Lurker > Antifar

So does happiness just increase with senility? At least I have something to look forward to now lol.

Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg sells his health-care plan as a moderate alternative to Medicare-for-all offering a government-sponsored plan to those who want it while letting others keep their private and employer-sponsored insurance.

But the South Bend, Ind., mayors plan has a catch: If you choose not to enroll in any coverage, you could still be on the hook for thousands of dollars. Under Buttigiegs proposal, Americans who lack coverage would be automatically enrolled in the government plan, potentially saddling them with a big bill at the end of the year for retroactive coverage.

Buttigiegs campaign has said the proposal will ensure the candidates promise of universal health coverage without eliminating private insurance, as some of his more liberal opponents have proposed.

But critics say the policy represents an expanded version of one of the least popular aspects of President Obamas 2010 health-care law: the individual mandate, which fined Americans for not having health insurance. The mandate was repealed by the 2017 Republican tax law and ruled unconstitutional last week by an appeals court. None of the other leading Democratic hopefuls have reprised it as part of their health-care plans.

Mayor Buttigiegs retroactive enrollment is just a supercharged version of the unpopular individual mandate that hes trying to obscure with misleading rhetoric, said Matt Bruenig, head of the Peoples Policy Project, a left-wing think tank.

Instead of paying a $695 fine at the end of the year for being uninsured, you are hit with a bill to pay an entire year of premiums that could be ten times that amount, he said. This will be a political nightmare.

A Buttigieg campaign spokeswoman denied the candidate had misled voters and said the potential back payments are justified because those making them are effectively insured throughout the year. The choice Buttigieg sells to voters, the campaign said in a statement, is not between having insurance or not, but rather where to get that insurance.

Buttigiegs approach is part of his broader attempt to appeal to moderate voters who have helped propel the mayor to the top of the Democratic presidential field, particularly in the early voting states.

Buttigieg has criticized Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) for backing Medicare-for-all, which would require more than 150 million Americans to switch from their existing private health insurance plans to the new $30 trillion single-payer system.

Buttigieg markets his $1.5 trillion plan as a more centrist and less expensive approach in part because it offers patients the freedom to choose between a government plan and a private insurer, rather than forcing all Americans onto the government plan.

We must step up and deliver Medicare for all who want it while preserving your freedom to decide whether you want it, Buttigieg said at Cornell College earlier this month.

You take a version of Medicare, a public plan. We make it available to every single American. But Im going trust you to decide whether you want it, Buttigieg said in Davenport, Iowa, also earlier this month. You can stay on a [private] plan if youd rather. Or you can come to the public plan if you want.

Buttigiegs health plan has gotten less attention than the Medicare-for-all proposal supported by Sanders and Warren, but may garner further scrutiny in the coming weeks as voters seek more information about the moderates vying for the Democratic nomination for president.

Buttigieg, former vice president Joe Biden and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) have all released policies that would create a new government insurer a public option that would compete with private health insurance.

Though Biden has publicly said he would bring back the Obamacare mandate, it is not in his campaigns official health-care plan. Bidens plan would automatically place people in government insurance, but only if they are low-income and qualify for free coverage, like Medicaid.

Buttigiegs plan aims to achieve universal insurance by automatically enrolling everyone without insurance in government plans.

Buttigiegs campaign has not identified how it envisions charging Americans who do not make their premium payments, but the campaign has said that all premiums would be capped at 8.5 percent of income. It is unclear how many people could be affected by retroactive enrollment under Buttigiegs plan, and the campaign did not provide an estimate. The Buttigieg campaign said one option for those who do not pay their health premiums is to charge these people through their yearly tax filings.

Before its repeal, the Obamacare mandate hit people without insurance with a $695 annual fine or a charge worth 2.5 percent of their income, depending on which was higher. Critics say Buttigiegs plan could leave people with year-end bills worth more than $7,000.

The ACAs mandate was never an actual mandate it was simply a penalty if you didnt have coverage. This is really a mandate to have coverage, said Larry Levitt, a health-care expert at the Kaiser Family Foundation, which studies health care issues, of Buttigiegs plan.

Jared Bernstein, a former economic adviser to Biden, said these kinds of penalties are necessary to achieve universal coverage. Bernstein noted that without the retroactive penalty, consumers would have no incentive to sign up rather than simply wait to become sick before seeking care.

Youre eligible for a penalty, which makes sense in my view because otherwise you have a free-rider problem, Bernstein said.

If you want to cover everybody and Petes plan gets awfully close you need a big enough risk pool to control costs. And to control costs, you need two things: a mandate, and to subsidize people who cant afford the costs That kind of mechanism is integral to the architecture of any plan that gets to universal coverage.

Others who have studied the policy disputed that it resembled the ACA mandate.

In the ACA mandate, you had to pay something for nothing. Youre paying a penalty at the end of the year. This isnt that You are getting the benefit of health insurance and walking around with financial protection in the event of illness and injury, said Christen Linke Young, who has written extensively about retroactive taxation for the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit policy group. Young is not on the campaign, but aides consulted her research as they crafted Buttigiegs policy.

When Republicans challenged the mandate as unconstitutional in 2012, the Supreme Court upheld the policy in a 5-4 decision. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. was the deciding vote as the court ruled that the m

FORMER NEW YORK CITY mayor and multibillionaire Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg used prison labor to make campaign calls. Through a third-party vendor, the Mike Bloomberg 2020 campaign contracted New Jersey-based call center company ProCom, which runs calls centers in New Jersey and Oklahoma. Two of the call centers in Oklahoma are operated out of state prisons. In at least one of the two prisons, incarcerated people were contracted to make calls on behalf of the Bloomberg campaign.

According to a source, who asked for anonymity for fear of retribution, people incarcerated at the Dr. Eddie Warrior Correctional Center, a minimum-security womens prison with a capacity of more than 900, were making calls to California on behalf of Bloomberg. The people were required to end their calls by disclaiming that the calls were paid for by the Bloomberg campaign. They did not disclaim, however, that they were calling from behind bars.

The Bloomberg campaign confirmed the arrangement in an emailed statement to The Intercept. We didnt know about this and we never would have allowed it if we had, said Bloomberg spokesperson Julie Wood. We dont believe in this practice and weve now ended our relationship with the subcontractor in question.

The campaign said it did not know about the arrangement between ProCom and an undisclosed campaign vendor until The Intercept made its inquiry. The campaign then ended the relationship on Monday and said it has asked vendors to do a better job of vetting subcontractors in the future.

The use of prison labor is the continued exploitation of people who are locked up, who really have virtually no other opportunities to have employment or make money other than the opportunities given to them by prison officials, said Alex Friedman, managing editor of Prison Legal News and an advocate for incarcerated peoples rights.

John Scallan, a ProCom co-founder, said his company pays the Oklahoma minimum wage of $7.25 an hour to the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, which then pays the incarcerated people working in the call centers. The Department of Corrections website lists the maximum monthly wage for the incarcerated at $20 dollars a month, but another policy document says there is a maximum pay of $27.09 per month.

When asked if their total monthly earnings are capped at these levels, Scallan said incarcerated people who work for ProCom make far higher wages. I can tell you unequivocally that is not us, Scallan said. Some of them are making that much every day.

The Oklahoma Department of Corrections did not respond to multiple requests for comment to clarify the discrepancy, nor to answer questions about ProComs arrangement with the Bloomberg campaign.

Coming into the race late, Bloomberg has plowed millions of dollars into his long-shot bid to take the White House. According to Forbes, the former New York mayor is worth $54 billion, making most of his money from the financial information and media company that bears his name. After entering the crowded race in November, Bloombergs campaign has already hired more than 200 staffers in 21 states and spent over $76 million in television advertisements. Newsweek estimated that Bloomberg could spend billions on his campaign.

This is not the first time prison labor has been used in a federal election. In 1994, the late Republican congressperson from Washington state, Jack Metcalf, used prison labor to make campaign calls and was subsequently elected to Congress, where he served three terms.

I loved season 1 but absolutely hated 2. Should I give 3 a shot?

He sounds very healthy

Validate my feud senpai!!!!

20 fuckin hours?!

Naw, there's just literally nothing interesting about this article, other than the fact that you agree with the thesis (which, btw, I do too).

surprised that you didn't go with festivus miracle

John F. Harris is about as mainstream as the mainstream media gets. He spent 21 years at The Washington Post, including as its political editor. Then he became the founding editor of Politico, where he is now a columnist.

Last month, Harris wrote a column that I cant get out of my head. In it, he argued that political journalism suffers from centrist bias. As he explained, This bias is marked by an instinctual suspicion of anything suggesting ideological zealotry, an admiration for difference-splitting, a conviction that politics should be a tidier and more rational process than it usually is.

The bias caused much of the media to underestimate Ronald Reagan in 1980 and Donald Trump in 2016. It also helps explain the negative tone running through a lot of the coverage of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders this year.

Centrist bias, as I see it, confuses the idea of centrism (which is very much an ideology) with objectivity and fairness. Its an understandable confusion, because American politics is dominated by the two major parties, one on the left and one on the right. And the overwhelming majority of journalists at so-called mainstream outlets national magazines, newspapers, public radio, the non-Fox television networks really are doing their best to treat both parties fairly.

In doing so, however, they often make an honest mistake: They equate balance with the midpoint between the two parties ideologies. Over the years, many press critics have pointed out one weakness of this approach: false equivalence, the refusal to consider the possibility that one side of an argument is simply (or mostly) right.

But thats not the only problem. Theres also the possibility that both political parties have been wrong about something and that the solution, rather than being roughly halfway between their answers, is different from what either has been proposing.

This seemingly radical possibility turns out to be quite common, as the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. author of the classic book, The Vital Center, no less pointed out. The abolition of slavery, womens suffrage, labor rights, the New Deal, civil rights for black Americans, Reagans laissez-faire revolution and same-sex marriage all started outside the boundaries of what either party favored. The most consequential history, Harris wrote, is usually not driven by the center.

Political and economic journalism too often assumes otherwise and treats the center as inherently sensible. This years Democratic presidential campaign has been a good case study. The skeptical questions posed to the more moderate Democrats are frequently about style or tactics: Are you too old? Too young? Too rich? Too far behind in the polls?

The skeptical questions for the more progressive candidates, Sanders and Warren, often challenge the substance of their ideas: Are you too radical? Are you being realistic? And, by golly, how would you pay for it all?

I recently took a detailed look through the coverage of the wealth tax, favored by both Sanders and Warren, and centrist bias seeps through much of it. The coverage has slanted negative, filled with the worries that centrists have that the tax wouldnt work in practice or would slow economic growth.

Experts who favor a wealth tax, like Gene Sperling, Felicia Wong and Heather Boushey, or whose academic research suggests it would work, like Lily Batchelder and David Kamin, have received less attention than experts who dont like the idea. For that matter, the complaints of obscure billionaires have gotten more attention than the arguments of sympathetic experts. Billionaire whining about a wealth tax, as Ilyana Kuziemko, a Princeton economist whos sympathetic to a wealth tax told me, mostly isnt newsworthy.

Im not suggesting that journalists lather the wealth tax with praise. There are real questions about it, and journalists are supposed to be skeptical. Im also not suggesting that Sanders or Warren is necessarily the best nominee. As regular readers know, Im a moderate on Medicare, immigration and college debt, among other subjects. John Harris, for his part, confesses to a pretty strong bout of centrist bias.

But maybe thats why we recognize it and pine for more objective coverage. Not every policy question posed to Democrats needs to have a conservative assumption, and not every question posed to Republicans needs to have a liberal one. If Warren and Sanders are going to be asked whether their solutions go too far, Joe Biden should be asked whether his solutions are too timid: Mr. Vice President, many economists believe that inequality is bad for an economy, so are you doing enough to attack inequality?

Once you start thinking about centrist bias, you recognize a lot of it. It helps explain why the 2016 presidential debates focused more on the budget deficit, a topic of centrist zealotry, than climate change, almost certainly a bigger threat. (Well-funded deficit advocacy plays a role too.) Centrist bias also helps explain the credulousness of early coverage during the Iraq and Vietnam wars. Both Democrats and Republicans, after all, largely supported each war.

The world is more surprising and complicated than centrist bias imagines it to be. Sometimes, people like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are right. Even when theyre not, they deserve the same skepticism that other politicians do no less, no more.

I'd recommend Origins over Odyssey for sniping, the bows (weapons in general) don't feel as strong in Odyssey.

Is there a video of this? I need to hear this spoken out loud.