* “Hillary Campaigns to be America’s Third Black President”
Modelling yourself after the only living two-term Democratic presidents seems wise, no?
The high/low strategy of simultaneously appealing to affluent suburban whites and poor minorities wins elections, even if it doesn’t lend itself to great policy.
The Sanders strategy of trying to get working class white Americans to embrace left-wing politics has been attempted, and resoundingly failed in 1972 and 1984.
* If I recall correctly from 2009, Obama did very little, if anything, at crafting the health care legislation. He basically let Pelosi and Reid run the show, and they turned it over to an army of staffers and insiders who wrote the legislation. Obama seemed highly detached.
Yet the GOPers call it ‘Obamacare’ and apparently the blacks think if you criticize it you are criticizing him.
* Does she effect an urban accent when she talks to black voters?
* I wonder if she’s droppin’ her g’s and doin’ that black singsong like she did when she was runnin’ against Obama.
That was funny. What was really funny was Obama doin’ it, too.
Duelin’ Negroes.
* Funny how a paper can have a paywall and still think walls don’t work.
* This “You ran against him” line of attack is puzzling to me because I believe my memory isn’t completely shot, yet H2008 I recall having a slew of black pols lined up to support her; while Barry had famed soul musician Edward M. Kennedy in his corner. Pace retconning, the black electorate (seemed) not in total embrace of the Harvard exotic– for a healthy chunk it was more of a fairly gradual adoption combined with a bandwagoning effect after the initial primaries. Could it be that elite white disdain of Ms. Rodham, for her audacity of running against The One back then, has had all kinds of time to trickle down and be imbibed, after a fashion, by black taste-testers as well?
If so, Obamadmin has f’ed up the Democratic enterprise even more than I’d realized, spending way too much of his tenure rousing anti-white feeling which mostly glanced off the GOP while inflicting internal bleeding for top white Democrats such as his heiress apparent…
* I’m buying more into this idea that Hillary’s base is gay men & bitter bra-burner clingers. These are the people who will stick with her to the end because it’s not important to them how she performs, just who she is. And I’m guessing they’re not a numerical juggernaut (as Howard Dean observed, writing off the Confederate-flag gun-rack pickup drivers was perhaps overly hasty; who knows if we’ll need those later?) But in terms of connecting with appreciable numbers of various voter blocs she just sucks at it. It’s not even that Bernie is the second coming of Huey Long, either. He just loves to pontificate & politick, while Hillary treats answering a press softball as a hideous chore.
* It’s getting harder and harder to believe democracy is the least bad system let alone a good one, especially a multiracial democracy. The founders never intended for borderline-moron sub-saharans to be able to vote.
* Sanders would be doing better with blacks if he where not Jewish.
* I’m rather shocked by the amount of hostility shown to Sanders by so many elements of the D establishment and grassroots. Makes me wonder how much of it is resentment over his very white core supporters and how much is just the Clinton machine calling in all it’s favors.
I still think Clinton will beat him, but on the off-chance she loses for the second and God-willing final time the wailing and gnashing of teeth will be wondrous to behold.
* “Obama’s legacy of helping blacks”? I don’t discount his importance to this demographic as a totem, but other than perhaps the expansion of Medicaid and food stamps I am hard pressed to think of any policy of his that “helped” blacks at all. In fact, his highest profile accomplishments all seemed to be items off the white SJW laundry list, and his record on immigration runs directly contrary to the best interests of black Americans.
To the extent that Clinton has any appeal to blacks, I would chalk it up to nostalgia for her husband and as a former cabinet member she served our first black president (which I guess is helping A black person).
* I’ve come to the extremely reluctant conclusion that single-payer is the only way out of this.
What I’d really like would be for people to pay for doctors and drugs out of pocket and have medical insurance be just that: the thing you buy to cover risks you can’t afford all at once. But for political and other reasons that’s never gonna happen, and at least with single-payer you might wring some of the legal fees and other nonsense out of the current system.
Personally, I find it a very strange thing to have concluded. But I can’t see where I’m wrong.
* It’s one of those things like police forces that are better off being done by the government.
Healthy people won’t buy insurance and the whole thing will never be economical. You make the people absorb costs, they avoid medical care and don’t do preventive medicine, and costs wind up being higher and health worse.
Also, if it’s for-profit, doctors and hospitals have incentives to do procedures patients don’t need, insurance companies have incentives to deny people care for stupid reasons, and so on.
We spend the most money and have some of the worst health outcomes in the developed world.
* I am not surprised by the criticizing Obamacare = criticizing Obama. In my experience, people who adore Obama find it impossible to divorce criticism of Obama with criticism of blacks in general.
In discussions I’ve had with leftist friends who have more or less insisted that criticism of Obama = criticism of blacks, and is racist.
* What would be best is to move as much of the health care industry into the free market, and just give government guarantees to the needy and those with “preexisting conditions”; and require catastrophic insurance coverage for all (either through a national system or through an PPACA-style mandate). If the health care industry loses the profit motive and other market forces, the allocation of resources will become even more distorted, and both costs will become too high and supply will become too scarce.
Whether this can win in a democratic republic with an entrenched bureaucracy and well-armed special interests is another question. (And the answer is no.)
Maybe a compromise would be enactment of a single-payer system but allow deregulation of medical care sought outside the single-payer system. This would allow profit seekers to provide quicker services to those who want them, and for innovators to make money off of new technologies, medicines, and techniques. The customer would then have a choice between paying to see a doctor today, or waiting 3 weeks for a free visit to his Berniecare doctor. It would be like traveling to Costa Rica for an operation, but without having to fly to Costa Rica.
* How is medical care any different than any other service? It’s not. Are VA hospitals run well? Do we all think the IRS, DMV, public schools and Post Office do a great job? Single payer may work politically, but is it better for most people? Seems unlikely.
* Government should confine itself to the provision of truly public goods which, to go on a tangent, education is definitely not. It is highly debatable whether medical care is actually a public good.
There is no such thing as “health insurance.” Insurance is for non-normal casualties. Everybody gets old and sick. Health is not insurable. It’s really just a system of transfer payments from young, healthy people to old, sick people. Maybe we can characterize it as a “pre-paid medical plan.” I don’t know.
There is no such thing as “preventive medicine.” Preventive medicine really means don’t smoke, drink in moderation, eat right, exercise and avoid risky activities. An obese 55-year old who watches 4 hours of TV and drinks a six-pack a day and isn’t having his blood sugar monitored is already sick. Subsidizing his doctor visits so he’ll go ahead and get on his subsidized insulin and we can pay for his increasingly decrepit existence for another 15 years is not an economic outcome.
Having said that, one would think out of the $6+T in combined government revenues we could craft a system that provides medical care at some level for all Americans. It won’t work, social democracy never does, but it seems pretty fruitless to oppose this particular tide.
* All Killary has to do is hire some BLM goons (preferably, women) to confront Sanders. He will run away. Problem solved.
* Is this pathetic or what? Africans who come here have their minds blown by all the catering to American blacks via affirmative action, welfare and other handouts and genuflecting by idiot Democrats like Hill and Bill. A Martian visitor would think the black race are the resident geniuses on this planet. Bono (U2) started a lot of this crap. I wish blacks well but I don’t believe in such pandering and elevation of the non-deserving.
* Hill and Bill are visibly denaturing, like the (Godwin trigger warning) Nazis at the end of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” I wonder if she’ll stroke out on camera?
* Welcome to Election 2016 Bambata! Being the passive-aggressive, snarky little bitches they are, I wasn’t at all surprised to learn “this is why we can’t have nice things” to be a favorite debating technique among SWPL/hipster dweebs, yet I’m still amazed how dim they are to the fact this particular line of argument applies a fortiori to their own mania for diversity. So among the long list of nice things we can’t have because of diversity (including good mass transportation, decent public schools, and cool youth hostels) now add nice, clean, high-minded socialist runs for President. I mean, yeah, I don’t want a socialist Presidential candidate any more than the rest of you, but if one is going to exist it should be resisted by intelligent, informed arguments instead of moronic, self-defeating appeals to Big Man face-saving. But hey, you gotta give this to black people- they not only show up, they show up in custom-ink T-shirts just right for the occasion!
* So it’s not enough to just defend the interests of black people. The radical activists demand that Democratic candidates actively dump on white people, even poor whites. Fortunately, Sanders doesn’t seem to be having any of it.
* What blacks want can perhaps best be understood in light of the old nazi slogan:
“We don’t want higher bread prices! We don’t want lower bread prices! We want national socialist bread prices!”.
They don’t seem to care so much what they get, as long as it can be deemed authentically black.
* Intelligent, responsible healthy people will buy (and have bought) insurance to deal with major illnesses, just as intelligent responsible people have always bought car insurance. Automobile insurance existed and was widely used for a long time before the passage of laws making it a legal requirement.
All that government intervention has done is thrown all the stupid irresponsible people in the same insurance pool with the rest of us.
* You may be right about the single-payer system. It may be inevitable, at least in some form. As someone put it, not entirely facetiously, why not just “drop the number ’65′ from Medicare.” Watch for more and more hospices to open up as a consequence thereof . It is no coincidence that the hospice system emerged coincident with the emergence of socialized medicine. In ’99 my wife was diagnosed with stage-4 lymphoma. Stage 5 and it’s lights out. We had private health insurance. She beat it. If we were living in Europe she would have been long gone.
Everything has its price. There is “no free lunch.” Nor is there free medical care. Not under a single payer system. Not in ANY system.
* Hillary has an advantage with black voters because they don’t care if you’ve been (or are going) to prison or not.
* Charles Murray has been nothing but a curmudgeonly, elitist naysayer since Trump arrived on the political scene. All he can do is complain endlessly on (social) media about how terribly vulgar and uncouth the upstart is. He offers nothing in the way of a better option. How disappointingly ironic that he stand as a example of the very classism he’d spent his scholastic career warning against.
* The more I hear from Muslims in the US the more I agree. Their values are not ours nor will they ever be.
* Buchanan was too much like a bull dog.
Trump is more like a wolf at a dog show.
“Too many candidates” surely helped him.
* Bill Clinton was our first Black President. BO was our first affirmative action President. There is a difference.
* Yes, she does alter her accent and cadence when speaking to black audiences, like Obama does and Bill did. She affects a sort of Southern type accent.
* US has about the *best* health outcomes in the world when you take HBD into account. I.e. Japanese women are the longest lived national\sex group, but Japanese American women live even longer. Our Swedes live longer than Sweden’s Swedes. Our English live longer than the English. Our Irish live longer than the Irish. Our Mexicans live longer than Mexicans. And of course our blacks live way, way, way longer than Africans. And this is all the more remarkable considering how darn fat we are.
US healthcare is the most expensive but also the world’s finest in knocking out issues that can kill you.
Why overall US health comes are lower than some other developed countries is because we are a way, way more diverse country.
* Did anyone see the video of Bill standing next to Hillary at some recent campaign event? He was gaping vacantly while somebody was talking to him. Does he have alzheimers or something? He looked completely out of it.
* In some ways, this is just a taste of what is to come in future elections. The dilemma for Democrats will be to either run a white Presidential candidate and watched them get picked to shreds or a black or brown one that will drive white Republican turnout and defections from their own party. The fun part will be the fracas between brown and black. I’m not so sure blacks are down with “se habla Espaniol”. White liberals will just become a rump.
* Bernie can offer the ultimate in reparations: comfort women. Drawn from the excitable white coeds at his rallies.
* The obvious question with “single-payer” is who that single payer is going to be. I have suggested assigning the role to the Vatican. But I don’t think that’s who Bernie & Co. have in mind.
That single payer will decide what the single piper plays, so you’d better choose carefully. I’d be very wary of the entity charged with enforcing our immigration laws, for example.
* High medical costs are the trade-off we pay for ensuring some of our brightest and most capable young people become doctors, geneticists, and pharmacological researchers instead of all trying to hit the jackpot creating the next Slutchat photo sharing app.
A great outside-the-box political wedge issue (any Trump campaign staffers listening in, please feel free to run with it) would be imposing tariffs on European trade until they started paying their fair share for medical research leading to new drugs and devices. You do realize, right, that if Europeans did not have access to all the new medical products the put-upon US health consumer is paying for almost exclusively (through our market-based prices, and not some national health board whose almost at-cost diktat pricing schemes would ensure these products never got made) socialized medicine across the pond would quickly look a lot less enviable.
* I also am tired of the bashing of modern American Medicine. We are the world’s hospital. In no field is American Exceptionalism more apparent than medicine. You all can use the Nigerian and Indian-educated MDs coming under the ACA. Not me, not those I love.
* “Single payer” just means that the same bureaucracy that administers Medicare would do the same for everyone.
The alternative to “single payer” is private health care insurance. When you pay $1.00 into your private health insurance plan, you get back about 83 cents in actual health care; the rest goes to pay for all those ads you see on TV, customer service reps that deny you coverage, corporate jets and high salaries for executives and profits for stockholders. UnitedHealth Group, the largest health insurer, reported that for 2014 it made $10.3 billion in profits. That’s $10.3 billion that it could have spent on better care, but gave to its stockholders instead.
For every $1.00 that Americans put into Medicare, we get 98 cents in actual health care.
I think its pretty obvious that “single payer”, i.e. Medicare for all, is a better idea. However, I’ll bet that $10.3 billion bought a lot of lobbyists and PACs for UnitedHealth Group, so for those who hate “single payer”, it’ll never happen. Nor will you ever see a truly competitive health care insurance marketplace, which is probably Trump’s fallback, if he can’t get real Canadian style single payer.
* When a company faces less competition, it can distribute profits to executives and shareholders instead of plowing profits into investment. When it faces competition, it has to defer distributing profits to execs and shareholders and must invest to ensure future profits. Single-payer eliminates all competition and turns the market into a monopsony with a single buyer. It achieves lower consumer prices because as the sole buyer in the market it has bargaining power. But it has no incentive to offer new and better healthcare. There’s no reason to with no competition. It’s just an expense for a non-profit monopsonist.
* The African-American community disregard the fact that Sanders want to give them more goodies such as universal healthcare. For them it is not the policy as such that matters but who is delivering the policy. Hence, a black democrat using the same leftist Civil-Rights oratory as Barack Obama would see his/her policy supported by the black community even if his/her policy deprived the African-American community from everything.
It reminds about the strategic used by South African ANC and Zimbabwean ZANU-PF. Their politics have been a horrifying experience for black South Africans and black Zimbabwean. Nevertheless, a vast majority continue to support both the ANC and the Mugabe government.
The motivation is simply that they prefer a black nationalist party or leader over a party or leader who includes the white minority – even the second would be a better choice.
This is however not unique for African-Americans or black Africans. All Non-European groups – even economically prosperous groups such as Chinese, Koreans, Jews and Japanese seem to follow similar pattern. You see the same irrational behaviour among white Americans although not so directly bounded to race but rather abstract ideas of how the reality ought to be and what we should strive for. Libertarianism and socialism seem to be extremely appealing for Scandinavians.
The egalitarian view on ethnicity, religion, culture and traditionalism seem mostly sanctioned from above – Historically by Christian churches and today by societal elites. Throughout history Whites/Europeans has been extremely cruel towards Non-Whites/Non-Europeans in their struggle for conquest. If I see through the eyes of African-Americans I can understand that they distrust white Americans as they have always been on the bottom of the society. Naturally, they seek to promote their self-interest and election an African-American is natural for them.
Mike Duggans mayoral victory in Detroit show that African-Americans (although a rare example) is not always putting racial preferences first. He was the first white mayor since Roman Gribbs (1970-1974). I guess Detroit (90 percent non-white) had no choice.
In Detroit the Democratic politician (since Jerome Cavanagh who was elected in 1962) turned it something into literally a third world city and did in 50 years. Major cities such as Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and St. Louis has lost more than half of their population since 1950 but still they have been able to keep the infrastructure fairly intact and children could actually read when they left high school. I wonder how deep in doh-doh this country has to go into people vote for politicians who actually promote the interest of Americans rather than the vested interest.
* Remember that “single-payer” only affects payments, it’s health care insurance, not the delivery of health care. There is plenty of room for private, for-pay medical care systems to demonstrate efficiency, compete with superior care, etc.
* To disregard the fact that Sanders is offering more Free Stuff would presuppose that black voters even know about and understand the Sanders platform. That’s not the case. Most black voters are completely oblivious. All they know is that there’s this thing called Obamacare that Obama did, and the black leadership and their allies like Hillary can get black voters to oppose any alternatives because they don’t understand the alternatives.
* Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries are subsidized by private insurance. The amount they pay providers such as doctors and hospitals is frequently below the actual cost to deliver services. The difference is made up by increasing the cost for people with private insurance. This is why so many doctors cap the number of Medicare and Medicaid patients they will see.
