[I hope jconway doesn’t mind me designating this the “official” debate thread. — Charley]
12 candidates on one stage is not my idea of a substantive discussion. I think the DNC has thus far done a decent job with including the lesser known candidates and making sure the top tier candidates get an opportunity to debate each other. I am glad they used random assortments for the previous big debates instead of making an under card or main night dichotomy. By this point, all of the candidates have had good exposure to the voters. Even the Delaneys and Bullocks of the field. Which is why its time for the lesser knowns to go.
There has been a clear and consistent top tier in terms of fundraising and polling that has begun to emerge. By raising the threshold of the next debate to just 4%, the DNC would likely cut out many of the middle and all of the bottom tier candidates. There is still a chance someone from the middle tier (Yang, Klobuchar, Booker, O’Rourke, or Castro are all polling at around 2%) could qualify with that metric.
Otherwise we will finally get a five person debate between Sanders, Warren, Biden, Buttigieg,and Harris. These are the candidates that are likeliest to place in the top 3 in Iowa and New Hampshire. The likeliest to move on past the early primary states. They have the ground game, the fundraising, and the polling to go the distance. We deserve that debate.
I agree.
I realize that I don’t know why these debates are now sponsored by media organizations rather than the League of Women Voters. Was this a conscious choice? By whom? For what reason?
I’m repelled by the football-style graphics, presentation, and production.
I’d like to see a moderated exchange among the top five on PBS or CSPAN.
Yeah, and maybe they could sit down and have more of a discussion.
And they could/should have lots more debates and on specific issues. Health care takes up 20% of these debates and they just keep circling. Do a debate or two on that. Have the nurses union run one. Climate got the town hall, but we could have and deserve more real discussion available in more avenues – not just major corporate media trying to egg on fights between candidates.
That said, Mayor Pete can jump in a lake.
Actually honored Charley. So far I feel like Booker and Castro are angling to be Warren’s veep, Harris has flatlined, Pete and Klobuchar are trying to pick up the Biden mantle. No heart attack can slow Bernie down. Warren was authoritative and responded to every attack, also is clearly the front runner now. Biden a bit of an afterthought, though we have a preview of how harsh the media is going to be about Hunter. It’s not going away anytime soon.
Pete did decently against Gabbard on foreign policy, I still don’t get what lane he seems to be aiming for. Warren-Booker is looking awfully good right now. He’d assuage blacks and corporate Democrats about her candidacy.
Also it really annoys me that public health care is the only issue where the media gets fiscally hawkish in its questions. Never about unnecessary wars, walls, or tax cuts.
Maybe on the latter. On the former, she is already performing much much better among those voters than he is.
A VP pick may send signals to donors, but I think it’s been proven again and again that VP picks have little electoral benefit. This year that could be different, though. If Warren is the nominee, none of the talked about picks would bring an electoral benefit, save one. Sanders brings the closest thing to a movement any candidate has (it’s not huge enough to win the candidacy it seems, but it is very large and consists of lots of voters who don’t regularly turn out). Ha, but that pick would also make major donors soil their pants.
He’s been far more cooperative with the other Democrats, especially Warren, then he was in 2016. I do worry some of his ride or dies would stay home. We’ll see after the early states. In a just world though, that would be one hell of a ticket.
Also it helps they sort of play good cop/bad cop in these debates. Bernie saying point blank “no billionaires” makes Warren’s wealth tax look more sensible. Similarly his honesty on taxes in single payer (they go up, but premiums go down).
They aren’t being given much time to answer. This debate should have been split, and while I was originally sympathetic to trying to avoid the GOP kids table imagery from 2016 now I wonder if lesser candidates would actually benefit from having a night to themselves.
Welp. They’re all fine.
Biden seems … old, and not vital, running a nostalgia campaign. As Warren notes, that’s not gonna cut it.
I find Buttigieg a bit twerpy but he had a good exchange with the odious Gabbard. Less great vs Beto; the room was impressed by “I don’t need a lesson in courage” but I thought meh.
Sanders has a great manner, the self-assurance of a guy who believes what he says. I get the appeal, I really do.
Steyer could be a huge hero, but not by running for President.
Harris, Klobuchar, Booker, Castro, and Beto are fine but I’m not sure what their lane is. If nothing else it’s good to have smart people speaking urgently.
Of course Beto is right about confiscating guns. It’s hard, maybe impossible. But of course he’s right.
Yang wut. Break up tech already.
I’m not really getting Harris’s attack on Warren.
Anyway Warren is smart and great and game as always. I wonder if she comes off as too “hot”, too urgent — understanding that’s a gendered perception. It’s her superpower and her charisma. She is under-appreciated as an intellectual brawler — being a Harvard law prof, after all. She’s formidable, and someone willing to take risks.
NO CLIMATE CHANGE QUESTIONS YET.
THAT IS BONKERS.
I thought of you throughout that debate screaming at your tv. This undermines the argument that we don’t really need climate only debates. Clearly we do if the issue isn’t getting discussed AT ALL in these broad debates. I’ll flip flop on Joe debating climate too, he should man up and face Markey. This is getting ridiculous in both races.
Symmetry: the debate started out with the candidates completely wimping out on Joe Biden’s corruption, and ended with the candidates falling all over each other to heap praise on one of the Keating Five.
I was disgusted by the question that asked something to the effect of “Do you agree that Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax will address income concentration”.
The question itself demonstrates the incompetence of mainstream journalists, and of course presupposes its answer.
Wealth is not income. The wealth tax is not intended to address income concentration.
Income concentration in America is not NEARLY so destructive to so many as wealth concentration. Do the CNN questioners not know that, or are they intentionally provoking yet another irrelevant and stupid exchange about the wealth tax?
A better question would have been something along the lines of “How would you propose to address wealth concentration if elected President?”.
It really seems to me that these things are more like wrestling exhibitions than actual debates. It seems clear to me that the CNN was primarily interested in sparking fights and then talking about who was fighting whom and how much symbolic blood was drawn.
At no time tonight did I have the sense that the moderators were trying to elicit real insight from the candidates into the issues facing us.
Joe Biden tweeted this last night as a response to Medicare for All.
The bad faith is stunning. I admit that the “you’re already paying for it in premiums and deductibles and co-pays and out of pocket” answer is a political challenge for M4A supporters when confronted with the “will taxes go up?” question, but to get this kind of bad faith regurgitation of right=wing talking points is despicable.
I can’t wait for this man to not be involved in our politics anymore.
“Where do the other 8 months come from?”
If we all got appointed to the board of directors of various foreign companies, we could all afford it. What’s better, this could happen without any wrongdoing on Joltin’ Joe’s part.
Doesn’t the McKinsey candidate’s “Medicare for those who want want it” proposal sound a lot like W’s plan to partially privatize Social Security?
Warren nicely dinged it as “Medicare for those who can pay for it”.
I’m honestly agnostic on the public option/single payer fight. But candidates who support the former keep repeating right wing lies about the latter, which is making me like single payer more.
The UK, Canada, France, Scandinavia, and Germany still have pretty awesome economies and better mobility than we do. Wonder why.
Ever notice that “how will you pay for it?” never seems to get asked about unnecessary tax cuts, wars, or walls?
It’s incredible. Only gets asked about things that directly help people and Democrats can’t crawl over each other fast enough to be the ones to shoot it down with right wing talking points.
I thought Mexico was paying for the wall!:)
I think Warren has that point backwards. Medicare for those who want it is like public education – available to everyone taxpayer subsidized, but with private options still available just as private education options are.
That’s not a good analogy though, since under the moderate plans, not everyone is eligible for Medicare like they would be under Medicare for All. Her plan is the one that covers everyone with a public plan and gives them the option of electing for supplemental plans, just like Canadian Medicare or Northern Europes. Just like American Medicare now.
Every American senior gets a baseline plan from the government they can build out with supplemental plans. This talk about the insurance industry being eliminated or people losing their coverage or ACA going away is simply untrue. It’s just expanding a popular program that already works to cover every single American, not just seniors.
They can always opt out of that program or buy supplemental insurance, just as they can now. Warren is opt out, the moderates are opt in. It makes a huge difference. We are already seeing the gutting of the mandate raising costs on the exchanges. Warren restores the mandate, but gives everyone coverage which is the carrot that will make it work, not just the stick of a fine like Obamacare had.
The better analogy is Social Security. Everyone pays into it, everyone collects it, and everyone has the option to do private plans on top of it. It is a universal program that works. if we made social security optional it would fail. Same with Medicare for all.
A public option is better than the status quo, and I will settle for half a loaf. But we are far more likely to get the full loaf if we push for it first, than half a loaf if we push for that first.
Social Security is, in fact, a great analogy.
It is no accident that the same forces who most loudly oppose any sort of Medicare For All plan also seek to destroy Social Security (by privatizing it, for example).
No, I interpret the Medicare for ALL who want it as just that – everyone is eligible just as everyone is eligible for public ed. I’m pretty sure at least Sanders if not Warren has said indeed that private insurance would be eliminated.
The fundamental difference is that the existence of public education does not destroy the funding mechanism for private schools.
The only way a health insurance provider makes money is by collecting more in net premiums than it disburses in net claims. The reason health insurance is required is that health care costs FAR more than any single person or family can afford to pay.
That’s very different from a private school, where the combination of a an endowment of some sort and high but not impossible tuition can cover the expenses of the school.
An insurance company needs several THOUSAND healthy subscribers for each subscriber who receives health care.
Any effective medicare program will draw so many subscribers that there will not be enough left to sustain the private insurance plans that exist today. The carriers will either cancel those plans or go out of business.
The union plans that we’re talking about still require significant monthly premiums, especially for families. Why would any union worker want to pay for a contractually-mandated insurance plan when a much more generous plan (no deductibles, no exemptions, no prescription limits, no “non-network” providers, etc) is available free of charge?
Medicare-for-those-who-want-it is a chimera — there won’t be any private alternatives.
Which may be secretly (or not so secretly) Pete Buttigieg’s hope and assumption, though I can see healthy people choosing to buy into a private plan if said plan offers more and better coverage.
The terms of the proposed M4A plan are already clear:
– No deductibles
– No coverage limits
– All prescriptions covered
– All providers covered
All this with zero premiums.
How does a private plan offer anything better than this, at any price? How would an insurance carrier offer a plan that’s better than this when every potential subscriber gets the above from the government with no premium?
The premise that there will be ANY private insurance carriers, at least as we know them today, is false. I think the candidates that are offering campaign pitches based on this premise either know its false and lie about it or don’t know that it’s false and have incompetent staff.
Objects don’t go faster than the speed of light. The acceleration of gravity on the surface of the Earth is a physical constant. An insurance company cannot make make money asking people to pay premiums for something the government already offers them at no cost.
Don’t underestimate the ability of corporations to get people to act against their own best interests if there is a buck to be made.
I personally agree with that, but I still think you can say the same of public education – if you can be educated in all subjects for free why would you ever choose a private option?
@education vs health insurance:
Education has a fundamentally different business model from insurance.
The business model in private education ventures is a direct provider/consumer relationship. The consumer of the higher-priced education pays a premium to receive it. Launching a successful private school or tutoring business is therefore a straightforward process of finding customers and providing a product they will buy at prices they are willing to pay.
The business model in insurance ventures introduces a third-party intermediary, the insurance carrier. Premiums are collected from a huge number of subscribers who don’t make claims, so that the resulting revenue covers the costs the small number of subscribers who do make claims. Launching a successful insurance carrier therefore requires persuading hundreds or thousands of consumers to pay an intermediary in for protection from some risk that it promises to cover.
The people who choose to pay for private education are generally prosperous families who believe that some private school offers a better education (however that is measured) than their local public school. The point is that those private education customers pay their own way.
That mechanism just isn’t available in the insurance market. A person or family wealthy enough to cover the costs of private health care doesn’t need insurance — they just pay for their health care out-of-pocket.
It sounds as though you are confusing the role of insurance carrier with health care provider.
A health care provider is much more like the private school analogy that you offer. Nobody proposes to prohibit those, and the same wealthy families who pay for private school are likely to also pay for private health care.
The insurance company is a third-party intermediary. There is no comparable role in the education market. When single-payer government-sponsored health care removes the risk of catastrophic economic loss from health care, it removes the business driver for any private insurance provider.
No risk means no need for insurance. That is not true for education, public or private.
It’s been a very annoying and self defeating debate. As if nobody learned the lessons from the failures of the last two Democrats who attempted health care reform.
You start out demanding immediate single payer and stay consistent about it on the campaign trail and you’re likelier to finally get a public option in the end. If you negotiate yourself to some mythical center that makes David Brooks and the Republicans happy you’ll see them cry death panels and socialism anyway and make that plan unpopular.
It’s likelier we end up with a Buttigieg M4All who want it or a Harris 10 year on ramp to single payer than the Warren plan. It’s a lot less likelier if we start our negotiations from the compromise position. This is why Warren is smart about this. Stay vague and inflexible and consistent. It’s what Trump did with the wall and now that’s getting funded. Albeit illegally and not from Mexico, but who remembers that promise anyway? Certainly not the media or his supporters.
According to Sweden’s insurance trade industry organization, Svensk Försäkring:
The number of private health care insurance policies has increased in recent years. In 2011 about 440,000 people had private health care insurance. Most of these people have their policy paid by their employer.
The trend continues, with the English-language The Local reporting last week that “One in ten Swedes now has private health insurance.” The site also says, “More than half a million Swedes now have private health insurance,” though that seems to refer to the growth in the number of policies, with many more of the country’s 9.5 million people actually covered by private insurance.
Most of the sites I’ve found report that private health insurance in Sweden provides coverage in addition to, rather than instead of, the universal public plan.
According to sites like this, a typical premium for private health insurance in Sweden was $415/year (4,000 kr) in 2017 (the last year I was able to find data for).
That’s about a quarter of what I paid per MONTH ten years ago.
I think it’s pretty important to clarify what is being compared before drawing any conclusions from factoids like this.
It is difficult to compare things. You’re in the age group I am, learning about Medicare for All, does that mean part A,B,C, includes D?. Medigap insurance?
If they come out and say ALL federal employees and elected officials will be standing in line before and after me I’ll get behind it. It’ll never happen. I have great private insurance and always have, provided by my former employer. Not looking for any change, because I just don’t trust Washington to do it in a fair and equal manner.
I think it’s easier than you suggest.
My understanding is that “Medicare for All” is a name chosen for its resonance with today’s medicare. I think the complexity you describe (A, B, C, D, Gap) all goes away with M4A. That’s because that complexity reflects the current private insurance system we have.
I think federal and elected officials will have the same coverage you have. You won’t continue to get that same coverage you have now, because the carrier will cease to exist.
If you’re over 65, are you sure your current insurance is better than, for example, a BCBS medicare advantage plan? I pay $76/month — a tiny fraction of what I used to pay. Have you compared coverages? Deductibles? Prescription benefits? Providers are prohibited by law from attempting to collect more than the medicare rate for any procedure. Does your private plan have a similar protection?
I think you’re making a mistake by assuming that your current plan won’t change even if it is better than some medicare advantage plan. The GOP wants to remove the restrictions that prevent your insurance carrier from charging more for less coverage.
I think it’s very unlikely that we’ll see M4A or any other fundamental change in health insurance within the next four years. I think any relationship between what actually happens and what is now promised is purely coincidental. I think you can probably get a medicare advantage plan that is way better than your current plan — I wonder how hard you’ve looked.
We should not forget that we are not the part of the electorate that this matters to — we already have GREAT single-payer government-sponsored health care, because we qualify for medicare.
It’s the tens of millions of people younger than us that face a HUGE crisis.
It seems to me that the best answer to the complaints about the cited $31 trillion cost estimate of Medicare For All is something along the lines of:
1. That’s a ten-year total. It’s about $3.1 T per year
2. We already spend more than that in OVERHEAD for health care.
3. Medicare for all is a bargain compared to what we are doing today — even WITH the ACA.
I’d like to see the candidates and media hammer on the second bullet.
Instead of asking “How will pay for Medicare For All”, I think it will be more productive to hammer on:
“How are we paying for health care today, and what are we getting for it?”
Medicare For All at $3.1 T per year is a BARGAIN compared to what we have now.
Social Security is a very good analog. Social Security benefits, especially for working-class men and women, are MUCH MUCH larger than anything that would result from investing the same premiums in alternative vehicles. This is the fundamental lie of privatization.
We must not let the right wing drive the health care agenda. We must stay focused on the reality of the staggering amount we pay for health care and health insurance today, and the abysmal outcomes we get from those expenditures.
How many of those costs are related to insurance industry profits? I think the better comparison is to compare costs between private plans and traditional Medicare.
The costs include insurance industry revenues. Yesterday, I looked up the total health insurance industry revenue for 2018 (I’ve lost track of the link). It was a total of about $1.5 T.
That’s about half of the $3.1 T/year total cost cited for Medicare for all alone.
Bearing in mind that this number is total revenue instead of profit, it’s still a huge number. Insurance industry overhead (profits are part of overhead) is a HUGE part of our bloated health care expenses.
The reason why traditional medicare costs are not a reliable data source is that our system is designed so that providers subsidize their lost profits on medicare through gouging of charges for private insurance and private pays.
There really is no reliable data source (that I know of) for cost information from providers. Just as an example, I had a heart procedure performed by the cardiac team at MGH earlier this year. In my EOBs from MGH, the “list” price of that procedure totaled about $175,000 (for a 3 hour outpatient procedure). Medicare actually paid about $1,500. MGH wrote off $173,500 — the difference between their list price and the amount allowed under their medicare contract.
I’m quite sure that government bureaucrats somewhere claim that their negotiating skills “saved” $173,500 on my procedure. I also wouldn’t be surprised if MGH claims they “lost” that same amount on that same procedure. I think it’s a shell game intended to hide the actual costs from any third-party inspection.
Years ago, Massachusetts automobile retailers used to advertise “sales” where they promised “sixty percent” (or whatever) “discounts”, usually for very limited periods. The common practice was to invent a “Dealer List Price” that was some largish markup of manufacturer’s list price. Nobody — absolutely NOBODY — ever paid dealer list price. What Massachusetts regulators found was that the cars sold at these “sale” prices were actually sold for HIGHER prices than whatever was normally received for the same vehicle.
In my early engineering days, wizened veterans at Digital emphasized the importance of approaching most consumption investigations (mostly power) by looking at the “gozintas” and “comeoutas” — ignore the internal details and measure the total quantity going in and the total quantity coming out.
I would like to see our media and our candidates doing that kind of cost analysis with our current health care industry — total costs divided by total benefits.
I think a very interesting total would be the total amount paid by Americans divided by the sum of the total amount paid to individual service providers (doctors, nurses, etc) and the total amount paid to equipment suppliers.
I think the ratio of those two numbers is a reasonable approximation to the actual overhead we’re paying right now — including insurance industry profits, insurance industry executive compensation, and so on.