I appreciate hearing that other countries with private health insurance do a lot better than we do at it simply because they regulate what insurance corporations have to cover and how much doctors can charge for care a lot more aggressively than we do. But I guarantee you that if we pressed for similarly strong regulation instead of Medicare-for-All, right-wingers would call that "socialism," too. After all, they called the Heritage Foundation's health care plan "socialism" once a Democratic President embraced it, and they call everything else they don't like "socialism," so beginning negotiations with what you'll settle for is impossible with these people.
In a related note, we learn from Sarah Lueck at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities that if our Supreme Court does eventually strike down the Affordable Care Act, the Republican plan to replace it -- the so-called Protect Act -- wouldn't live up to its name. Which I'm sure is very surprising! Here's the main wrinkle: the bill would literally ban insurance corporations from throwing people off their rolls for having pre-existing conditions -- but it would also let insurance corporations simply not cover those pre-existing conditions in the first place! It gets worse from there, and is exactly the kind of thing that's going to drive even more good Americans into demanding Medicare-for-All.
Well, this isn't a good look: Fox News's Bret Baier, in a town hall featuring Sen. Bernie Sanders, asks his audience if they really want a "government-run" health care system, and his audience responds with cheers. It's easy to pick on Fox News for running into that wall, but the rest of our "liberal" media would be similarly dumbfounded to discover people who would rather have our government administer health insurance than the private corporation that's likely screwed them over repeatedly, and that's because media people talk to each other far, far more than they talk to regular Americans.
From the "It's Early, But..." file: Mason/Dixon poll finds Roy Moore leading other Republicans in the 2020 Alabama U.S. Senate race. National Republicans think this seat will be an easy pick-up, but I wouldn't be so sure: while Sen. Doug Jones has the same kind of center-right profile that delivered Jon Ossoff to oblivion, he's also the guy who put two of the Birmingham bombers in jail, and perhaps not coincidentally, black voters did turn out in tremendous numbers for him in 2017. Admittedly the other, non-girl-dating Republican candidates in the race would probably have a better shot at beating Mr. Jones than Mr. Moore would.
Finally, scientists at Tel Aviv University create the world's first 3D-printed heart made from "human cells and patient-specific biological materials." 3D printers haven't previously been able to make tissues with blood vessels, and creating an organ from the patient's own tissues reduces the chance that a host will reject a transplanted organ. We've got a long way to go here -- the heart they made is about the size of a cherry and would need unspecified "training" to function like a human heart -- but this is still a big step.
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