People forget lifetime caps on health insurance

[PatrickforB]

71. If we wanted to come together, we'd stop spending over half the budget ($858B this year)

on war, and begin putting some of that tax money (individual taxpayers like us pay in 84% of the government's tax revenue) on stuff that actually helps us.

I have benefitted from ACA as well, but ACA is still a vehicle for insurance profits. My point is not to cut down Obama OR Biden. Please understand this. My point IS that we'd be better off with Medicare for all Americans. We would.

Most people who get into healthcare do so because they want to cure/heal people. What they actually end up with is carefully timed appointments to maximize profits or retained earnings. For example, at Kaiser, which is my employer-provided DHMO, my deductible is $8 large for me and my wife. Recently, my wife asked to go in for a physical because she was tired all the time. They told her when she made the appointment not to talk about anything that was bothering her. These appointments are carefully timed to last 10 minutes with the actual physician after the nurse assistant takes vitals. Then there is blood lab work. No discussion and the physician does not even touch you.

Why? Because the physical is considered preventive medicine, and thus under our plan offered with no copay. BUT, if you have the temerity to actually DISCUSS your health with the physician, you will get charged.

Think about that for a minute. Many physicians and nurses left during COVID because they got tired of the lies Trump was telling and how right-wing-nut-type patients abused them. Many more are leaving because they have discovered our system is not a healthcare system, but a profit-from-illness system.

Please disabuse yourself of the idea I'm trying to CUT DOWN either O or Biden. I'm not. This discussion is about public policy. Specifically, how the profit motive is in DIRECT CONFLICT with our interests as patients. It is. We need to remove the profit motive from healthcare so the system works toward our best interests. Like K-12. Public schools. When the profit motive is introduced we get larger class sizes, less diversity and elitism delivered through vouchers. Like prisons, where the profit motive leads to malnutrition, poor healthcare, and brutality.

My point, True Blue, is just that. Part of the way we organize ourselves must necessarily be to level the tax system so billionaires and corporations pay their fair share of taxes so we can afford to publicly fund things that need to be publicly funded - like K-12, state college and university education, prisons, and yes, healthcare.

Policy discussion - NOT a cutting down of O or B.

As an aside, pretty much EVERYONE knows this is the correct policy position, and Bernie moved the Overton Window by discussing it during his two presidential campaigns. The problem is that the healthcare, big pharma and insurance lobbies bully Congress into taking even a public option off the table, and that is NOT to benefit us, but so they can continue to profit. That's how it is, and it needs to change.

THAT is my point. Interestingly, if we have a crushing victory in 2024 because of changes in demographics, and Dems find themselves in control of Congress and the White House, we'll see what actually happens. We here should NEVER make the mistake of thinking the GenZs or Millennials love Democrats. I know my kids, and the numerous young people with whom I converse, see the Dems as the lesser of evils. They want gun control, abortion access, student loan forgiveness and affordable debt-free college, childcare and healthcare. They actually want a government that governs us and makes policy decisions that benefit Main Street instead of funneling ever more public monies to Wall Street.

I think we may be about to see a significant change of the guard. Because these kids coming up are aggressive. They aren't willing to wait for stuff like this, because they have watched their parents and grandparents get screwed by Wall Street and trickle down economics.

So yeah, Biden has done some really good stuff, and Obama did too. But if we're honest, we have to destroy the GOP at the polls, and I mean destroy them, to buy another couple hundred years for our republic. Because right now, we are in end stage capitalism where we have wealth imbalances that are much worse than in 1929.

Seriously, our whole system has been padding the pockets of billionaire parasites (AOC is right when she says every billionaire is a failure in tax policy) since Kennedy was killed and LBJ sent 500,000 of our people to Vietnam so Wall Street could profit from their death toys. Dick Nixon sabotaged the peace talks in Paris so he could win while Vietnamese and American kids were dying in bunches. Then we had Lewis Powell's 1971 Manifesto to the US Chamber that lays out the whole corporate takeover plan. When Reagan slithered into the White House, he brought massive 'trickle down' tax cuts to corporations that essentially transferred the tax burden to individuals and killed the Fairness Doctrine in 1987.

Decades of AM talk radio and corporate-paid propaganda from Fox and others pounded the divisions between us, and we have what we have now. COVID wasn't enough to bring us together, because we had a divider in the White House. So we have 30 to 40 million heavily brainwashed people who always vote for the GOP and against their own interests.

If we actually want to save this republic, we'd better do some aggressive messaging at all levels and in all elections. I supported a lady running against a holy-roller wing-nut in my state house district, gave her money and got a yard sign. You know what her message was?

Make politics boring again.

Seriously.

We've got problems.

Now I know a bunch on this site - we who have fought the long fight and tend to be older, will pan me for saying what I just did. But the GenZs and Millennials are producing about 4 million new left-leaning voters a year. They like socialism. They like gun control. They want access to abortion. They want portable healthcare (you ever pay for COBRA? That's a break-the-bank thing, and NOT really portable for most because it simply is not affordable). They want childcare. They want better and fairer tax policies. And they insist on aggressive efforts to lower the carbon footprint and mitigate climate change. Essentially, they will be absolutely moving this party to the left. We'd better be ready to risk Wall Street's wrath.

Biden has done a really good job with the situation he has inherited. He has. I'm not cutting him down. What I am saying is that policy changes in favor of Main Street, not Wall Street, need to accelerate.