He's owning up to this being a grandstand bill off the bat, which is an improvement at least.
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Bernie Sanders Will Introduce Doomed Medicare For All Bill to "Force a Conversation"
- Thread starter shawnbuddy
- Start date
GoldenEye 007
Member
The Democrats have no power and are currently marginalized in Congress. They have nothing but time when it comes to legislative issues. About the only thing they can do is symbolic actions like this - which they have been doing.
That way, there is at least somewhat less ammo when GOP and "both sides" types come along trying to say Dems have been doing noting but being obstructionists.
shawnbuddy
Member
... I'm pretty sure you were?
shawnbuddy
Member
We have different understandings of the term or something, I guess.
Was it not sarcasm? I'm sorry it really seemed like it was.
Edit - like, you said 'why waste all that effort' as some kind of dig at Sanders right? And I'm saying that's actually literally true.
won't vote to approve cancer drugs for kids, but will introduce some bullshit legislation he knows won't pass
at some point is Sanders going to go back to doing actual legislative work, or is he just going to grandstand and make stupid-ass points until 2020?
at some point is Sanders going to go back to doing actual legislative work, or is he just going to grandstand and make stupid-ass points until 2020?
"Everyone should have health care" is a stupid-ass point. Also why doesn't he get to work passing real legislation in a republican controlled federal government. Come on Bernie do you do anything other than give small children cancer
Uh...because the goal should be to have substantive and meaningful legislation ready to pass when Democrats take control?
Have people really learned nothing from the current events in Congress? Literally one of the critical errors the Republicans committed to put them in this situation was passing "symbolic" repeal bills that they knew could never become law because they weren't well-constructed or thought out! This put them in the position of not being able to explain why they took so many votes on bills they claimed were meaningful but couldn't pass anything once they actually had power to act, revealing they were lying all along.
Why in God's name would you want to do the same thing to our party?
I want Bernie introducing this bill -- like I said, he's actually late on it -- but it should, to the greatest possible extent, be an actual, effective bill that we could actually support and pass. If it's not, we should criticize it and improve it. I think it's a good policy and we should be shopping it and getting it ready to pass. But if there's no way to write an actual Medicare for All bill that people like, I'd really like to know that right now before people start running on it for 2020!
If it is, in fact, an unpassable bill that would be disastrous if actually made law (which I am not assuming it is, because I think Bernie knows better), then it would be extremely irresponsible for Bernie to introduce it.
shawnbuddy
Member
It is literally true. The bill might as well be pictures of ducks stapled together for the chance he has at passing it, so no, he's not going to do the work to make a real Medicare For All Bill.
Yeah and I'm saying i agree but without the weird resentful part
GoldenEye 007
Member
He ran as one and caucuses as one in Congress. For the purposes of his position, he's a Democrat.
TurnipFritters
Member
It would be good and cool to start working on an actual bill somewhere between now and 2020 (the sooner the better!), but it's like, not the end of the world that they aren't putting one out in 2017.
Unknown Soldier
Member
People who create threads with titles like that aren't interested in actual honest discussion anyways.
shawnbuddy
Member
It's a lot easier to understand Bernie when you realize it's "your" party. It's not his party. It's like that old Lone Ranger joke. "What do you mean 'our,' Kemosabe?"
A thread title that accurately describes the bill and its intentions, per Sanders himself?
No, this is false. Bernie is not a Democrat the way Sprite is not a heavily advertised soft drink. Saying he's not a Democrat is part of his branding operation. In practice everything he does for the benefit of the Democratic Party, which is why he's on the Democratic outreach team. Because he's a Democrat!
Realistically everything is about positioning the Dems towards a unified goal once the Congressional makeup changes. The same things happened on the lead up to the ACA, coalitions have to start somewhere. What they land with is always going to be radically different than what is proposed at the jump but the effort has to at least start somewhere. So long as the effort is more substantive than the empty rhetoric of the GOP for the past near decade.
Yeah what even are scare quotes anyway
Do you really not see how the diction, especially given the context of this site, might not come off as a bit leading?
Exactly.
Those aren't scare quotes.
Hitlersaurus Christ
Banned
If this makes it to a vote, any democrat that votes against it should be primaried.
...And drowned, for that matter. After living in a country with a 1st world healthcare system and affordable medication I absolutely dread returning to the US.
...And drowned, for that matter. After living in a country with a 1st world healthcare system and affordable medication I absolutely dread returning to the US.
Normally Bernie shenanigans are annoying but in this case I think the public is ready to hear about this proposal because they've finally been exposed to how ludicrous and corrupt our existing healthcare options are, instead of just not knowing any better.
A guy was on MSNBC last week FREAKING out that healthcare might be socialized, but literally had no argument beyond the word "socialism." Couldn't push back on costs, clarity or even bureaucracy.
I moved to the States from the UK in 1996 and discovered that a gigantic decades long con job had been played on the American public by healthcare and insurance businesses. Most Americans simply had no idea there were better ways to do this, and frequently expressed ridiculous falsehoods propagated by corporations and congress.
You have all been lied to, and somehow bought into the lie.
A guy was on MSNBC last week FREAKING out that healthcare might be socialized, but literally had no argument beyond the word "socialism." Couldn't push back on costs, clarity or even bureaucracy.
I moved to the States from the UK in 1996 and discovered that a gigantic decades long con job had been played on the American public by healthcare and insurance businesses. Most Americans simply had no idea there were better ways to do this, and frequently expressed ridiculous falsehoods propagated by corporations and congress.
You have all been lied to, and somehow bought into the lie.
GoldenEye 007
Member
Lots of hypothetical vitriol towards Democrats, who have been as effective as they can be in stopping as much trash as possible. But none towards the GOP.
So you're going to tell me that you don't even see that it's a reasonable interpretation that maybe the reason those words in particular are quoted is some sort of rhetorical device?
I'll blame the person communicating with me here.
El_Tiguere
Member
THIS. Show the American people that we are on their side, NOT on the side of health insurance racketeers.
Is it possible for even five minutes to have a discussion that isn't about whether the posters in the discussion are being disingenuous or secretly hate the candidate you preferred in the previous primary, but instead actually about the topic that is being mooted for discussion?
shawnbuddy
Member
I guess that's why he's always attacking it and painting it as the evil elite establishment!
Uh is it something that Bernie Sanders himself actually said
Sure, but if someone's going to tell someone that's a totally implausible reading I'm going to point out that it isn't.
Well, he has to build up his leftist credentials somehow.
I mean, maybe the more relevant question here is, if Bernie is not a Democrat and doesn't care about the Democratic Party, why do you think the Democrats made him head of outreach? Is your theory that they're idiots? Or do they understand what Bernie's doing and value it and want to encourage it?
Why not just say "No" instead of writing all those extra words?
Pigeon do you think that op's thread title and subsequent posts in this thread were made with that goal in mind
GoldenEye 007
Member
He ran as a Democrat and again for the purposes of his position is a Democrat. Also, McConnell, along with Ryan, have been massively embarrassed by their lack of direction and accomplishments. A unified Dem front had to happen to allow for that.
I have plenty of criticisms of the party too. Doesn't mean I'm not in practice a Democrat.
I mean why engage in any discussion on this site ever? I want to.
Also, I think it's odd that you're quoting me since I seem to be making the least strong statement on the matter.
I don't care.
Why do you care? The OP's intentions are irrelevant to my choices.
What do you think of the actual bill and Bernie's intentions to introduce it?
shawnbuddy
Member
The words in quotes are the assessment of what Bernie is doing from the NPR article.
Nobody read the articles.
It appears to be reporter's paraphrase, making the quotes grammatically incorrect because they're not a direct quote. It's a mistake, but there's no malice given that Sanders has been owning up to the fact that this bill will fail and it's a stunt. It accurately describes Bernie's description of what he hopes to achieve.
Hell, I've been defending him on this in the thread.
The OP's intentions are exactly as irrelevant to your choices as mine are.
I'm not sure why you care about me caring about a third party.
I usually appreciate you as a poster, but I really don't get what you're doing here.
To answer your question, I don't think much of it because it isn't particularly important and doesn't mean very much.
I didn't really have a problem with Bernie voting against that cancer drug bill, because it was obvious it was going to pass. I'm sure if his vote was needed -- like it was for the ACA vote -- I'm sure he would have voted yes.
Because I'm an easily baited rage case who gets mad at people who are just shamelessly disingenuous
Anyway I'm fully in support of Bernie doing this, and I think that any divisions it creates within the party will be ultimately productive.
shawnbuddy
Member
I think they saw that he was going to take a chunk of young voters with him if they didn't extend some olive branches after the extremely acrimonious primary election in which they played the bad guy. This way they just get these passive-agressive attacks and hardliners like Our Revolution, not a full-scale populist revolt. But I'm driving things off topic, sorry.
Aaron Strife
Banned
Maybe he wanted to wait out the AHCA fight. The Democrats put up a united front against ACA repeal and its billion incarnations, and having the most well-known senator in the country be like "yeah, ACA does suck, here's my bill to replace it" might have undercut those efforts.
The game plan for the first seven months of Trump's presidency was "protect the ACA." Now that the effort to kill it seems dead, we can move onto talking about how to improve the healthcare system in America. The timing makes it clear that we heard out the GOP's ideas - they were terrible and couldn't pass. Here's ours.
Conyers has been introducing his bill at the beginning of every session, it's a tradition at this point.
Hitlersaurus Christ
Banned
Uh, vitriol towards the GOP doesn't need to be stated. Of course they wouldn't support it. The point is that any Dems who vote against single payer might as well be one of them GOP.
If you're a white male.
Some people don't have the luxury of making healthcare their only voting issue.
I don't think it's that complicated! I find it immensely tedious to read a thread about a topic I think is potentially interesting that then gets derailed into a conversation about the goals or internal thought processes of individual posters in the thread.
For one thing, it is literally impossible to prove, for obvious reasons, so the entire conversation will circle without end and hinge on individual perceptions, which themselves are tainted by tribal perspectives. It's like Rashomon for yelling at people on the internet.
For another, it's actually irrelevant! If introducing this bill is good or bad, it is good or bad regardless of the motives of the poster talking about them. "I don't trust the person making this argument" is, at best, circumstantial evidence against an argument. But it's not evidence at all against the conclusion of the argument. So if people think the bill is good, or bad, or necessarily, or poorly-written, or whatever, then they should just make that argument directly.
So I wish people would just stop doing that. And yes, I mean it on my side as well as on "their side". If you think the OP's post is actually itself derailing or destroying the thread, that's one thing, but it looks more like just not wanting the thread to exist because you disagree with the perspective of the poster.
As I understand it, way back in the day, PoliGAF OT was created specifically because political discussions in OT would constantly proliferate and degenerate into personalities exactly like this.
Eh, I mostly agree, but as I noted, I think it's extremely important for the bill to be, as much as possible, substantive and effective. We should be viewing this as a bill that President Gillibrand* will sign in 2021.
* deliberate trolling
Hitlersaurus Christ
Banned
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