With much thought and careful consideration, GeekNights officially endorses Elizabeth Warren for the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primary. She is far and away the most qualified candidate in the field, with specific and detailed policy proposals. From breaking up the megacorps to ending the egregious student debt that's crushed a generation, she is most in line with the values and ideas we espouse here on GeekNights.
3 Likes
I put my money where my mouth is.
3 Likes
Goals:
8 Likes
So that is super fire, I wish I was a badass a lady as she is.
Warren drops “Medicate for All” plan. It’s not single-payer.
Elizabeth’s Behavioral Health Coverage Transparency Act would hold insurers accountable for providing adequate mental health benefits and ensure Americans receive the protections they are guaranteed by law.
Medicare for All will mean access to primary care and lower health costs for patients – and less uncompensated care for rural hospitals, helping them stay afloat.
I big part of fixing health it doesn’t address, in addition to it needing to be single-payer, is that primary care providers need to be paid more and simultaneous to that specialty provider should no longer require a referral to see patients.
Primary care providers currently make nothing unless they overload themselves with too many patients to adequately care for more a than few individuals.
On the referral side, that whole process is broken. Working in healthcare, I can say with certainty that people have suffered from entirely preventable outcomes due to the time it takes to go through getting a referral approved, submitted, received, and accepted. The only people who win in these situation is the insurance company because the referral became useless after the specialty that could have prevented an ailment cannot fix the issues after they happen.
1 Like
This is pretty big news:
" The party endorsed Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont during the last presidential cycle, at which time he described Working Families as “the closest thing” to “my vision of democratic socialism.” The group’s endorsement of Ms. Warren on Monday, one of the few by a prominent progressive organization this early in the primary, could turn heads among left-leaning Democrats desperate to defeat Mr. Biden, the more moderate front-runner, in a primary election where their party’s ideological future is at stake."
1 Like
yea the bernie-bros are really up in a knot over this.
4 Likes
They are indeed.
I especially love the tweet from some guy basically saying that the WFP would never endorse Sanders, apparently not knowing that they had endorsed him in 2016.
1 Like
In a perfect society, insurance would be unnecessary and the concept of it would be illegal
1 Like
You don’t defeat the moderate wing of Democrats through thought pieces or pithy tweets, you defeat their politics through organizing – Maurice Mitchell, WFP director
Lmao
1 Like
Increasing “access” to healthcare is a Republican strategy. Yikes!
3 Likes
Are we talking health insurance or like, all insurance of anything?
The concept of insurance is inherently predatory. Your safety net should not be a for profit entity. At a more structural level, the concept of “insurance” wouldn’t be necessary in a society that does not deny citizens access to health care, transportation, housing, etc. according to their available capital.
2 Likes
I think you’ve got the wrong idea about (non-health) insurance.
Businesses pay to insure things all the time - they’d rather have a guaranteed narrow band of outcomes than save the small amount up front and risk losing everything. That’s super valuable.
Unless you’re advocating to get rid of all businesses too?
1 Like
All I’m saying is in an ideal society, participants of that society; citizens, business, etc., would never be put in a position in which their existence is threatened by lack of capital. The purpose of a government/society is to provide protection for everyone through cooperation.
In a capitalist society, insurance will never operate as intended because to maximize profit an insurance company needs to charge as much as possible and pay as little as possible, as in the exact opposite function insurance is supposed to serve.
Yeah, turns out that Endorsements are rigged, Primaries are rigged, polls are rigged. I look forward to finding out what’s rigged next. I mean, let’s face it, they talk a big game about how they like both, but the moment Warren does anything, out comes the accusations, the abuse, the absurd disingenuous reframings, the excuses, the conspiracy theories.
But hey, look on the bright side, at least Jacobin writers will have something to do to earn their pay, other than just throwing out easy, snooze-worthy and desperately clickhunting articles about if whatever is popular on netflix is socialist enough.
I haven’t done more than skim it yet, but it seems like she’s proposing something similar to the proven Australian model - government provided healthcare, with a heavily regulated private option that puts the primary burden on insurers rather than the person and ensures care one way or the other, so people who want to pay more and can afford it can, and people who can’t or don’t want to, don’t have to. Basically, it’s universal healthcare, but with enough lip-service to centrists(like, actual centrists, not just as a snarl word) and the right to get them to not fight it much, because they’re too dumb to realize what it actually is.
4 Likes
Sure, post-scarcity would be great. We currently have constrained resources.
What do you think the purpose of insurance is?
At any rate, this isn’t really how it works in the real world. “Loss ratio” are the words you’re interested in googling. If health insurers in the US don’t spend enough on care, they’re required to give back the difference. Kind of the opposite of “charge maximally, pay minimally.”
The Affordable Care Act requires insurance companies to spend at least 80% or 85% of premium dollars on medical care […] If an issuer fails to meet the applicable MLR standard in any given year, as of 2012, the issuer is required to provide a rebate to its customers.
2 Likes