El Chisme

this bad boy can fit 1/5th of economy in

1/6th actually (% of gdp):

I’m preaching to the choir as I often do, but none of this started with Trump and I’m starting to think it’s impossible to get normies to understand that

Shit will have to go down for normies to get it. That being said, we saw some people who would rather die than face the truth about COVID.

Yep and Democrats fought every step of the way to prevent a public option (aka Medicare for all) from being part of the bill.

For the young people out there, you have to realize that there was no point in the modern era of the Democratic party where they were the good guys

So many people think that whatever happens under the current president, as reported by the media, is their sole fault. This is why we have the liberals at brunch meme because the reporting on the border and other issues is much more positively phrased when Democrats are in power so they assume no changes are needed. Then the reporting changes when a Republican is in office and they get mad over the same issues.

I think people are afraid to think for themselves about what's going on, they just want the algorithm to serve them their opinion. This is probably why propaganda and sponsored content are so effective.

Even the insurance companies are losing in this. The expiration of tax premiums will mean that millions of healthy working-age Americans will be forced to drop their health care- and that is the demographic that subsidizes the high costs of elderly end-of-life care. They're gonna have to squeeze the remaining members even harder to keep the same profits. The real beneficiaries are the the vultures that divert federal funds allocated from the ACA to themselves under this crony Trump administration.

Access to care, if you can afford it.

not a seppo, but i think it's something to do with medicare/retirement being so close (the highest risk profile), some shit with those subsidies themselves obfuscating risk related pricing (how the damn insurance should work in the first place, but whatever), and probably something else to make it edge case-y

It's because individual health insurance is basically just betting against the insurer on the insurer's terms. The risk isn't spread out and there's no power to negotiate prices with the insurer or the providers. It's like gambling on whether or not a 64 year old person will have a catastrophic injury costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills.

Medicare 4 all is the liberal option. We need to fully nationalize the health system and for the most part, totally rebuild it given how terribly warped insurance has made the industry.

Repealing the ACA would just mean nobody would have insurance again.

What an absurd comment

I took a 50% paycut when I moved to Europe and shit like this has convinced me my compensation went up based on healthcare benefits alone. Not even including walkability, public transit, PTO, childcare, safety, etc.

That's just...wow that's awful.

Same for the UK

I hope people don't dogpile you.

You aren't wrong but you also need to realize that it goes a lot deeper than elections. When liberal democracy (capitalism) runs dry on new resources and labor to exploit, this is the kind of thing that can be expected to happen.

I don't think the Democrats would give us this exact fuckery in 2025, however they've shown themselves to be completely incapable of resolving the problems that brought us to this moment. They are even anti-solution, just "things will get worse, but more slowly" vs "things bad now".

This was decades in the making and there's no easy path out of it for the US.

Sure, elections will always have consequences, but the problem with American elections in particular is that the parties have traded places every 4-8 years basically since FDR. The past 50 years, the Dems have been the kicking-the-can-down-the-road party and lost any sort of interest in actually fighting for anything. And now we're here. If we had a (D) president now then we would have an (R) in 2028 and this would all be moot anyways. American institutions have been rotting since at least Truman--it will take much much more than a few election cycles to get out of this pit. The Democrats are going the way of the Whigs at this point, inshallah.

Correct. If bloodless neoliberal ghouls like obamna and 99% of dems didn’t create a more conservative version of Romneycare, we might not be in this mess.

FYI hexbear doesn't have downvotes, like we literally can't downvote people. it's just that no one agrees with the sentiment you were expressing, that this is all somehow because the orange man is bad, somehow everything that is wrong with the foundations of our world were created by the orange man, rather thatn the logical, expected outcome based on the way things were before, and the way they were before that.

the consequences have been piling up for centuries

orange man is bad, but is everything america does and has done