Gleanings from the Hellhole

Happy Holidays, Y'all...

George finally reminded me I haven't read much off Seattle's DSA site, so.....

https://seattledsa.org/dispatches/

Last month's Hellhole:
https://seattledsa.org/2018/11/the-hellhole-week-of-11-26/

LOTS of good stuff here, and I wanted to note a few actions we could think about for the new year:

1. A lot of the news in the Dispatches has to do with affordable housing, and that is already a sort of an issue here; a better phrase in Pendleton might be 'tolerable' housing...though.  In any case...we should think about having an Eviction Action committee to help people who do not know how to defend themselves from evictions.  Ideas about that, anyone?  Anyone have experience being evicted they'd like to share?

2. Definitely need to think about single-payer health insurance.  Lots of stuff in the above Hellhole on that: 'Privatized health insurance leaves no assurances'.  I will also link here:

https://web.stanford.edu/~jay/health_class/Readings/Lecture01/arrow.pdf

...for the definitive Ken Arrow article (it is very dense, but the conclusions are definite)...and some of Paul Krugman's analysis of the feasibility of single-payer...

Single payer has always been economically feasible!  Lots of countries do it; we do it for everyone 65 and older. It’s really quite weird that we talk as if single-payer would be a huge, radical departure from American practice when so many people are on Medicare and Medicaid.

In fact, the government pays a significantly higher share of health bills than private insurers do, even in America. If we went to government provision of all insurance, we’d pay more in taxes but less in premiums, and the overall burden of health spending would probably fall, because single-payer systems tend to be cheaper than market-based.

In the United States, unlike most other wealthy countries that have managed to create superior health care systems, one major political party is committed to opposing the expansion of health care access.

And because we've persisted so long in a hybrid mix of a government-funded and market-based insurance system, interests have become entrenched that will fight any attempt to overhaul the status quo.

The question instead is political feasibility: are the votes there to completely replace private insurance through employers? Remember, employer-based coverage still works well for most people and creates a huge stake for major interest groups. I don’t see it being eliminated in one fell swoop.

What’s more likely is a limited move toward greater public involvement: allowing buy-in to Medicare, maybe moving the lower age limit down to 55 or lower, expanding Medicaid further. We’re probably going to move incrementally toward public provision, not in one big bang.

Even these smaller steps will be hard to achieve because the GOP's grip on power in the Senate — especially with a 60-vote majority needed to pass major legislation — severely limits the ability for progressive legislation to gain traction. But, as we've learned from the Obamacare saga, once health care access is expanded, it is incredibly difficult to roll it back.

So if the Democratic Party can continue to ratchet up the scope of government-run health insurance, the GOP is unlikely to be able to tear it down.

Keep in mind...ACA was a compromise, not an end in itself.  Medicare-for-all would still be a vastly better deal, but ACA is what Obama's team knew they could get.  And millions of Americans now realize that 'socialized medicine' really is better than nothing.