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April 10, 2019
LIVE: Senator Bernie Sanders & over a dozen co-sponsors introduce the Medicare For All Act of 2019
LIVE: Senator Bernie Sanders & over a dozen co-sponsors introduce the Medicare For All Act of 2019
LIVE: Senator Bernie Sanders & over a dozen co-sponsors introduce the Medicare For All Act of 2019
Posted by Business Leaders for Medicare for All on Wednesday, April 10, 2019
April 9, 2019
If it keeps piling up, plastics in the ocean could outweigh fish by 2050. These scientists accidentally found a potential solution to the plastic problem.
This Plastic-Eating Enzyme Could Revolutionize Recycling
If it keeps piling up, plastics in the ocean could outweigh fish by 2050. These scientists accidentally found a potential solution to the plastic problem.
Posted by VICE News on Friday, April 5, 2019
April 8, 2019
The Trumps once forced 900 mostly Black families living in Coney Island out of their homes — here’s how the family used taxpayer money to decimate a New York neighborhood
How the Trumps Brought Death and Destruction to Coney Island
The Trumps once forced 900 mostly Black families living in Coney Island out of their homes — here's how the family used taxpayer money to decimate a New York neighborhood
Posted by NowThis Politics on Sunday, April 7, 2019
April 8, 2019
Someone should alert Trump and Republicans in Congress that America is a hotbed of socialism. But it’s socialism for the rich. Everyone else is treated to harsh capitalism.
Socialism for the Rich, Capitalism for the Rest
Someone should alert Trump and Republicans in Congress that America is a hotbed of socialism. But it’s socialism for the rich. Everyone else is treated to harsh capitalism.
Posted by Robert Reich on Monday, April 8, 2019
April 8, 2019
The devastating historic flooding from the Bomb Cyclone have left Nebraska’s farmers wondering how they’ll recover as storms become increasingly frequent under climate change.
How Nebraska Is Recovering From the Bomb Cyclone
Midwestern farmers are not about to let historic flooding put them under.
Posted by VICE News Tonight on Friday, April 5, 2019
April 9, 2019
Wondering how we can save $$ and cover all Americans?
April 9, 2019
By the end of this episode, you're going to feel 10% less crazy about the world. Ian makes his case and then sits down with a man who’s worked everywhere from Moscow to Mumbai, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Tom Pickering. And on Puppet Regime the SPACE FORCE saga continues as Captain Trump and crew find themselves marooned in a strange new land.
Posted by GZERO World with Ian Bremmer on Monday, April 8, 2019
April 9, 2019
“We need to make this move because we’re in the midst of the greatest economic and technological transformation in the history of our country,” Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang says, arguing for a universal basic income of $1,000 per month for every American. “It helps give tens of millions of Americans a real path forward… it would improve people’s health, nutrition, it would elevate graduation rates, it would improve people’s mental health,” he adds. https://cnn.it/2WVzwl9
Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang makes his case for universal basic income
"We need to make this move because we're in the midst of the greatest economic and technological transformation in the history of our country," Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang says, arguing for a universal basic income of $1,000 per month for every American. "It helps give tens of millions of Americans a real path forward… it would improve people's health, nutrition, it would elevate graduation rates, it would improve people's mental health," he adds. https://cnn.it/2WVzwl9
Posted by CNN on Tuesday, April 9, 2019
There is only one event in the history of our planet which has brought about global change more rapidly than today’s human-driven extinctions – the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.
Scientists studied fossils from just after the cataclysmic impact in order to understand how quickly our planet can recover from disaster (and why there seems to be a limit to it).
Scientists say that the 10 million years it took our planet to recover from the mass extinction which wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago could have important parallels now.
The researchers say that there appears to be a ‘speed limit’ on how fast the planet can recover from such events – capped at about 10 million years.
The researchers looked at the link between recovery and evolution because of earlier research that found recovery took millions of years despite many areas being habitable soon after Earth’s most recent mass extinction.
The team tracked recovery over time using fossils from a type of plankton called, foraminifera, or forams.
They found that a certain amount of ecological complexity seems to be required before life can really kick back into gear.
The speed limit is related to the time it takes to build up a new inventory of traits that can produce new species at a rate comparable to before the extinction event.
Lead author Christopher Lowery, a research associate at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG) said, ‘The implication should be that these same processes would be active in all other extinctions.
‘I think this is the likely explanation for the speed limit of recovery for everything.’
There is an instinct among political pundits to confuse caution for practicality — an assumption that those who advocate for incremental change are being reasonable, while those pushing for bold reforms aren’t. This is seen most starkly in the debate around health care reform, despite the fact that the “practical” pushers of limited reform fail to address the real problems in our health care system.
We all recognize that the status quo isn’t working. We spend more per person than any other country on health care, but we aren’t getting any bang for our buck. We have lower life expectancy, higher infant mortality rates and more preventable deaths, and too many personal bankruptcies are due at least in part to medical bills.
Where we disagree is the solution. The favorite new “reasonable” plan is “Medicare for America,” a bill from Reps. Jan Schakowsky and Rosa DeLauro that has won the support of big names like Texas presidential hopeful Beto O’Rourke and the Center for American Progress, the left-of-center think tank where the plan originated as “Medicare Extra for All.” It has been extolled in opinion pieces for some of America’s largest newspapers as a “realistic” plan to fix what’s broken in our health care system.
Read more commentary:
Take it from me, tweaks won’t fix health care. Dems should focus on Medicare for All.
On the other side, if punditry is to be believed, there are the Medicare for All “hard-liners” who believe in expanding a significantly improved Medicare system to every American, with coverage that includes dental, vision and long-term care. This is portrayed as radical or even unreasonable.
Time to get real. As an economist who has spent decades studying our health care system, I can tell you that Medicare for All advocates are the only ones who are being reasonable, because theirs is the only plan that will control health care costs while finally achieving universal coverage.
The problem with incremental plans, whether they are public options, buy-ins to Medicare or Medicaid, or pumping more money into subsidies in the Affordable Care Act’s individual marketplace, is that they preserve the private health insurance system weighing down our health care.
This may be why pundits and centrist politicians view those plans as “reasonable,” but it means that they are leaving the main reason for our system’s dysfunction in place: the multipayer, for-profit financing model.
Commercial insurance companies are nothing more than middle men. They add no value to our system, but they do drive up costs with their bloated claims departments, marketing and advertising budgets and executive salaries. We pay for all of these things before a single dollar is spent on the delivery of care.
They also create extra costs for providers who need large administrative staffs to deal with billing systems, accounting for as much as $100,000 per physician.
Any plans short of Medicare for All leaves these costs in place. In other words, they leave hundreds of billions of dollars a year in savings on the table.
The waste goes beyond administrative savings. While pharmaceutical companies and hospital groups are consolidating and forming regional monopolies, our fragmented, multipayer system leaves no one insurance plan with a large enough share of the market to negotiate effectively. That allows these companies to essentially set their own inflated prices and bilk the public for hundreds of billions of dollars.
Is it any wonder that they oppose Medicare for All?
If we’re talking about which health care reform plans are serious about attacking cost, providing universal coverage and making sure everyone has access to health care, Medicare for All is the only reasonable answer. No other plan does this effectively, which is why I suspect that the Center for American Progress has not come out with spending estimates. Basic economic tenets tell us that their plan will not reduce health care spending as effectively.
Is Medicare for All bold? Absolutely. Is it reasonable? You bet. It is time to accept that Medicare for All is the practical alternative.
Gerald Friedman, a health care and labor economist, is an economics professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst and the director of The Hopbrook Institute.
