Who are the biggest opponents of a Medicare-for-All, single-payer health care system in America? According to Michael Corcoran at TruthOut, single-payer's biggest opponents are health insurance corporations, big pharmaceutical corporations, medical device-manufacturing corporations, and for-profit hospitals, who comprise the "very small and powerful group of rich people (who) would be a little less rich if single-payer became a reality." And surprise! Some of these also comprise Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)'s biggest donors, which may be why she says the "comfort level" with single-payer "is not there yet," despite solid majority support for the idea in poll after poll.
Dean Baker reminds us that the counties-only-having-one-insurer-on-the-exchange problem just so happens to be much more of a problem in Republican-controlled states. By a four-to-one ratio, in fact -- and that would be a much, much bigger ratio if Pat McCrory had won in North Carolina last year, since that state comprises the vast majority of counties with only one health insurer on the exchange among states with Democratic Governors. Hence "when Trump and other Republicans tout the lack of competition in the exchanges, they are essentially talking about their own efforts to sabotage Obamacare."
Aaron E. Carroll and Austin Frakt at the New York Times remind us that you should be wary of "research" contending that folks on Medicaid have "worse health care outcomes" than folks on private insurance or no insurance. You can probably think of a few reasons folks on Medicaid have "worse outcomes," like that they're already poor and thus likely already in lousy health, or that the fact you can sign up for Medicaid retroactively means the system has a higher proportion of sick folk to begin with -- or that you can't run experiments with the same exact people on Medicaid, private insurance, and no insurance all at the same time. After all, you could easily imagine we have more sick folks on Medicaid because without it, a lot of them would be dead.
Eric Levitz at New York magazine suggests that President Trump hasn't come out with his big plan to beat ISIS because he's having trouble getting his military advisors to come up that's substantially different from Mr. Obama's. So to sum, he blew past that 30-day deadline (one he campaigned on) a few months ago, and has blown past at least two new deadlines since then, all because he needs a plan that he can say is really and truly his, apparently more than he needs one that actually works. Why we tolerate such drama is beyond me, but you can go ahead and add this to your list of reasons Mr. Trump has failed to keep our nation safe when terrorists attack again.
Finally, arts-and-crafts corporation Hobby Lobby pays a $3 million fine over its purchase of religious artifacts smuggled out of Iraq -- but doesn't admit guilt, at least not criminal guilt, because they're too big to fail, I guess. Thanks in large part to the Persian Gulf War and the Iraq War, Iraqi archaeological sites have lost hundreds of thousands of religious artifacts to looters, and the right-wingers who run Hobby Lobby had to have known that, regardless of their claims that they're (you guessed it!) new to this. At least they didn't try to beg off their fine by claiming a religious freedom to own these items, though I bet the next "Christian" corporation caught in this pickle will try that.
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