US Politics XXIV: Your Country Sucks

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Fine by me :shrug:. Sounds reasonable.

ETA, from the last thread, regarding this CNN article: https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/29/politics/trump-phone-calls-national-security-concerns/index.html

In hundreds of highly classified phone calls with foreign heads of state, President Donald Trump was so consistently unprepared for discussion of serious issues, so often outplayed in his conversations with powerful leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Erdogan, and so abusive to leaders of America's principal allies, that the calls helped convince some senior US officials -- including his former secretaries of state and defense, two national security advisers and his longest-serving chief of staff -- that the President himself posed a danger to the national security of the United States, according to White House and intelligence officials intimately familiar with the contents of the conversations.

So. Why. Aren't. They. Doing. Anything?

God, I am so sick and tired of reading about how "concerned" people who are working in or have worked in this administration are and not reading about any major action taken to stop him or just get him out of here. They either just up and quit and later write books talking about how awful he is or they just speak of their concerns anonymously or whatever. FUCKING DO SOMETHING ALREADY IF YOU'RE THAT WORRIED. Where were all of you during the impeachment hearings?
 
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I'd also like to declare that Australia also has many things that suck, like our racism, the culture wars, classism, susceptibility to bushfires, lack of AFL teams in Northern Territory and Tasmania, but, it does suck less than the USA, mostly due to our healthcare system, lack of passion for guns and seemingly a much lower percentage of insane people. I can't wrap my head around those fuckwit white lawyers who were pointing killing machines at protestors yesterday.
 
I never thought my country sucked before Trump. Yes there have always been things about it that sucked.

But now sadly I agree, my country sucks. Still some good people in it, but yeah it sucks.
 
Let’s not forget about the mortgage relief that was given. People expected to pay the six months up front when its lifted.

Unless that was changed and missed it ?

I think something will get passed, but it’ll be last second
 
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Meanwhile mortgage applications and average home loan amounts are rising. This is drawing into sharp contrast the gulf between people who do and don't have access to property buying.

Still seems to me the most logical and humane thing to do is freeze rent and mortgage payments. I don't understand why that isn't being considered.
 
I think that due to some technicality, many people's benefits expire on July 25. Meaning there are less than 4 weeks for Congress and the obstructionist do-nothing Republicans to act.
 
I suppose there’s some measure of hope in the fact that — despite all the well known, listed problems and the horror show of the past 3.5 years — making fun of the US is still widely understood as punching up.

We may survive.

Maybe.
 
Meanwhile mortgage applications and average home loan amounts are rising. This is drawing into sharp contrast the gulf between people who do and don't have access to property buying.

Still seems to me the most logical and humane thing to do is freeze rent and mortgage payments. I don't understand why that isn't being considered.
They don't want to even give a taste to anyone of what the world might look like with a social safety net. If, in a time of crisis, you give the things to people that they need to live (like housing and healthcare), they might start asking why you don't give those things to them all the time.
 
It’s the same with the stupid argument on how unemployment pays more than their job.

Doesn’t that raise a red flag about their job ??? Why does a actual job pay less than unemployment???
 
I suppose there’s some measure of hope in the fact that — despite all the well known, listed problems and the horror show of the past 3.5 years — making fun of the US is still widely understood as punching up.

We may survive.

Maybe.

Honestly, the concept of American exceptionalism has been terribly toxic globally for decades. It's easy for most Americans to forget what the direct and indirect consequences of this have been for people all around the world - from Latin and South America, to Asia to the Middle East. And the fact that many Americans now are probably going to question this concept if not outright reject it, is in my view, a positive.

The US isn't the devil, but as a country it is ABSOLUTELY no better than comparable Western democracies.
 
Honestly, the concept of American exceptionalism has been terribly toxic globally for decades. It's easy for most Americans to forget what the direct and indirect consequences of this have been for people all around the world - from Latin and South America, to Asia to the Middle East. And the fact that many Americans now are probably going to question this concept if not outright reject it, is in my view, a positive.



The US isn't the devil, but as a country it is ABSOLUTELY no better than comparable Western democracies.




But it certainly is bigger and more influential. It’s in all of our interests for the US to function well. It’s vastly preferable to a world dominated by Russia and/or China. Most global problems aren’t going to be addressed without US leadership.

What do you take to mean by American exceptionalism? Because I wasn’t thinking about that at all in my comment.
 
It’s the same with the stupid argument on how unemployment pays more than their job.

Doesn’t that raise a red flag about their job ??? Why does a actual job pay less than unemployment???
That's only a thing now with the added $600 weekly kicker, unenjoyment does not normally pay more than your job, whatever said job is. Your benefit is normally calculated as a percentage of your most recent take home pay.
The issue with the plan they implemented is they arbitrarily assigned a figure of an added $600.
The idea was to make folks "whole" during this crisis.
Problem is twofold:
A. It made lots of folks more than whole, so getting people to return to work when called back is an issue in many places.
2. The crisis has lasted much longer than anticipated so if no extension is adopted, at end of July folks will lose that extra $600. They'll revert to their regular unemployment.

The plan should have been to top everyone's unemployment off so it matched their normal take home, but doing so would have been an impossible calculation and gummed up an already faulty system even further. Now the government has to figure out a way to keep people who can't return to work financially secure while trying to balance getting those who can safely return to work to do so rather than refuse because they'll be paid more to stay home.
Good luck with this administration figuring that out.
 
But it certainly is bigger and more influential. It’s in all of our interests for the US to function well. It’s vastly preferable to a world dominated by Russia and/or China. Most global problems aren’t going to be addressed without US leadership.

What do you take to mean by American exceptionalism? Because I wasn’t thinking about that at all in my comment.

Oh I wasn't referring to anything in your comment - just a general observation.

I've said before, the global impacts of a bad/ruined US economy are staggering for all of us. It's exactly why the US needed to have a proper lock down in order to return to the new normal that we are now seeing everywhere else in the western world. Obviously a bad economy is bad for Americans but as you state, it's terrible for all of us precisely because of the size and dominant nature of the US. And instead of having proper leadership, you have a total moral failure of a president who has not only failed to contain this but has made it worse.

And yes, some blame has to go to the people. Protesting after a couple of weeks of not being able to get their haircuts? Give me a fucking break. And they tell minorities to pull themselves up by the bootstraps. Hello...they could have put on their big boy/girl panties and sucked it up for another month or two and had their country now functioning at a level returning to normal.
 
https://newrepublic.com/article/158337/big-pharma-coronavirus-grift

Big Pharma’s Got a Brand New Coronavirus Grift
America's health care system is doing what it does best: rigging the game to extract maximum profits from an ongoing catastrophe.

Libby Watson/June 30, 2020

With each passing day, the federal government’s pathetic response to the coronavirus pandemic becomes more and more outlandish. We have never seriously tried to implement a federal testing and tracing effort that might slow the virus’ rampages. We have forced workers to choose between risking their lives at work and feeding their kids—and for those locked out of that impossible choice, good luck getting unemployment even if you qualify. Congress sent everyone $1,200 and said, you’re good now, right? The president said he asked his aides to slow testing because the more you test, the more instances of infection you uncover, and the more the numbers look bad. He hates bad numbers.

Now, as cases spike once again and states belatedly reverse their idiotic “reopening” plans, we have another story of that particularly American brand of incompetence and greed intefering with our ability to fight the virus. Pharmaceutical giant Gilead will begin charging for remdesivir, one of the few drugs that has shown to be effective in treating Covid-19, and the cost is not only high—it’s higher for patients with commercial insurance. Call it a Failing Empire surcharge.

The United States is the only developed country where Gilead will charge separate prices for the government and private payers, at $390 and $520 respectively; a typical five-day course will cost $3,120 for a private patient, versus $2,340 for a patient with government insurance. The drug costs less than $10 to manufacture. One could ask why patients should be charged at all for being treated during a global pandemic—but then, why charge patients for treating their cancer, or sprained ankles, or diabetes? The pandemic continues to unravel the frayed threads of American society, and the lack of logic or humanity in our health care system has been among the most clearly illuminated weaknesses. In the time since the coronavirus arrived on these shores, each major player in our healthcare system—insurance companies, pharmaceutical firms, and hospitals—has demonstrated its willingness, its compulsion, to grift off the global pandemic.

The news that remdesivir would be priced so exorbitantly could hardly be greeted with surprise. Everyone knows drug prices are ridiculous, and new drugs are consistently introduced at absurdly astronomical price points. It is almost too perfect that the drug is being sold by Gilead, the same company that priced its revolutionary HIV prevention drug, Truvada, at $20,000 per year in the US; in other countries, a month of the same drug costs $6.

Big Pharma and its defenders usually point to the high cost of research and development; we simply must charge $1 million a year for a cancer drug in order to recoup the cost of its development. They point to (very shaky) research showing it can cost up to $2.6 billion to bring a new drug to market; other studies peg the figure at over half a billion, which still sounds like a lot of money. But is that actually why drugs cost so much? In The Atlantic, Ezekiel Emanuel points to a quote from former Pfizer CEO, who explained that the high cost is actually derived from “the anticipated income stream, rather than repayment of sunk costs.” From there, it’s simply the case that the companies charge so much because there’s no countervailing force impeding them. One only has to look at the insane profits of drug companies (and their endless, nightmarish commercials) to recognize that these are not poor, virtuous companies sacrificing money for the public good. They spend so much on research because they’ve rigged the game to deliver vast profits; by the same token, they have little incentive to spend on research that doesn’t look promising to their bottom line.

Even if you are of the opinion that drug companies are unduly burdened with the cost of research, there is a very simple solution: Nationalize them. Critics of Gilead’s pricing plan were quick to point out that the clinical trial that brought remdesivir to market was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. In May, Texas congressman and drug pricing advocate Lloyd Doggett sent a letter to Secretary Alex Azar asking how much the government spent on the trial; last week, HHS responded, providing figures showing that the 2020 remdesivir trial has cost $23 million as of April 30, and that NIH grants have provided tens of millions in funding to previous studies relating to remdesivir.

This happens with many, if not most, drugs. Even though private companies do sponsor their own expensive trials, much of the research that leads to the development of new drugs is government-funded. One study found that funding from the National Institutes for Health contributed to the development of all 210 drugs released between 2006 and 2010. If it costs up to $2.6 billion to develop a drug, who is better placed to spend that sort of money than the government?


Almost no one will pay the full list price for remdesivir, as with other drugs. If you have health insurance, you may not even notice the full price that you would pay without insurance when you pick your medication up at the pharmacy. But someone, at some point, is paying that difference; the list price is still a price. Your insurance company might not pay that full cost either: They contract with pharmacy benefit managers, who negotiate discounts or rebates with drug companies in secret, and who keep some largely unknown portion of that rebate. Drug companies claim these rebates are raising list prices, because every actor in the health care system is constantly pointing at other players and saying, it’s their fault for these high costs. Either way, the high prices your insurance company has to pay for your drugs can simply be passed on to you through premiums, which have risen to extraordinary heights—unless you’re unlucky enough not to have insurance at all, in which case the cruel joke of the high list price lands on your head. The average premium for a family employer-sponsored plan is now more than $20,000 a year.

Part of the outrage at Gilead was directed at their decision to charge two prices for the drug. The government will pay $390 per dose, but for privately insured patients, the cost will be $520 per dose, which adds $980 to the cost of receiving the drug for a 10-day treatment course. Patients who owe co-insurance or a deductible and haven’t met their out-of-pocket maximum may be expected to pay a big chunk of this. This is outrageous, but it’s also routine. Hospitals always charge privately insured or uninsured patients far more than they charge Medicare, which sets the prices it will pay. A RAND study found hospitals charge private patients 241 percent of what they charge the government; some hospitals in the study charged as much as 400 percent of Medicare prices. Just as with drug companies’ bleating that they simply must charge more to make up for their spending on research and development, hospitals protest that they must charge privately insured patients more to make up for their losses on caring for government-insured patients.

For patients without government insurance, prices are not just massively inflated. They are also mostly inscrutable, and vary from patient to patient, even within the same hospital. Covid-19 treatments are no exception. A New York Times story from this week documented the different prices paid by Texans who received tests for Covid-19 at the Austin Emergency Center. Two friends who got the same test with the same negative result received wildly different bills: The one who paid cash was billed $199, and the one who paid with insurance was billed $6,408. The insurance company negotiated the hospital down to $1,128, of which the patient owed $928. (After media coverage of her bill, it was dropped entirely.) Remember, insurance companies are supposed to be able to negotiate better prices with hospitals; instead, they’re so good at negotiating that they end up paying five times what a patient who forgot their insurance card would pay. Apparently their lead negotiator is Lucille Bluth.

Once again, the answer is simple. If hospitals have to perform such complicated bullshit-billing to balance their books—or to make huge profits and pay their executives handsomely, and really, what’s the difference—then we can make it much easier for them by doing away with the entire payment model, and funding hospitals based on how much care they perform instead. And if insurance companies are so bad at regulating and reducing hospital prices, we ought to relieve them of this duty and implement single-payer.

Insurance companies have not proven themselves to be good partners in fighting the pandemic, not that this was ever a remote possibility. Reporter Andrew Perez recently noted that the Trump administration has allowed insurers to refuse to cover the cost of Covid-19 testing for employment purposes—that is, tests that employees may need to take to return to work—and must only cover “medically necessary” testing. (It is hard to imagine who would stick a swab that far up their nose for non-medical, non-necessary reasons.) One patient, whose complaint to the Washington state insurance commission was obtained by Perez, said her insurance plan had declined to cover the cost of the test she was required to get in order to return to her job. That patient was herself a medical provider, an optometrist. We are making doctors pay for their own coronavirus tests before they can return to work.


A press release from America’s Health Insurance Plans, the insurance industry’s lobby group in Washington, detailed a study it commissioned on the high cost of testing for coronavirus, presumably to make us all feel so grateful for their sacrifice in paying for these tests. The release noted, with an apparently straight face, that “Every American should be able to get the COVID-19 tests they need,” and claimed that “Health insurance providers stand ready to work with employers, public health leaders and policymakers to develop and execute robust strategies to protect Americans and reduce the risks of spreading of the virus.” Strategies that, apparently, include declining to cover the cost of tests. As ex-industry insiders like Wendell Potter have revealed, this sort of behavior is not just unsurprising, it is seen internally as necessary; they must do whatever it takes to impress their Wall Street shareholders. We cannot and should not expect insurance companies to be generous in their coverage of coronavirus testing or treatment.

Insurance companies promised to waive all cost-sharing for coronavirus testing and treatment, to much fanfare. But employees on “self-insured” insurance plans, where the employer pays for treatment costs and which cover the bulk of employer-sponsored insured workers, may find themselves out of luck if their employer declines to waive cost-sharing, which many will do. Journalists have already written stories about patients facing large bills for their coronavirus care, including patients who were supposed to be covered but still received “harassing” calls from hospital billing departments, or for doing the right thing and getting tested. It is so often the case that once the media reveals the startling costs of an outrageous medical bill, the aggrieved patient is swiftly relieved of having to pay those costs. But you have to wonder how many such bills are escaping the media’s attention—given the quickness by which those so exposed cave without a fight, these exceptions must be exceedingly rare.

The stories of relatively small-bore grifting that surrounds the current administration and its coronavirus response—the investor who ripped off “not for medical use” labels from inadequate masks, the standard self-dealing—feel all too representative of the Trump era. It feels inevitable that having Trump, who is so rich and so famous because of his unpunished grifting, in the Oval Office would inspire hundreds of lesser crooks to imitate him, knowing that a country that allows such an obvious fraud to become president would probably let them get away with the same crimes. But there are daily, ongoing grifts that pre-date Trump’s election, perpetrated by major American institutions. Of these, there is no deadlier scam than the American health care system. Drug companies will soak patients for the crime of wanting to stay alive. Hospitals will charge completely made-up prices for coronavirus tests and treatment. Insurance companies will find ways not to cover treatment. All the while, people will continue to avoid care because they know the ruin that faces them if they seek it. If the pandemic doesn’t shake us out of this madness, maybe nothing will.
 
The haircut/re-opening "protests" were heavily astroturfed, for what it's worth.

I said that here the minute they started and was basically yelled at for not comprehending their economic anxiety.
 
I said that here the minute they started and was basically yelled at for not comprehending their economic anxiety.
Yeah. But your overall point is well taken; there are people in America who were going to find a way to be pissed off and non-compliant with this no matter what.
 
In positive news for a moment...

https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/kentucky-democrats-flip-state-senate-suburbs-180927182.html

Democrats won a special election to fill a vacant Kentucky state Senate seat this week, flipping a district Republicans held for decades and signaling that the suburban shift that helped create a blue wave in 2018’s midterm elections may continue in 2020.

Dr. Karen Berg defeated Republican candidate Bill Ferko by 14 points to win the race to replace longtime GOP state Sen. Ernie Harris, who retired in April after holding the seat in suburban Louisville for 25 years. Berg narrowly lost to Harris in the 2018 general election, but will now hold the seat until that term expires in 2022. The win marked the first time Kentucky Democrats have flipped a state Senate seat since 2010.

Berg’s victory, which was announced Tuesday after officials finished counting absentee ballots in the June 23 election, will barely dent Republicans’ grip on the Kentucky state Senate, where the GOP still holds a supermajority. But it is the latest sign of trouble for the GOP in the suburbs of Kentucky’s largest city and may foreshadow further problems for the party in November as its suburban base continues to erode under President Donald Trump.
 
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