I feel like everything is performative with Johnson. He will appear to be whatever an audience wants him to be. I think he's actually more like Trump, politically, than he appears, but he's far better-educated (clearly paid much more attention in school) and doesn't have the same level of obvious insecurity.
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UK general election 2019, voting day today (prediction thread, news, whatever)
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I feel like everything is performative with Johnson. He will appear to be whatever an audience wants him to be. I think he's actually more like Trump, politically, than he appears, but he's far better-educated (clearly paid much more attention in school) and doesn't have the same level of obvious insecurity.
SMOGZINN
Lifer
I know this is not directed at me, but I want to answer it anyway.
Yes, I do. Because it does not do very much at all. All it really does is open up HSA's to Medicare recipients. The problem with this is that HSA's are something you need to spend years building up. You can only contribute $1350 a year to a HSA. That is hardly enough to make a significant dent in medial costs. I'm quite healthy for my age and my, very minor, prescriptions cost more than that a year. A HSA is not something you can take out when you are 65 and have it make any difference in your healthcare needs. For the non-over-65 Medicare patients, well they are on Medicare because they don't have any extra income to put into a savings account. They might be able to get some benefit from a HSA, but a tiny tax relief, which for someone under 65 that is on Medicare it will be a minor (they are likely already not paying much if anything in taxes) will not be much of a change for them.
If Trump allowed everyone to open and maintain a pre-tax HSA. I would wholly support that.
If he increased the HSA contribution limit to something reasonable, say $10k per person per year, that I would support.
But pretending that letting a few extra people contribute to a HSA only after it is already to late for them to make reasonable contributions to it, that is not helpful.
I'm saying it's functionally pointless from the perspective of actually making our system work. The problem is how much our system costs, not if we can provide people tax breaks to cover the insane costs.
You don't understand the topic. The RATE of health care inflation is increasing under Trump, it decreased under Obama.
Wait times are inputs, not outputs. The health of the nation is what health care is trying to improve, and the NHS and the US system have comparable outcomes despite one costing around half the other.
Because their system achieves similar outcomes to ours at half the price. If you could pay half price for something why wouldn't you?
We already spend 1/5th of our GDP on health care and health care inflation continues to outpace regular inflation, meaning that percentage will continue to rise. This is unsustainable and we are far further down the unsustainable expense path than other countries. Eventually we will just run out of money to fund it.
SP33Demon
Lifer
You can't afford 400/month? That's 26 hours @$15/hr min wage (which is common in many states) or not even a full week's worth of work pre-tax. Even 10 bucks an hour gets you coverage after just 5 days of work.
If you married your SO, then you'd have medicaid as well.
I agree on the rejecting part, it took me 8 months to get my wife's breast pump reimbursed which was a pain the ass. But if you don't like their service, switch until you find a provider that you do like.
[DHT]Osiris
Lifer
Right now, $400/month represents about half of my disposable income. Included in that would be 'extra money that goes to debt after paying minimums'. There's ways in which we could curtail our standard of living to increase that amount if we wanted to I suppose, but that would get threadbare pretty quick.
By cutting the amount I can put to debt to in half, it significantly increases the amount of total money I'll pay on those debts over time, increases the amount of time I'll be spending paying debts rather than investing or fueling the consumerism engine, and forces my mentality into one of saving rather than spending. Now multiply that across the entire US population.
Hell, I'm lucky to be in a position that I even can afford $400/mo, some people probably don't have that much disposable. I've spent large amounts of my life in that position. Given your level of disbelief, I'd wager to say you've lived a privileged life and haven't yet realized it.
WelshBloke
Lifer
I like Gary Younge's article
www.theguardian.com
The idea that you just need a nice Lib-Dem-lite centrist Labour leader seems like an illusion. People didn't move to the centre, they moved to the nationalist right (or in Scotland, the nationalist centre-left).
(Though it's true that even someone politically like Corbyn but more dynamic and charismatic would have helped - a small bit of it was simply about competence)
Labour won’t win again until it works out why it lost | Gary Younge
It’s not enough to blame Jeremy Corbyn, Brexit or the media. The picture is far more complex than that, says Guardian columnist Gary Younge
The idea that you just need a nice Lib-Dem-lite centrist Labour leader seems like an illusion. People didn't move to the centre, they moved to the nationalist right (or in Scotland, the nationalist centre-left).
(Though it's true that even someone politically like Corbyn but more dynamic and charismatic would have helped - a small bit of it was simply about competence)
SP33Demon
Lifer
Yeah it's not really for older people ie medicare recipients because the goal of the plan is to pay for your medicare premiums in retirement with pre-tax savings. I mean, if you're old and didn't plan for retirement then I feel for you.
Contribution limit is only $1350? No, it is "$3,550 for self-only and $7,100 for family coverage". Maybe you're talking about the minimum deductible which is $1350.
2020 HSA Limits Rise Modestly, IRS Says
In 2020, the annual limit on health savings account (HSA) contributions will be $3,550 for self-only and $7,100 for family coverage. Here are some details that employers that sponsor high-deductible health plans should know about HSA contribution limit...
www.shrm.org
Yeah it sucks that HSAs can only be opened if you're on an HDHP and working. I agree it would be great if everyone could open one, it would really ease the medical cost burden and might be the solution to our crisis. Funny that it would mean LESS taxes for the government and not more like Obamacare did with the mandated penalty if you don't comply.
I guess his overweening self-centredness may be his only redeeming quality. He's too selfishly ambitious to be a full-on right-wing ideologue.
s0me0nesmind1
Lifer
Having a high deductible insurance is a no-brainer IMO.
If you have little-care costs, it's clearly the best.
If you have lots of medical care, it's often the best option as well if you're going to hit the Max out of pocket..
The only time another insurance types (e.g. PPO - more expensive optioons, etc..) are better are when you're somewhere in the middle.
If you have little-care costs, it's clearly the best.
If you have lots of medical care, it's often the best option as well if you're going to hit the Max out of pocket..
The only time another insurance types (e.g. PPO - more expensive optioons, etc..) are better are when you're somewhere in the middle.
WelshBloke
Lifer
You guys want to take the discussion of the American health system into a different thread?
SMOGZINN
Lifer
But you see how opening up HSA's to Medicare recipients does not really help? By the time you are a Medicare recipient it is too late to save. The minor tax advantage is not going to be all that helpful (I mean it is better than nothing, but it is not going to solve any problems).
Okay, that is embarrassing. I just typed the wrong number. I actually work with HSA and taxes. I know these numbers like the back of my hand, I have a heavily highlighted publication 969 on my desk all the time. I should note that the $7,100 for family is just the 3550 number doubled, and is actually worse than the individual contribution because it is probably covering more than 2 people (it is for family coverage, not just you + spouse, but you + spouse + children).
The penalty is not really a tax, it is a penalty. Ideally it would not have collected much, because the goal was to have almost everyone have insurance. To be fair, it was hardly ever even collected (I think it was collected for 1 year, and was capped at $50?)
Fenixgoon
Lifer
Yeah it's not really for older people ie medicare recipients because the goal of the plan is to pay for your medicare premiums in retirement with pre-tax savings. I mean, if you're old and didn't plan for retirement then I feel for you.
Contribution limit is only $1350? No, it is "$3,550 for self-only and $7,100 for family coverage". Maybe you're talking about the minimum deductible which is $1350.
2020 HSA Limits Rise Modestly, IRS Says
In 2020, the annual limit on health savings account (HSA) contributions will be $3,550 for self-only and $7,100 for family coverage. Here are some details that employers that sponsor high-deductible health plans should know about HSA contribution limit...
Yeah it sucks that HSAs can only be opened if you're on an HDHP and working. I agree it would be great if everyone could open one, it would really ease the medical cost burden and might be the solution to our crisis. Funny that it would mean LESS taxes for the government and not more like Obamacare did with the mandated penalty if you don't comply.
without a truly major overhaul of the healthcare system, increasing the insurance pool size is probably the next best thing you can do
Vic
Elite Member
The only thing Speedy seems to be consistent about is being conveniently inconsistent.
What is the proper reaction to self destructive behavior. I would say that a person gripped by an urge for self destruction would wish on a self destructive group of people that they have fun destroying themselves. I would also say that anybody free from or aware of their their own self destructive tendencies would wish that those infected with it at an unconscious level develop some self understanding so they do not have to unconsciously act out those feelings in a self destructive way. The whole point of being enlightened is to free oneself from unconscious needs and the ego is an identity that is based on unconscious assumptions that create the motivation to not see any of it. We strive unconsciously, not to become better, but to be better at being sick. We live in an invisible prison, a prison of ego that imagines it can escape. The ego can't escape. The ego is the prison. Hopelessness is the only escape. Thought is fear and the end of thought leads to an awakening. To surrender, to know that all that happens is just as if it were God's will and to submit to it, to cease to struggle, to cease to feed the suffering, opens the door to grace. That's what dying to the ego means, letting go of everything. There is only love, There has never been anything other than God's perfection, the wholeness or unity of being. You are just a giant ball of love that laughs.
You don't really want people to suffer. It's just that they must once corrupted. We had to become sick to survive. All innocence is a threat to the mentally ill. It is a mirror in which they can see their own sickness and how much they have lost. Don't add will and intention to that.
So it does seem that it was largely about leave-voters moving directly from Labour to Tory. Hard to see how a 'moderate' Lib-Dem-type remain Labour leader would have improved matters. Though a more competent and dynamic and just less Islington leader I'm sure wouldn't have hurt. Frankly, just someone with a Northern accent might have done better.
www.theguardian.com
I think the problem for Labour is more than either Brexit or Corbyn being ineffectual. It's structural. It was supposed to be the party of organised labour, and labour isn't organised any more. It's not the 19th or 20th century, and the economy and hence society isn't organised around factories and mass production and hence a trade union movement. We're fragmented and divided (and very often competing with each other in a casualised labour market) and the main common experience is through the media (whether social or mass). Which means disgruntlement can be easily manipulated by demagogues. And people are still disgruntled - hardly anyone believes in socialism, but an awful lot of people are still not very happy with what capitalism seems to be offering them.
That's the only way I can explain the sheer obsession with Brexit. It's not even so much that I'm against it (though I am, if only on balance) as that I'm a bit baffled why so many are so fixated on it as the cure for all their problems. I believe it will in fact make things worse, but even if I didn't think that, I still would be puzzled why so many are obsessed with the notion that achieving it will fix everything. I'm even slightly puzzled by the reverse, by those who think staying in the EU will make everything fine (like some Lib Dems seem to). It's almost like a massive displacement activity.
How did Boris Johnson achieve his landslide victory? A visual guide
Johnson’s gamble on a ‘Brexit election’ paid off, with big gains in Labour’s leave-voting heartlands
www.theguardian.com
I think the problem for Labour is more than either Brexit or Corbyn being ineffectual. It's structural. It was supposed to be the party of organised labour, and labour isn't organised any more. It's not the 19th or 20th century, and the economy and hence society isn't organised around factories and mass production and hence a trade union movement. We're fragmented and divided (and very often competing with each other in a casualised labour market) and the main common experience is through the media (whether social or mass). Which means disgruntlement can be easily manipulated by demagogues. And people are still disgruntled - hardly anyone believes in socialism, but an awful lot of people are still not very happy with what capitalism seems to be offering them.
That's the only way I can explain the sheer obsession with Brexit. It's not even so much that I'm against it (though I am, if only on balance) as that I'm a bit baffled why so many are so fixated on it as the cure for all their problems. I believe it will in fact make things worse, but even if I didn't think that, I still would be puzzled why so many are obsessed with the notion that achieving it will fix everything. I'm even slightly puzzled by the reverse, by those who think staying in the EU will make everything fine (like some Lib Dems seem to). It's almost like a massive displacement activity.
mikeymikec
Lifer
IMO, the leader of the opposition should have placed themselves in a position post-referendum of the following:
1 - Holding the government accountable every time the Leave campaign promises evidently weren't being upheld
2 - Being a figurehead for ensuring the people get what they want or 'Leave' can GTFO
3 - Where the government don't bother to explain things like for example why they don't want a referendum, the opposition leader should be the one explaining in plain words why one is needed.
4 - Advocating a second referendum on the actual deal or remain
By the time the 2019 election came along, the people should have had it drummed into them what that leader's position has been the entire time.
It leaves the door open for that leader to be pro-leave or remain, and most of the people won't be saying stupid things like "just get it done already / no discussion is needed". That leader would be seen by most as an advocate of the people getting what they want or for them to get the choice about what the actual deal is going to be.
Corbyn more or less did the opposite: He stayed very quiet on Brexit and he flip-flopped a lot in what he did say.
I think Labour still has a place in UK politics as an advocate for peoples' rights over those of corporations.
1 - Holding the government accountable every time the Leave campaign promises evidently weren't being upheld
2 - Being a figurehead for ensuring the people get what they want or 'Leave' can GTFO
3 - Where the government don't bother to explain things like for example why they don't want a referendum, the opposition leader should be the one explaining in plain words why one is needed.
4 - Advocating a second referendum on the actual deal or remain
By the time the 2019 election came along, the people should have had it drummed into them what that leader's position has been the entire time.
It leaves the door open for that leader to be pro-leave or remain, and most of the people won't be saying stupid things like "just get it done already / no discussion is needed". That leader would be seen by most as an advocate of the people getting what they want or for them to get the choice about what the actual deal is going to be.
Corbyn more or less did the opposite: He stayed very quiet on Brexit and he flip-flopped a lot in what he did say.
I think Labour still has a place in UK politics as an advocate for peoples' rights over those of corporations.
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darkswordsman17
Lifer
Yep.
People already are free to open an HSA. Its called a savings account. Now, certainly there's the tax part of that (i.e. letting people bypass tax on it lets it build and will get people to contribute more to it as it effectively lowers their tax burden). I don't know of fucking anyone that has savings that wouldn't use that to pay off medical debt (let alone when threatened to be sent to collections if they don't pay it). But they're not really going to fix the issue. The issue is that people want to spend less money on health care. An HSA does nothing at all for that, it just makes it easier to afford the exhorbitant costs when they arise. Its the same reason that sure, getting everyone contributing to health insurance gives a larger pool, if you don't also lower costs then it'll just remain a grift, and arguably will become even more of one, just like they've bastardized 401k and retirement investments.
Conservatives still would have had an easy time monopolizing the pro-leave voters methinks. Your problem was multi-party first-past-the-post.
But Labour was in a cleft-stick over Brexit. It's very clear that where they really suffered was in leave-voting areas, where traditional Labour voters jumped ship completely, because they were so driven by wanting Brexit. In remain areas, like London, Labour did perfectly well. Whichever way a Labour leader had gone, they'd have lost support and hence seats, either in leave areas or remain ones. Corbyn's equivocation was a response to an impossible situation. It didn't work, but I don't see coming out unequivocally for leave or remain would have done either. Being so pro-remain did the Lib Dems no good whatsoever.
It's not only about Brexit, but Brexit is symptomatic of that decline of the mass organised working class. So is the excessively 'Southern' and 'out of touch' image of Corbyn.
The grass roots that gave Labour an identity and purpose and natural form of structure no longer exists. And the disparate coaltion of the disgrunted and disaffected that exists in its place has no intrinsic structure or form of organisation, and is wide-open for being influenced and manipulated by demagogues and those who control the media (including, but certainly not limited to, Putin, and of course including all the usual suspects among the global and US rich, who own the media companies and all those well-funded lobby groups pretending to be think tanks).
Traditional forms of industry and the organised working class came to an end under Thatcher. It's just had a bit of a long over-hang, where people in former industrial areas continued to vote Labour out of family loyalties and cultural tradition. That is clearly starting to fade now, a couple of generations on.
I just think the ultimate attactor point that we are heading to is a form of fascism. Which is not to hyperbolicly call Johnson a 'fascist' (though he does have some of the opportunist and cynical traits of Trump, who in turn echoes Putin, I don't for a moment think he's the real deal himself). I mean in the very long term, I'm thinking of a much longer time-scale, decades at least, even a century. I just can't see where else we are going to end up, other than where Russia went (and so many other countries in the world where socialism was seen to fail, but capitalism created too many losers and disaffected people, so they embraced nationalism and a strongman figure).
I'm a bit depressed.
DarthKyrie
Golden Member
But he's totally not a racist or a Nazi.
Won't you think of the CEO and the shareholders they are so abused by this system? Why should they have to pay out anything for the people that pay for insurance, that money doesn't belong to those ratepayers?
/s just in case
The more I read about Johnson and the Tories dodgy far-right and racist connections the more irritated I get with our relentlessly, astonishingly, biased media. The level of attention paid to Corbyn having gotten a bit too matey with various Arab groups (with anti-Semitic attitudes) compared to that paid to the Tories' equally dodgy associations with anti-Semites was of the order of 100 to 1. No, make that 100 to zero.
Johnson and Rees-Mogg welcoming the creation of the UK branch of "Turning Point" for example - a group with strong alt-right connections (it's the one with that Candace Owens woman in it). Or Johnson employing the appallingly anti-Semitic writer Taki on the Spectator for _years_, and printing some of his appallingly racist writings.
Oh, and not forgetting the Tory's (and Johnson's in particular) support for Hungary's Viktor Orban led hard-right government, in the EU parliament. Or Johnson's meeting with Steve Bannon.
The only hope now is that Johnson is so opportunist and self-centred, that he'll happily tack leftward where it gets him votes. That cuts both ways, really, on the one hand it means a Johnson government might not be as relentlessly hard-right as it paints itself, on the other it means he'll be very hard to dislodge as he has the great strength of flexibility, something the ideologically pure of left or right tend to lack.
Johnson and Rees-Mogg welcoming the creation of the UK branch of "Turning Point" for example - a group with strong alt-right connections (it's the one with that Candace Owens woman in it). Or Johnson employing the appallingly anti-Semitic writer Taki on the Spectator for _years_, and printing some of his appallingly racist writings.
Oh, and not forgetting the Tory's (and Johnson's in particular) support for Hungary's Viktor Orban led hard-right government, in the EU parliament. Or Johnson's meeting with Steve Bannon.
The only hope now is that Johnson is so opportunist and self-centred, that he'll happily tack leftward where it gets him votes. That cuts both ways, really, on the one hand it means a Johnson government might not be as relentlessly hard-right as it paints itself, on the other it means he'll be very hard to dislodge as he has the great strength of flexibility, something the ideologically pure of left or right tend to lack.
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