N. B. The horrific Las Vegas shooting (earlier on page for details) took place prior to putting together the pundit round-up and no pieces here cover it. Thoughts and prayers are never enough. We as a country took no action after Newtown, though individual states did better. And here we are. Again.
Josh Kraushaar/National Journal:
America under President Trump isn’t becoming an autocracy, as some recently feared. Our country’s democratic institutions have demonstrated their resilience, the media have rediscovered the importance of checking those in power, and the bureaucracy has demonstrated that simple inertia can overwhelm even the most committed demagogues.
I’ve struggled how to precisely describe this moment in American history, in which the leader of the free world is an erratic, demagogic celebrity who dominates every nook and cranny of public life like no president before him—yet is so weak institutionally that he can’t pass any legislation with his party fully in charge. In February, I anticipatedthat the Trump administration was “more likely to look like a tragi-comedy, not a horror story.” Still, that doesn’t fully capture the uniqueness of this moment in American politics.
The Trump administration resembles an American version of a monarchy, in which the head of state consumes outsize attention but has ceded significant power to trusted advisers, his party’s leadership in Congress, and well-placed bureaucrats across the government.
Dave Weigel and Elise Viebeck/WaPo:
“I don’t know him, I don’t know him,” said Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio).
“I haven’t taken a deep dive into his record,” said White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
“Let’s give him a chance,” said Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.).
For most Republicans, Roy Moore’s run for Senate in Alabama is a subject best avoided.
Megan Garber/Atlantic:
The Mona Lisa Presidency
“The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled,” the art critic John Berger famously noted, and while that has always been true, it is perhaps truer now, at this moment, during this presidency, as the world moves in the orbit of a leader who regularly blurs the line between fact and fiction. The invented phone calls. The invented celebrations. The crowd size. The wire taps. The birth certificate. In June, The New York Times published a feature titled “Trump’s Lies”; produced in exceptionally small font, and condensed to run the width of a webpage, one must nonetheless scroll for a long while to reach the end of the list. As of September 8, according to The Washington Post’s tracker, Trump had made 1,145 “false and misleading claims” in his 232 days in office alone—claims that proceed to infiltrate the American psyche.
Whether the lies are the result of a strategic mind or a careless one, the general effect is the same: epistemic exhaustion, among Trump’s fans and detractors alike. Systemic uncertainty. Widespread mistrust. Citizens who feel empowered to dismiss not only the president’s words, but also each other’s, with sneers of “fake news.” The presidency will always revolve around the particularities of the person who holds it; the office’s current occupant, however, is particularly volatile in mind and mood. (“Ahead of his departure for Paris,” CNN reported in July, “Trump spent much of his time watching television and huddled with top advisers. … And his mood ranged from furious to frustrated, but also defiant.”) While any White House will issue words that aim to spin and deflect, the words of this one—“1,145 false and misleading claims”—are particularly unreliable as reflections of the decisions the president will make on behalf of the country.
Danny Vinik/Politico:
Aging: 5 icebergs Washington is ignoring
National policy is way behind on dealing with an immense demographic shift. Here’s where it could come back to bite us.
It isn’t just Social Security that is going to explode federal spending. Medicare and Medicaid, the health care entitlements, are expected to balloon the debt as well. While Washington often blames out-of-control price increases for rising health care costs, the truth is much simpler: Older people are, understandably, more expensive to care for. According the Congressional Budget Office’s latest projections, spending on the major health care programs and Social Security is projected to rise from 11 percent of gross domestic product this year to 16.9 percent of GDP in 2047—and more than half of that rise is due entirely to aging.
The above demographic facts are part of the equation of Medicare for All (which isn’t — I am told — really Medicare for All.) Accepting that it isn’t, the demographic time bomb still needs to be figured in, and might be a good selling point in terms of the need for decreasing costs as well as uniform application (i.e. “when you get older, everyone needs health care and we need to be treated the same. Especially true as the large boomer demo ages. So let’s do it in a cost effective way”).
As for the Bernie Sanders proposal, here are are mid September discussions of what it is/isn’t and where it stands with the public (the article including polling):
NY Times:
Canada has a decentralized national health insurance program, which provides universal coverage and reimburses private health care providers. While Mr. Sanders’s model would provide comprehensive services including mental health, dental and vision care, provinces and territories in Canada administer their own programs, so benefits vary and are usually not as generous.
Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia — the three provinces where three-quarters of Canadians live — provide only emergency optometry and dental care, with some exceptions for children and the elderly.
The British system differs from Mr. Sanders’s plan in structure. The National Health Service owns and runs hospitals, which British citizens can visit usually free of charge, and has contracts with doctors. Under Mr. Sanders’s plan, every American would receive insurance through Medicare, but the government would not run hospitals.
NY Times, and note the several groups with “new taxes”:
How Medicare for All Would Affect You
People insured through work would have new taxes, but no more premiums.
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156 million people
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People with Medicaid would have more choices, but possibly higher taxes.
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74 million people
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People currently with Medicare would have more generous coverage.
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56 million people
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The uninsured would all get health care.
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28 million people
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People who buy their own insurance would have new taxes, but less out-of-pocket spending.
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22 million people
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Veterans would keep their existing health care system.
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9 million people
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Native Americans could also keep their current source of care.
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2 million people
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To get an idea of the opposition, which would be intense (posting for information is not an endorsement of the claims):
Chris Conover/Forbes:
In part 1, I showed that the new federal taxes required by Senator Sanders' Medicare-for-All plan would impose a hidden cost of $1.1 trillion in deadweight losses in 2017 alone. This is the #1 reason his single-payer plan is a singularly bad idea.
In part 2, I showed that the Sanders single-payer health care plan would add more than one half trillion dollars in waste to an American health system that already has far too much waste, making waste the #2 reason this plan is a bad idea.
The #3 reason Medicare-for-All as conceived by Senator Sanders is a bad idea is because of the inevitable rationing it will produce. In other well-known single-payer systems, this rationing takes several forms, including restrictions on the availability of treatments or, more commonly, rationing by waiting.
Don’t expect friendly treatment of the proposal. See also There are 3 types of single-payer 'concern trolls' — and they all want to undermine universal healthcare, which is a good but incompletely persuasive read.
Here’s a more rational critique, from NPR, including reviewing what it does (and that it’s not simply expanding Medicare), and the biggest current objection (besides disruption) is the pay for :
Payment is unclear. A generous plan that covers all Americans is going to require more revenue. There's no exact plan for how to pay for Sanders' bill, but he did on Wednesday afternoon release a list of potential payment options. Among the proposals: a 7.5 percent payroll tax on employers, a 4 percent individual income tax and an array of taxes on wealthier Americans, as well as corporations. In addition, Sanders' plan says the end of big health insurance-related tax expenditures, like employers' ability to deduct insurance premiums, would save trillions of dollars.
Among the consequences would be consumers getting a better idea of what health care costs, as less of it is hidden within ESI (employer sponsored insurance). Still, expect sticker shock when that happens (see above comments about taxes). The Sanders camp is well aware the payment side needs work, hence some of their proposals.
We need, with the new permission structure to allow discussion (and that’s the beauty of his proposal — mainstreaming the idea), the think tanks and academics to start tackling the details.
Meanwhile:
This is an important read, for perspective, from an experienced disaster manager:
Trump wasted days by not being on top of the Puerto Rico disaster. Days we can’t have back.
Matt Yglesias/Vox:
Puerto Rico is all our worst fears about Trump coming real
To an extent, the United States of America held up surprisingly well from Inauguration Day until September 20th or so. The ongoing degradation of American civic institutions, at a minimum, did not have an immediate negative impact on the typical person’s life.
But the world is beginning to draw a straight line from the devastation in Puerto Rico straight to the White House. Trump’s instinct so far is to turn the island’s devastation into another front in culture war politics, a strategy that could help his own political career survive.
The rest of us will just have to pray for good luck.
Ingrates.
Note date of tweet:
Carla Minet/WaPo:
Even Trump, who declared earlier this year that U.S. taxpayers shouldn’t “bail out” Puerto Rico and then made a point after the hurricane of insisting that Wall Street be paid back for debts it holds here, is coming. What will his visit on Tuesday produce, besides a new circus?
Puerto Rico needs help to manage the immediate emergency. And we need money from the federal government, from international foundations, from our diaspora. But we also need to be allowed to decide where to invest those resources and quickly start the path to rebuilding, for Puerto Ricans and by Puerto Ricans. This natural disaster should not be an opportunity for the same people who have caused our economic disaster, who have been benefiting from our tax-exempt bonds, our industrial decrees and our generous subsidies — which somehow always land in the pockets of foreign multinationals, vulture funds and millionaires, keeping us in the top jurisdictions for inequality in the world.
Let’s recover and rebuild another way. Or this latest crisis will surely go down as the worst.
Wanna game out 2020 against the eminently beatable Trump? Here’s a fun guide from Jason Zengerle/NY Times:
Would Mr. Sanders or Mr. Biden have won in 2016? We’ll never know — but it’s unlikely either will in 2020.