Daily Clips: March 24, 2017
Workers hold the key: “Despite the threat of automation and the weakness of organized labor, workers still hold the key to winning social change.”
Republicans scramble for healthcare bill votes:
Financial markets, which have been buoyed by Trump’s plans to cut taxes and boost infrastructure spending, are watching closely. U.S. stock markets fell on Thursday as Republican leaders delayed a vote, and European stock markets opened lower on Friday, although the U.S. equity market looked set for a higher open.
Why Democrats should push ‘Medicare for all’ now:
ObamaCare plays to precisely the opposite of America’s strengths. Instead of being a simple, straightforward program to hand out insurance coverage — the policy equivalent of a honking great axe — it’s got complex regulations, fiddly quasi-market structures, and mandates everywhere you look — the policy equivalent of the repair box from Toy Story 2. It should be no surprise that many of those regulations do not completely fix the problems they were intended to address, or are effectively ignored. We need simpler, bigger, blunter tools, and single-payer fits the bill.
Seattle-King County scores nation’s 4th-highest population gain
The next progressive health agenda:
Many people will equate an expansion of Medicare with a “single-payer” plan. But even Medicare-for-all would not be a single-payer system since about one-third of current Medicare beneficiaries use the program to buy coverage in a private Medicare plan. Medicare today is a marketplace—but a marketplace with a dominant public plan and not just a “public option,” which might turn out, if badly designed and established separately from Medicare, to be a relatively small and weak player in the market.
Tweet of the day:
Meanwhile, at today's meeting on feline healthcare… pic.twitter.com/wApNyFS7jz
— Justin Shanes (@justinshanes) March 24, 2017
