How could this be?

The article describes Schumer offering a limit to the proposed public national health insurance plan so that it can’t compete with private health insurance companies to the best of its ability. The effort for national health insurance is ostensibly beneficial because it could compete with private insurance plans, but would still be an insurance effort that wouldn’t promise complete coverage. Senator Schumer’s idea is not a “middle ground,” it is a move to defend an industry most are discontent with. It is a further push right of an already compromised position from the point of view of public interest.

Today doctors with PNHP and other activists were arrested in a coordinated protest that disrupted the start of a Senate Finance Committee hearing that further demonstrated the degree to which serious consideration of single-payer health care has been and is being avoided by politicians. Democratic Senator and Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus both declared “we need more police” and that he respected the views of all Americans — but apparently not enough to include the options quite possibly preferred by a majority of them in his committee hearing. Senator Schumer also sits on this committee.

Single-payer health care, a concept that excludes the middle-man layer of insurance entirely, which Physicians for a National Health Plan (PNHP) says polls show most Americans want, and which most of the western industrialized world has successfully adopted, is seemingly excluded from both political debate and factual scrutiny and reporting by commercial media.

There has been no exhaustive political or media effort to reconcile what most of the western world has done to provide far more health care per dollar to its citizens than the United States has via its private system with the veracity of the positions favoring maintaining an insurance-based system that has failed Americans through under-coverage and complete lack of coverage for 40 million or more Americans. Surely foes of such a system who feel they’re in the right could provide a thorough debunking of PNHP’s resources, including highlighting polls that seem to demonstrate political viability? 

I admit heavily linking to them here without providing much balance, as PNHP does a convincing job of demonstrating both support of practicing doctors and aggregating the spare reports of widespread small-d democratic support for their views. In my spare time, I’ve yet to see any criticisms that reconsile their assertions and evidence or thoroughly debunk them. Please share any such challenges you find so well formed.

In related news, my friend Sam Husseini was the originator and a writer in the creation of ads starring Mike Farrell (of M*A*S*H fame) advocating such a plan. That disclosure no doubt indicates a bias on my part to many, but such associations are not the real root of my bias. Rather, it is the acceptance of the stance that health care is a human right. From that position comes my skepticism regarding most political and commercial offerings on the issue (and to me there is no such thing as no bias or individual objectivity for anyone in matters of such broad potential effect). This shouldn’t weaken the observations with regards to apparently non-existent, or at best — disingenuous and weak, public debate on the issue in the Congress.

I’m not sure how one can make a fair extrapolation of those states’ primary election results because of the conditions they were held under.

I’m not partial to either of these candidates, and I am not a Democrat. I am befuddled by what seems like a fanciful wish by more than just Hillary Clinton to extract a legitimate number from a process that was officially abandoned.

The Party punished those two states, fairly or unfairly, and secured pledges from its presidential candidates not to campaign there. Clinton had a higher profile by default, and did project an additional presence there more than Obama, although technically not campaigning there (she seemed to just hold fundraisers and getting more media attention for it, if Obama did the same he didn’t benefit the same).

Whether the rules are fair or not is moot at this point — they were put in place and agreed to. People made decisions and overt commitments based on these rules.

Obama, wishing to compete effectively and obeying the rules, spent his money and time elsewhere so as to not even get on the ballot in one case. If he had made an effort there, had the rules allowed, there almost certainly would have been a different outcome in those elections. He certainly would’ve succeeded in getting on the ballot.

Clinton doubled-back on her commitment to these rules after the fact and when the overall vote appeared closer and, presumably, her campaign became a little more desperate. She began to join the state parties in overtly agitating for retroactive representation, pleading in the language of democracy. While the disenfranchisement wasn’t so democrat, the re-enfranchisement she has pursued is not any more democratic.

A fair election that presented all the choices did not happen in these two states, and Clinton seems to have acted duplicitously.

I’d say that the party members in Michigan and Florida have valid reason to protest the tactics and rules of their national party, but I don’t see how the vote that happened under the circumstances it did could be considered fair and anything to base a delegation count on with any credibility. If the party decides to give the states representation at the convention, and assign delegates based on those primary votes, I would think it would only secure in many minds that this party is even more schizophrenic or a farce.

The capital-D Democrats seem to have little to do with democracy. (And this is hardly the first cause to inspire that observation.)

Nothing else was shown of what this individual said, so perhaps he had a more nuanced view. But I wonder why people say things like that and I wonder why the press focuses on that. It seems like elections would be much more functional, primary elections especially, if you lined up behind the candidate who most represented your concerns and then voted for them—and then you found out who the leader was.

And if you were a “good” party member, you then supported that leader.

Instead people are encouraged to hedge their bets and pick a winner—before they actually pick a winner based on something meaningful.

Of course this has been the case for many election cycles now, so its probably a self-fulfilling habit: There probably is not anyone these people would really want to line-up behind based on the full portfolio of their issues or a close analysis of their credibility. For me, despite all the talk of “hope” and “change” (cliches that, coming from DLC Democrats, are oxymorons without being compound words), that sentiment applies across the aisle.

There’s a problem when people feel there are no good candidates and no clear leader, even the “clarity” presented by not having to deal with actual issues.

Of course, there are people who have looked closely at this kind of failure of democracy. And the dysfunction of horse race politics, poorly moderated debates and media myopia are not the only problems. Take a look at the work of non-profit endeavors like Fair Vote and Open Debates.