updated–Round Three? Robinson’s rebuttal to the rebuttal to the . . .

Billy_T wrote:

zn wrote:

As a rule I think it’s better to keep similar things in threads where the same conversation on the same topic just keeps going. Starting new threads drives other threads off of page one. There’s so much going on now, page one is just crazy with stuff!

Okay. If you want to move it to a better fit, I don’t object.

I started this one cuz I worry that I’m being a bull in a China shop in other people’s threads, and I don’t mean to be. I don’t want my posts to end the discussion, and they seem to be. That might just be a coincidence. But, who knows?

Anyway . . . if you want to shift this somewhere, no problem.

Problem is I can’t move posts. I have to ask people to do it themselves (though it’s easy–all people have to do to move a post is copy it then re-post it in a new place.)

Never, ever, ever worry about being what you called “a bull in a china shop.” Just post! I would not say your posts end discussions, it ain’t like that.

Billy_T wrote:

Okay. I think I’m gonna call it a night, but I’ll try to transfer this to one of WV’s threads tomorrow, if he’s okay with that.

Hope all is well.

I would appreciate that. Here’s the thing though…I would say on this board (ie. the whole board, huddle board) no one owns threads. I know that’s an etiquette some places but here, we are all different drummers. BUT at the same time, it’s better to keep within topics and not proliferate threads about the same topic, if possible. Point #2 (better to have long threads then too many short threads) takes precedence over the idea of “ownership.” So if I start a thread about quantum gravity, and WV takes it over with post after post about how the word “quantum” is stupid, that’s fine.

Kyle Kulinski weighs in.
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Billy_T wrote:

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The Rising spends almost all of its time attacking the Dems, and next to no time going after Trump — owned as it is by a Trump loyalist fat cat. If corporate controlled media has an impact on the content of that media, and it does, it obviously has an extra-heightened impact when coupled with directly partisan ownership. It’s just naive to assume it doesn’t.

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Well, I have wondered for a long time, whether The Rising goes after the Corporate-Dems MORE than it goes after the Reps. It seems like they do, but I dont have any real data on that. And i just pick and choose which vids i wanna watch, so I dunno what is going on, on the vids i dont watch. But i ‘have’ wondered about it.

Also, the ownership has bothered me. I looked up the ownership way back when i heard Bannon said the show “is the real deal.” Anytime Bannon is for something, its a bad sign 🙂

So, I do wonder about The Rising.

But then I consider the Pluses to having Krystal Ball on a popular show. I dont think i need to list them.

All in all, I think there’s good points on all sides of this. I dont think either side can make a totally-winning-case.

w
v

Billy_T wrote:

WV,

Does The Rising see “right-populism” in the same way as Kulinski?

He said there are right-populists who support:

Medicare for All
Unions
A living wage

Again, I’ve never bumped into one in any context or format, and it seems to go wildly against the right’s hatred of any public sector program replacing a private sector one . . . or adding regulations to businesses. But, I suppose pigs do fly in parallel universes.

Anyway . . . what’s your take on that? Is he, perhaps, being far too broad in his definition(s)? What is “right-wing” about those three policy ideas, or the purpose behind them?

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Well, there’s this:

right-pops:https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/23/16643790/is-health-care-a-right-republicans-single-payer-medicare-for-all

These are the Trump voters who believe in universal health care
They aren’t the majority — at least not yet.
By Dylan Scott

“I do think that’s a human right to have access to health care,” said Kate, a 55-year-old with one child still at home. “It’s like having access to clean water, food, and everything. It’s a basic human right.”

“Having basic health care, I think, should be something that a citizenship should provide,” 27-year-old Devin said. “If you have a sick community, you have a sick workforce, you have sick people. You have death. You have low productivity from it. So I think that as a step back from all of it, then yes, health care I think should be a right.”

“I think everybody deserves [health care],” Cindy, a 45-year-old with a teenage daughter, said.

We’re sitting at a table in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, talking about the prospect of universal health care. There’s just one thing about the people saying these words that might surprise you: Each and every one of them is a Republican who voted for Donald Trump in 2016.

Fresh off the GOP’s failed Obamacare repeal crusade and amid the Democratic embrace of Medicare-for-all, we wanted to get a better sense of how voters really feel about the most ambitious health care plan out there: universal single-payer health care. The group’s moderator Michael Perry, who runs the public opinion research firm PerryUndem, started with this basic question: Is health care a right?

Some of the answers didn’t surprise us — GOP voters still harbor plenty of animus for “Obamacare” and “socialism” and warned of the dangers of people getting health care who didn’t work or contribute to their society — but the handful who voiced support for universal health care are a growing minority of the Republican Party.

The Republican Party made a full-throated effort to repeal the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act, the most significant expansion of health insurance in 50 years, in 2017. But they soon discovered it was the single-payer aspects of the law that proved to be the most durable: Cuts to Medicaid and the rollback of Medicaid expansion were among the most politically unpalatable pieces of their plan. Most Republican lawmakers still supported it, but a few balked.

Republican voters, as we discovered, seem to have a more complex view than just “repeal and replace Obamacare.” Some of them really believe health care is a right, a perspective shaped by their personal experiences with the health care system. They are starting to think, however reluctantly, that the government might be necessary to guaranteeing health care to every American.
America’s shortcomings are driving some Republicans to believe health care is a right

The idea that health care is a right has become a growing consensus on the left. Barack Obama famously used the line to defend the Affordable Care Act. And it is the fundamental argument behind Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-VT) Medicare-for-all plan. His revised plan garnered more than a dozen Democratic co-sponsors in the Senate earlier this year.

Though Democrats are driving the popularity of universal health care, it’s not just Democrats who increasingly support this idea. The number of Americans who said they believed it is the federal government’s responsibility to provide every American with health coverage increased by 10 percent between March and July of last year, according to an AP-NORC poll. The Pew Research Center found the share of Americans who believe in universal coverage was at 60 percent in January 2017.

Support grew from 19 percent to 32 percent among Republican and lean-Republican voters from 2016 to 2017 — outpacing the 8-point upswing among Democrats to 85 percent, according to Pew. Republicans who believe health care is a right are still a minority, but a sizable and growing one.

So we wanted to go deeper. We pulled together two groups of eight Trump voters, 16 in total, for 90-minute conversations last fall about health care in America. We consciously sought an ideological mix of people: some at least receptive to the idea of a government-run system, others totally opposed.

We found that long-held beliefs about America are a real hurdle for some voters when it comes to single-payer health care. But at least a few Republicans were starting to see the value of a universal health care program.
What’s persuading Republican voters to entertain universal health care?

What’s perhaps most interesting, based on our conversations in Harrisburg, is why some of these Republicans are coming to believe that health care should be a guarantee, not a privilege.

Among Democrats, as pollsters told me earlier this year, supporting Medicare-for-all is largely a proxy for supporting universal programs, particularly with young voters.

“When you say, ‘I’m for that,’ it says that ‘I’m for equity.’ It says, ‘I’m gonna fight back against the corporate establishment,” Robert Blendon, a professor of health policy and political analysis at Harvard University’s public health school, where he conducts polls on health care, told me. “They are not health care voters, but essentially it’s symbolic of these other things which appeal to young liberal people.”

But among Republicans, based on our interviews, believing health care is a right and entertaining the idea of single-payer health care seemed to be founded on their own negative experiences with the current system.

Take Kate. She didn’t like her current insurance, which she got through her employer. “The deductibles have just skyrocketed,” she told us.

Americans like Kate are paying more out of their own pockets for health care, even with employer-sponsored coverage. The average deductible in employer coverage has increased from less than $600 to more than $1,500 since 2006. Since 1999, employee contributions for their insurance premiums have risen 270 percent — while wages have grown only 64 percent, barely above inflation.

Employer insurance is still the bedrock of American health care, but it’s not quite the deal it once was. People like Kate have felt the shift.

She and her husband already sometimes struggle to afford their mortgage. Then her son fell recently, and they had a $400 bill for the X-ray. “Not in the budget that month, but we have to find it because it goes to our deductible,” she said. “It’s a struggle.”

She also knows people who have lost jobs and couldn’t afford insurance. Does Kate, who identifies as a “die-hard Republican,” therefore believe health care is a right?

“I’m conflicted,” she said. “I’m truly conflicted.”

Her thoughts are worth reading in full:

Because you say the government shouldn’t be in medical care, but it is. We have Medicare. We have Social Security. We ultimately have it, for better or for worse, what there is. And the poor have it. The wealthy can afford it. So you’re talking about the lower- to middle-class people who are stuck in the middle, paying a large chunk of their income in taxes that they don’t get to reap any benefits from. I don’t want to say it’s not fair, but I don’t see any way out of that unless you go to a single-payer system.

And I am truly, and I’ll admit it, a die-hard Republican in 99 percent of my views, but over the last year I have really come to think differently about the health care in this country, and I wonder about a single-payer system. Something similar to Canada’s.

That was a repeated theme: People who had struggled in the current system seem more inclined to see health care as a right. Megan, a 42-year-old who works in retail, said she had seen her friends struggle to afford insurance, and she herself had gone eight years without coverage. She was on Medicaid now and getting ready to start a new job that offered insurance.

So Kate, Megan, Devin, and others — “Yeah, I think every citizen should have an innate right to be offered affordable, quality care,” Tara, a 35-year-old victims advocate, said — are part of that contingent of Republican voters who believe health care should be a right for all people.

They represent a meaningful shift in American health care politics. But they aren’t yet a majority in the ideologically conservative party.
Other Republican voters are stuck on who really deserves health care

These few are still, for now, the exception in the Republican Party. Two other strands persisted across our conversations with 16 Trump voters: A strict constitutional view says health care is not a right — and then there is the question of who actually deserves health care.

“Well, you have a right for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” Dave, a 62-year-old engineer, said. “Where in the Constitution does it say you have a right to free food, free services, or free health care?”

Charlie, a 42-year-old who said he was very conservative, agreed: “It’s not in the Constitution. Nowhere in there does it say, ‘I guarantee you can go see the doctor.’”

There were the expected objections to the federal government running any kind of universal health care program: It’s socialism. The federal government meddles too much already. People want to have choices in their health care. They’ve heard horror stories about long waits in other countries. They’re worried their taxes will go up to pay for this new health care program.

Throughout the discussion, particularly as the question of costs came up, these Trump voters returned to the same concern, which presents perhaps the most fundamental challenge to health care as a human right: Does everybody really deserve health care?

Some of these folks didn’t sound convinced.

“So if everybody’s paying the same percentage of tax, unemployed people are presumably gonna be free,” Dan, a 52-year-old school secretary, told us. “The more money you make, the more money you’re gonna pay for the same exact coverage that everybody gets.”

Or as Kevin, a 37-year-old who said he liked his current insurance, put it: “My biggest problem is the people that don’t work, what’s the incentive? I’m skyrocketing to help pay for them?”

It permeated the questions they had about a single-payer program.

“So in this, what you just described, a payroll tax, anybody not working is not contributing at all to it? Is that accurate?” asked Danielle, a 33-year-old who said she was a strong Republican.

When my colleague Sarah Kliff clarified that single-payer health care would be financed through a combination of payroll and sales taxes, Danielle added, “Except if you don’t have money to buy things, then you’re not paying sales tax.”

This was a theme, again and again, sometimes raised subtly, sometimes stated outright. I learned that a sizable number of Republican voters are wary of a system in which people who don’t work and make less money would have the same health care as the people who work hard.
Single-payer challenges what some people think America is and should be

Medicare-for-all, health care as a human right — these issues are, for people like Rick, a 58-year-old who voted for John McCain and Mitt Romney before Trump, existential questions. America, to them, is not a country that makes no distinction between people who contribute to our society and the people who don’t.

“If you take away all incentives to perform, if you take away Americans’ incentive to work hard, to perform, and to be a little better and not to look down, ‘I can afford this, you can’t.’ I mean, that’s capitalism,” Rick said. “If we tell everybody, ‘It doesn’t matter what you do, this is what you get,’ what do you think is gonna happen to us?”

They aren’t necessarily persuaded by tales of woe from some of their fellow Republican voters either. The system is mostly working for them — all but a few have insurance through their work — and they have very fixed ideas about what is an American notion of health care and what is not.

“I think every employee has a right to health care. We’re not ready for every American,” Rick says. “First off, what is an American? We couldn’t really afford that; we couldn’t bank on that. How can we implement that? Every employee that works in America should have health care, I think.”

Megan, who had gone years without health coverage, interrupted and gestured to Cindy, who had earlier shared a story about a friend with children who was struggling to find work and afford health insurance.

“So you’re saying that her friend, who is a mother of two, she doesn’t deserve it?” Megan said to Rick. “She doesn’t deserve health care because she doesn’t work? What about her children?”

“It’s complex,” Rick offered.

“I have a friend in the same situation,” Megan said. “She just got a job. She’s scraping things together.”

“If you have it that way, now we’re socialists. That’s the way it is,” Rick said by way of a conclusion. “Where we’re at, it’s very complex.”

Robinson’s argument sounds a lot like Trump and the republicans are crazy and unless they want to come to their senses, there’s no need to work with them.

That dismisses many voters who voted for Obama twice. Ignoring and abandoning those voters because they voted for Trump seems like madness if you want to actually win elections.

Robinson’s one dimensional characterization of right Populists betrays an incomplete understanding of some of these voters who don’t always vote for Republicans. If you want to understand right Populists I think you have to consider Thomas Frank.

A key point of Frank’s is that Democrats don’t know how to talk to the working class who have been abandoned by Democrats since Bill Clinton.

Yes, Trump was–and is–full of lies, but he still does a good job of appealing and talking to those voters, even if they are foolish to trust Trump and the Republicans. According to Frank, Trump deliberately echoes FDR’s own language at times and those Old School, New Deal Democrats like Roosevelt, Truman, and LBJ knew how to talk to rural voters in Missouri, Kentucky, Arkansas that Democrats NEVER win nowadays.

Corporate Dems have no clue how to talk to those voters and Lefty leaders like Bernie aren’t very good either.

Check out this from Harry Truman in 1948:

Republicans approve of the American farmer, but they are willing to help him go broke. They stand four-square for the American home—but not for housing. They are strong for labor—but they are stronger for restricting labor’s rights. They favor minimum wage—the smaller the minimum wage the better. They endorse educational opportunity for all—but they won’t spend money for teachers or for schools. They think modern medical care and hospitals are fine—for people who can afford them … They think American standard of living is a fine thing—so long as it doesn’t spread to all the people. And they admire the Government of the United States so much that they would like to buy it.

Can you imagine Bernie or any democrats starting off a criticism of Republicans by talking about farmers?

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• This reply was modified 3 years, 10 months ago by Cal.