The agenda Democrats began rolling out on Monday actually shares some ideas — job training, lowering drug prices, help for working families — with the Republicans’ stated but so far unrealized priorities.
.. Meanwhile, Mr. Trump’s campaign promise for a $1 trillion infrastructure overhaul, a job-creation effort Democrats are eager to talk about, goes nowhere.
.. And why isn’t Mr. Trump, who is counting bills to rename post offices as legislative achievements, turning to Democrats for help on initiatives they and he support?
.. Democrats want to help 10 million Americans find work by expanding paid apprenticeship and work-based job-training programs... Democrats want to give Medicare Part D the power to negotiate lower prescription drug prices for its 41 million enrollees; our deal maker in chief once thought that was a good idea, so he might want to pick up the phone... Party leaders realize, as Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, wrote on Monday, that they’ve lost the last two elections in part because they “failed to articulate a strong, bold economic program for the middle class and those working hard to get there.”
On Health Care, Bipartisan Dishonesty Is the Problem
When partisan criticism is missing, it might be a sign that politicians in both parties are helping themselves, not the country. Or, it might mean they’re pandering to the passions of the public and press rather than doing the hard work of thinking things through.
.. Honest partisanship isn’t the problem, bipartisan dishonesty is.
.. Both parties have become defined by their lies and their refusal to accept reality. It’s a problem bigger than health care, but health care is probably the best illustration of it.
.. The Democrats aren’t any better. Obamacare itself was lied into passage. “You can keep your plan!” “You can keep your doctor!” “Your premiums won’t go up!” These were lies. If those promises were remotely true, Obamacare wouldn’t be the mess it is.
.. The Republican “repeal and replace” bills debated for the last six months did not in fact repeal Obamacare. They kept most of its regulations intact — particularly the popular ones. The GOP did seek to repeal and reform the Medicaid expansion under Obamacare, but that’s not the same thing as repealing Obamacare.
The Republican “repeal and replace” bills debated for the last six months did not in fact repeal Obamacare. They kept most of its regulations intact — particularly the popular ones. The GOP did seek to repeal and reform the Medicaid expansion under Obamacare, but that’s not the same thing as repealing Obamacare.
.. More important, they also know that the GOP wasn’t pushing an actual repeal. But they couldn’t tolerate for a moment the idea that the Republicans would get to claim it was repeal. So the one thing both sides could agree upon was that this was a zero-sum war over repealing Obamacare — when it wasn’t.
.. If Trump and the GOP agreed to abandon “repeal,” as Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer wants, one can only wonder how much replacing of Obamacare Schumer would allow the GOP to get away with.
.. Likewise, if Democrats could somehow give Republicans the ability to say they repealed Obamacare, many Republican senators — and certainly Trump — would probably be happy to leave the bulk of it intact.
‘Medicare for All’ Isn’t Sounding So Crazy Anymore
To be able to deliver on its promises, single payer would not only require trillions in new revenue through higher taxes, but also huge cost savings from slashing payments to drug companies, doctors and hospitals. “There are a million and one complexities” to single payer that no one has really dealt with, said Dean Bake
.. Senator Sanders went out of his way to list all the tax hikes he’d use to pay for his 2016 proposal, including an across-the-board 2.2 percent income tax. But two prominent policy analysts said the plan would cost about twice as much as the senator claimed.
.. But many advanced, industrialized democracies with universal coverage don’t have a pure single-payer system. France, for instance, has health care for all that is largely state-financed, but most people also buy private supplemental coverage.
.. Mr. Baker believes the top priority is a credible transition plan. “If you just take everyone with employer-provided insurance and put all of them on a public plan, you’re going to freak people out,” he said. He’s interested in reviving the public option — a government-run plan that would compete with private insurance on the exchanges — as well as opening up Medicare or Medicaid to those who want to buy in.
.. Democrats risk making the same mistake on health care as Republicans: big promises without a plan to follow through.
Trust Nothing, Defend Nothing
The Democrats are clearly in full partisan mode, framing every inconvenient, benign, or even potentially exculpatory detail as a smoking gun. The whole “hacked the election” formulation, used both by the Democrats and by allegedly objective reporters, is a misleading bit of hyperbole. Is “meddled with” or “interfered in” too big a concession to reality?
.. Meanwhile, there’s no shortage of hyperbole among those most eager to defend Trump on the Russia story.
.. More seriously, the rush to say there’s nothing to the collusion story is a mirror of the rush to insist the story is everything.
.. There were no meetings with Russians. Well there was that meeting about adoption with that Russian lawyer (attended by the campaign manager). Well, it was a meeting about opposition research that turned into a meeting about adoption, but I had no idea the Russian government was involved. Then the NYT reports last night about an email saying the meeting was pitched as part of a Russian-government operation. Then this morning the Russian lawyer says it was the Trump team that was desperate for Clinton dirt.
.. But that’s my larger point. Who the hell knows? What I just don’t understand is how conservatives can mock, scoff at, and ridicule the idea there might be some legs to this story when Donald Trump does everything he can to make it look like there might be a there there. He fired the FBI director. He told the Russian ambassador he did it to thwart the Russia investigation. He told Lester Holt the same thing. Donald Trump is clearly obsessed with the Russia story and with forging a bromance with Vladimir Putin. Both his son and his son-in-law have ties to Russia and keep having to revise their denials, making anyone who believed them in the first place look foolish.