etc.). Another way to look at this is that the king is a faction, rather than an individual. As the core proposition of conservatism is indefensible if stated baldly, it has always been surrounded by an elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy, amounting over time to millions of pages. All such is axiomatically dishonest and undeserving of serious scrutiny. Today, the accelerating de-education of humanity has reached a point where the market for pseudophilosophy is vanishing; it is, as The Kids Say These Days, tl;dr . All that is left is the core proposition itself — backed up, no longer by misdirection and sophistry, but by violence.

    So this tells us what anti-conservatism must be: the proposition that the law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone, and cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone. Then the appearance arises that the task is to map “liberalism”, or “progressivism”, or “socialism”, or whateverthef—kindofstupidnoise-ism, onto the core proposition of anti-conservatism. No, it ain’t. The task is to throw all those things on the exact same burn pile as the collected works of all the apologists for conservatism, and start fresh. The core proposition of anti-conservatism requires no supplementation and no exegesis. It is as sufficient as it is necessary. What you see is what you get: "The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone…"

  4. Xcel Energy OK'd to build massive $743M Colorado wind farm
    https://www.bizjournals.com/denver/news/2019/04/25/xcel-cheyenne-ridge-wind-project-approval.html?iana=hpmvp_den_news_headline

    "Xcel taking over construction of the 500-megawatt Cheyenne Ridge Wind Project and associated transmission lines…The project covers more than 100,000 acres in southeast Kit Carson County. Xcel plans to acquire turbines for the Cheyenne Ridge wind farm from Vestas-American Wind Technology, which manufactures wind turbine components at plants in Brighton and Pueblo."

  5. The Supreme Court of Kansas held today that the Kansas state constitution protects a woman's right to decide whether to continue her pregnancy, and that state statutes infringing upon that right are subject to strict scrutiny by the courts. The opinions are available here.

    State constitutions will be relied on with increasing frequency in light of the anticipated rollback of federal substantive due process protections Gorsuch and the rapey alcoholic manbaby figure to facilitate.

    1. Countdown to the "Right to Life" groups calling for amendment, abolition of the state Constitution, and impeachment of judges will begin in 3 …. 2 …. 1 ….

       

    2. I'm a little surprised …. unless Kansas judges are not appointed by the governor. Can you imagine former Governor Skidmark not interrogating judicial candidates about the social issues, including reproductive choice? 

      1. I think one could build a case here in Colorado that any attempt to control abortion and contraception, beyond what the SCOTUS says, violates Article II, Section 4, on religious freedom.

        I would not expect the current SCOTUS to completely overturn Roe, but would more likely return the decision to individual states. Those states that are strongly anti-abortion and anti-contraception could possibly be sued under pertinent sections of their state constitutions regarding religious freedom (note: I have not read every state constitution).

        1. Colorado legalized abortion before Roe and did it legislatively. Given the track record of the egg amendment proponents and the current composition of the legislature and governor's office, it is unlikely to change even if Roe is overruled. But your point is well-taken about the state constitution providing an independent constitutional basis for right to reproductive choice.

          1. Colorado's Constitution may provide for legal abortion, but it also restricts abortion for public employees (abortion can't be covered by insurance),  for younger women, and for anyone on Medicaid.

            Colorado legalized abortion in 1967. A freshman legislator, Dick Lamm, introduced a bill, and a Republican governor, John Love, signed it into law.  But it had been pushed by a grassroots movement of women and men marching in the streets.  Colorado's law was restrictive; it required approval by a three doctor panel and consent of the woman's parents or husband. Even that was controversial at the time. And 5-50% of emergency room admissions of women (more with women of color and poor women) were from attempted or septic DIY abortions.

            Colorado's law did not go far enough, obviously. And laws varied state by state. So in 1973, Roe v Wade was decided by the Supreme Court, and abortion was legal nationwide. But again, we shouldn't give sole credit to nine justices who finally saw the light, but to pressure from below, from the streets.

            There were marches in the street. There was organizing in moderate women's groups, radical feminist bookstores, lesbian bars, liberal churches, health clinics, nurse and medical worker's unions, other unions, everywhere.

            The legislators and justices bowed to public pressure. I know. I was a youngun, but I was there – organizing contraceptive workshops in my high school, organizing and marching in the historic NOW/SWP march for "Free Abortion on Demand" in downtown Denver.  Nobody "gave women" reproductive choice. It was a hard-won battle.

            So counting on enlightened legislators interpreting the Constitution to keep abortion accessible now, in 2019, is a fool's hope. They must keep feeling pressure again from their constituents,  and it has to be a grassroots movement again. We have to keep the pressure on.

        2. What would happen if they started arresting women for having abortions, and putting them on trial?

          Would you have to prevent pro-choice jurors from serving? What's it called on murder trials, death penalty averse?

          Could you strike all religious zealots from the jury?

          Could you strike all athiests?

        3. You may well be right about the fate of Roe, CHB. One can see SCOTUS giving Roe and its progeny the Miranda v. Arizona treatment, keeping the decision nominally alive but so watered down and riddled with exceptions that it's all but impossible for the state to violate it.

          Thomas, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh loathe substantive due process on general principles and would have no trouble voting to do away with Roe entirely. Whether substantive due process survives and, if so, what it looks like will boil down to what Roberts and Alito decide.

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