Amendment 69 was the Colorado Care amendment. Ballotpedia has the language the results:
A “yes” vote supported creating ColoradoCare, a healthcare payment system designed to finance universal healthcare for Colorado residents partly through an additional 10 percent payroll tax—two thirds paid by employers and one third by employees—providing approximately $25 billion per year in revenue. |
A “no” vote opposed this proposal, leaving the Colorado healthcare system unchanged. |
No won by more than 3:1 over Yes.
It was not just Trump supporters who voted no. Mechanically well over half of Hillary Clinton’s vote in the state voted against Amendment 69. I probably would have been one of the Clinton-No votes as I could never figure out the financing of the proposal.
So what are the lessons that need to be learned?
First, single payer has a concentrated and motivated group of supporters but they are not a majority of the Democratic party. We have revealed preferences on this in the 2007-2008 health policy proposals. In that election cycle there were three viable candidates offering healthcare plans (Obama, Clinton, Edwards) and none of them offered single payer. We also have Amendment 69 failing with at least majority Democratic opposition. We saw major Democratic influencers not come out for Amendment 69.
Secondly, this is the second major single payer failure in the past three years. Vermont stopped their exploration process because they could never make the money work well enough to get a viable proposal to send out for approval. Colorado resoundingly rejected their proposal.
Single payer, behind a Rawlsian veil of ignorance and starting fresh, makes a massive amount of sense. We do not operate in that world. The world that we live in has a healthcare system that produces winners and losers. Providers and healthy people with good insurance through either work or Medicare are either actual winners or apparent winners. Most of the losers of the current system are either amazingly diffuse (lower cash wages for most workers), already somewhat covered (disabled on Medicare or Medicaid) or politically powerless. The challenge is how to get a policy that is disruptive as all get out that mainly benefits people with low political salience and power while either hurting or causing fear in people with high political salience and power through? I don’t know how to do that. This needle threading exercise is one of the many reasons why the ACA was designed as it was as it sought to keep the status quo as visibly entrenched as possible while improving things for low political power and salience groups.
Third, single payer is hard. It is not something that can just be hand waved into existence. It is something that needs a lot of high quality nerds and experts working through odd scenarios, looking at interactions and then presenting their thoughts to the general public for a long and hard listening to the concerns, questions and suggestions of the people that will actually have to use the system. One of the major reasons why I was not gung-ho for Colorado Care is that I had not seen them do the actual financial math. They assumed they could get a 1115 Medicaid waiver and a 1332 ACA waiver even as the waiver granting authorities were indicating reluctance to grant the needed expansive waivers. They just assumed the money would be there instead of lining up cash commitments ahead of time. They also assumed Hyde and current Colorado state law would not apply to abortion and other female reproductive health care procedures. There were a lot of assumptions on the mechanics of implementation.
Single payer is hard work to implement. Lazy work turns off potential allies that may not be sufficient to form a minimally viable winning coalition but definitely necessary to that coalition.
Given today’s politics, single payer advocates will have a decade to get the hard work done of designing a plan, figuring out implementation and persuading the public including people who are current winners that this plan is better than the status quo and the uncertainty is low. That works needs to be done and Colorado is a source of good information for that work.
Yutsano
There is a state that will be first, I don’t have much doubt about that. But if you look between when Saskatchewan passed single payer to the passage of the Canada Health Act (which really made it national) it was on the scope of 20 years. And that was 30 years ago. Taiwan took 15 years and studied EVERYWHERE before setting theirs up. IT. TAKES. TIME.
laura
Or we could dust off SB 810 California Single Payer for all and see if it still makes sense in its design, funding mechanisms, and cost savings -immediate and long-term.
I recall that the Lewin Group evaluated the assumptions and found them to be accurate.
It made it through both houses of the legislature twice but vetoed by Der Gropenfeuher and shelved once the ACA was on the table.
cosima
I am a CO voter casting an absentee ballot from overseas. I exhaustively researched every ballot measure, judge, proposed amendment, etc on the ballot, and I elected to vote no. I voted no for the reason that you guessed at above — I did not see anything that indicated that they’d done the heavy financial + policy lifting that was necessary to be able to enact this sort of sweeping change.
CO is fairly heavily taxed (state taxes). I’ve never researched where it falls in comparison to other states, but was certainly well above other states that we’ve lived in. Even so, schools struggle to obtain funding, roads are a mess in many areas, and the usual challenges faced throughout the nation. There is no state that I’d rather return to if we were to move back to the US, but CO seems to me to be a long way from the sort of consensus that is needed to get this thing off the ground.
During election night I was watching a map and saw it change from blue to pink and thought ‘oh shite where will we move back to?!’ Fortunately it swung back to blue. However, it is on a razor’s edge, and their state house/senate are an accurate reflection of that. I had to work like hell to educate people about the hijinks that Gessler pulled last pres election, he’d wiped hundreds of thousands off of the rolls.
Miss Bianca
Hey, Richard – so the vote was something like 80% against and 20% for. Pretty brutal shellacking. I was one of the few who voted “yes” despite my reservations, mostly because I wanted to register support for the *idea* of single-payer. But part of what irritated me deeply was the hand-waving aspect – every time I got an email from the campaign saying, “ask your questions!” I asked specifically about the waivers – namely, what assurances they had received from the Feds that this plan was going to be eligible for and receive the waivers. Nada in response.
Then another, purely personal irritation was that the chief organizer/cheerleader for the campaign in our area was a BernieBro(Sis) turned Jill Stein supporter. I was like, “wow, way to lose sight of what’s really at stake here. Do you really think voting for Jill Stein is going to help this cause? Unless Clinton gets into the White House, there’s NO WAY this plan, even if it passed, is going to fly, because the Republicans have made dismantling Obamacare their big hill they’re prepared to die on.” It just indicated a fuzziness of thinking to me – an inability to think strategically, see the forest for the trees – that caused me, in the end, to refuse to work with her to do any advocacy for the plan.
Third, I know a lot of people were bugged by the structure of it. A constant complaint I head was, “wait, this plan is going to raise our taxes, create the single biggest line-item in the state government budget, and they’re claiming that it’s *not* a part of the government? That it’s not answerable to the Legislature? That the Legislature has no say over who gets appointed to the committee that oversees it?” I thought those were not inconsiderable objections, personally.
Blue Galangal
We have to learn clear, concise soundbites and keep hammering them over and over. I wonder what the result would have been if every time there’d been a camera in a Democrat’s face over the election season, they had pivoted to Trump’s taxes.
Roger Moore
@Miss Bianca:
That sounds like a symptom of the bigger problem of the backers not being closely connected to reality. As Richard says, switching to single payer is going to be a huge, disruptive change with a huge number of moving parts. You need somebody who can really manage the details to make that work, so it’s a huge warning sign when the people trying to get it going are obviously disconnected from political reality.
hovercraft
I appreciate this honest assessment of single payer. If we are serious about one day truly achieving universal coverage we need serious discussions about what will and won’t work. Too many progressives are simply wedded to the idea of ‘single payer’, without being able or willing to delve into the details of what it would truly take to achieve it. As the president has said on numerous occasions, in an ideal world starting with a blank slate, it would be the best solution, but we are not in that world. When people were forced out of their crappy non-compliant plans, the outcry and hysteria was off the charts, the disruption necessary to go the single payer route would be off the charts, and the political price would make the losses since the passage of Obamacare look like childs play. Some day when the costs of our current system become unsustainable perhaps there can be a discussion about it, but for now we need to focus on saving Obamacare, and introducing a public option when we get back into power.
Those claiming that the lack of “progressive” policy proposals like single payer are the root cause of our losses, need to look at these results and understand that many of the most progressive voices in the party don’t actually speak for the majority of us. Bernie espoused many of these policies in the primary, and he lost, we chose the candidate who was clear eyed about what was possible. This wasn’t the party’s doing, this was the result of the base of the party voting for the candidate we felt best represented our positions.
gene108
For a lot of single payer advocates, the goal is the destruction of any profit in providing or accessing healthcare, thus insurance companies, some hospital chains, executives, etc, will be out of work.
Universal coverage is just a desirable side effect.
Barbara
The end is universal access to health care. Single payer is one means of achieving that goal, but it’s important to recognize that almost no country has an actual single payer system. Canada and the Scandinavian countries come the closest, but more heterogenous and/or higher population countries rely on private insurance or a combination of public/private organizations, with assigned roles and significant regulation.
gene108
@Blue Galangal:
Would not have mattered. Trump voters did not care or did believe the bad things about Trump. He told them what they wanted to hear and that was enough.
Chris
@hovercraft:
This.
The belief that most Americans are really just confused socialists, and that if only the right messiah were allowed to run and explain it to them, they’d totally realize that, can’t possibly be buried deep enough.
piratedan
well part of the way to get to single payer is to change how people feel about taxes… right now waaaay too many folks equate taxes with theft… because that’s how the GOP has framed it… when in fact taxes actually equals services and jobs… taxes pay for the police, fire fighters, judges, teachers, roads, bridges, Our military, etc etc etc … People think that they’re not getting anything for their taxes when its completely the opposite and we’ve either fallen down in our schools and our media for failing to make people understand that.
Granted, that argument doesn’t appeal to the narcissists and sociopaths that walk among us. Part of the heavy lift that needs to be done is to tell people that it will cost and what they will be paying for and see if they find that the benefits outweigh the costs. I would think yes, but after an election where we have Donald Trump elected, I am rather dubious about that assumption.
Davis X. Machina
The real split in the party between people who want the party to be a vanguard party, and those who want to have the party be a mass party.
Not age, not class, not gender, but this — this is what splits the actual people who throw the “D” lever — I hope there are still lever voting machines — in November when they vote.
Betty Cracker
@gene108: Can you define “a lot” in that claim or provide any evidence that suggests this is a common viewpoint?
BBA
Vermont was most of the way to single payer already – there was a single nonprofit entity, BCBS of Vermont, that already covered something like 90% of the state’s private market. If they couldn’t make it work what hope is there for single-payer anywhere else in the US?
The point of the ACA was to get us to Swiss/German-style multi-payer universal coverage. If universal coverage ever happens in America (which I somehow doubt, there will always be people on the fringes who can’t or won’t be reached) that’s how we’ll get there.
Starfish
Some people are deeply concerned about excess taxes on investment income above $20k. That was going to unfairly to after retirees to pay for a service that they really would not be being much from if they are already Medicare recipients.
MomSense
@Chris:
Here’s a thought. Bill Clinton is really popular with the white voters we lost. One of the things that kept getting touted in the primaries was that Sanders was successful in pulling Clinton left and distancing herself from Bill’s record which was not sufficiently pure for the Sanders wing. Heckuva job Bernie. That was a spectacularly stupid thing to try to achieve.
Richard Mayhew
@gene108: And that is a long discussion that we need to have. Is single payer a means or an end in and of itself?
For me, it is a means, one of many that could achieve the desired end.
@Barbara: Ditto
MomSense
@BBA:
Single payer would make us way too vulnerable to Republicans who will try for decades to dismantle it no matter how popular or successful it might be.
One of the back stories about Brexit is that people believed money would be redirected to the NHS. Why did they care? NHS had two rounds of about 30 % cuts in the two previous budget cycles.
StringOnAStick
I, like Miss Bianca, voted for it as a statement while knowing that it would fail spectacularly. The arguments I heard against it were all those that Richard outlined above, plus the idea that if we had single payer there would be even more people flooding into CO to get on it and that is a huge issue to many here right now. In the Denver area the population growth has been overwhelming; the current joke among the barely informed is that everyone is moving here because of legal pot, so maybe other states legalizing recreational will take some pressure off. Yeah, I don’t think that’s it but it works as an explanation for every anti-pot religious person I’ve met.
I heard a local radio program yesterday that was discussing our pot industry, and how the movers and shakers are lining up to go advise the other state’s business types on how to succeed in the legal pot world. Then I heard one of them say that nothing will change under the orange shitgibbon because “states rights” is such a core rethug value. Sure, you keep telling yourself that. Jeff Sessions is on record as rabidly anti-legalization, and once he gets assigned to head the DOJ, the DEA is going to be riding high (as it were).
Chris
@piratedan:
The problem is that taxes… and the services they provide, and, really, all the benefits of the liberal state that was built over the course of the 20th century… are like janitors: as long as they’re doing their job properly, nobody notices, and the resulting society is simply taken for granted.
opiejeanne
On my way to the emergency room, it may be my appendix. The nurse said GO NOW!
Making the most of my Medicare while I’ve still got it.
Chris
@opiejeanne:
Ouch.
Had appendicitis when I was nine. It was not fun, but at least it can’t happen again. Take care of yourself and yes, do go to the ER ASAP.
Barbara
@opiejeanne: Wow! Best wishes — update when you can! Thinking positive thoughts all the way!
Poopyman
@opiejeanne: Ow! Good luck!
Richard Mayhew
@opiejeanne: Good luck
Felanius Kootea
@opiejeanne: Hope they figure it out quickly. Good luck!
daveNYC
@MomSense:
Which is exactly why we should never have passed the VRA. Right?
Republicans will always try and dismantle the safety net, regardless how much or little there is of it. Trying to tailor policies that won’t trigger Republican pushback is a fool’s game. Either go with Single Payer because it works, or don’t because it doesn’t, but basing your decision on what’s going to piss of reactionary conservatives is fucking stupid.
Lurking Canadian
@StringOnAStick:
The core Republican value seems to be stomping powerless people in the face. They will support the authority of whichever level of government (federal, state, municipal, home-owner’s association) lets them do the most of it.
Peale
Richard, will you be writing up anything on the results of Proposition 61 in California as well?
Lizzy L
@opiejeanne: Good wishes for quick diagnosis and whatever comes after, and quick healing!
Feathers
I am convinced that why you don’t see support for reproductive choice from many corners is not only because icky lady stuff (and the pesky violence), but because it works as a tacit block to true national healthcare. Notice that when they basically won on abortion, the fight shifted to birth control. It’s not just because that’s what the nuts want, it also blocks government provided healthcare.
@piratedan: I’ve always thought that we need a term for and to focus on “private taxation” or the “klept tax” if you are a Gibson fan. It’s the money that you now pay to private entities because you are to cheap to pay the taxes required for the upkeep of our country. Healthcare is a place where the numbers are obvious. Another great example is roads – drivers pay far more in repairs and early auto replacement than it would cost to just keep the roads properly maintained. Here’s a link to one story, but this has been ongoing for years – Bad roads cost car owners billions. I must also note that my tea party co-worker and a bunch of her friends went looking for places to live that specifically had shitty roads and bad schools, because that meant LOW TAXES!!!! Needless to say, these were empty nesters, religious homeschoolers or didn’t have kids.http://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/23/bad-roads-cost-car-owners-billions-report.html
Paying higher taxes can save you money!!!!
Miss Bianca
@hovercraft: For the record, Bernie Sanders campaigned in the state for the plan. So did a number of other Sandernista celebrities. And yet, despite all that, look at the margin it lost by. So, yeah…the idea that our leftist betters are possessed of/by – that somehow, if progressive/radical ideas/candidates are proposed to The People, The People will automatically say “whoopie!” and vote for them strikes me as…shall we say…misguided at best, delusional at worst.
@cosima: Must respectfully decline to agree with you on the idea that CO is a heavily-taxed state. Property taxes – at least, on residential properties – are a fraction of what I would have paid in the Midwest (Michigan and Illinois would be my specific examples). Sales taxes do not strike me as excessively high, either. And then there’s the whole TABOR mess, which returns tax money to my pocket that could be better spent by municipalities, counties, and the state to have available as a “rainy day fund” to, say…fund the projects you are talking about – roads, schools, etc. And still, I hear people in this state whine about how much they are taxed even as they bitch about the need for better infrastructure spending. So, no way was this plan going to pass without some miracle of messaging that the Colorado Care campaign didn’t manage to achieve.
Richard Mayhew
@Peale: Once I can get a coherent thought on Prop 61, yes
opiejeanne
@Lizzy L: Thanks. They’re going to start an IV and do a CAT scan.
hovercraft
@MomSense:
The legacy of the conservative austerity policies adopted by Merkel, Sarkozy and Cameron in response to the great recession, people forget that much of the turmoil in Europe that has given rise to nationalism and the desire to close the borders is because of the policies these three forced the EU to adopt. Austerity is no more popular there than sequestration was here, it forced big cuts in many areas, and since their safety nets are much more robust than ours, the cuts were where people felt them directly, and personally. So the nationalists took advantage of the crisis and blamed these unpopular cuts on immigrants. For all of our complaints about the slow recovery, Europe’s has been much worse, the Mediterranean countries are still a mess even if they’ve fallen out of the headlines, and the northern countries resent having to bail them out. The Syrian refugee crisis was the last straw, people who were already frustrated by the situations in Greece, Spain and Italy, were suddenly being forced to take in millions of refugees. Taking our country back has been the rallying cry throughout the west for the last few years, because as the wealthy have moved through all of our countries looting them with the blessing of the governments, the “other” has been the scapegoat, people have allowed themselves to be distracted from the real culprits who demand ever more rigging in their direction, while at the same time demanding ever more sacrifices from us.
The 300 billion plus pounds was never coming back to go into the NHS, they were told this was a lie, but they chose to believe this anyway. Nigel Farrage and Boris Johnson walked it back the very next day, one even going so far as to say they never said it, while the other said it was just campaign talk. Sound familiar? Austerity and fiscal “discipline” are still too popular, but they have been proved to be not the be all end all they were touted as, the IMF and World Bank have backed off a bit but not nearly enough. Japan’s economy has been stagnant forever because all evidence to the contrary they continue to believe the myth. Conservative economists still preach the same crap they have for last 50 years even though they never produce the promised results, we need to do a better job of holding them accountable, we always let them get away with saying that their cuts don’t work because they weren’t deep enough. We have myriad examples of where they have had a free hand to do as they please and every time it still doesn’t produce the results they say it will, but we let them and the media wiggle away. They produce failure, and we let them maintain the mantle of fiscal responsibility, why?
Miss Bianca
@opiejeanne: Yow! Adding my best wishes to the bunch!
hovercraft
@opiejeanne:
Good luck, awful timing :-(
Feel better, and hurry up back to your family.
MomSense
@opiejeanne:
Oh no!!! Sending my very best.
MomSense
@hovercraft:
Our news media is not interested in covering policies or the results. They just invite two people on opposing sides to spout the crap and call it fair and balanced.
@daveNYC:
I’m saying that insurance middle men may provide a layer of protection strange as that may seem.
Chris
@hovercraft:
Conservatives aren’t wrong when they say that in the last several decades our lives have been ruined by smug intellectuals obsessed with their theories and blind to any real world experience or data, aided and abetted by crooks in politics. They simply neglect to mention that those people are all on their side.
Miss Bianca
@hovercraft: Yeah, and let’s not forget that part of the reason we have the Russia of today – and Putin as President/Dictator for life – was the economic devastation and resultant political/social trauma that followed the “Chicago Boys” model of shock capitalism, a belief in which seems to go hand-in-hand with austerity fetishism.
laura
@opiejeanne: best of luck for a swift and full recovery.
Chris
@Miss Bianca:
Yep.
It’s amazing; they destroyed Chile in the eighties, they destroyed Russia in the nineties, they destroyed Iraq in the 2000s, but no responsibility accrues to them, ever, somehow. It gets blamed on the locals who, stupid primitive non-American fucks that they are, can’t make our beautiful ideology work properly.
(Ironically, this was one of the excuses made for the failure of communism in multiple countries all through the Cold War).
liberal
@Miss Bianca: Yes…Putin is awful, but people strangely seem confused as to why he’d have lasting popularity. If they looked at the post-Communist economic record in Russia, they’d be far less confused.
liberal
@gene108: Can’t speak for others, but the best reason to support single payer is that it’d be far, far more efficient than a stupid-ass balkanized, heavily-regulated health care insurance system.
hovercraft
@MomSense:
Christiane Amanpour Warns Journalists: ‘I Believe In Being Truthful, Not Neutral’ (VIDEO)
Yutsano
@opiejeanne: Oh my goodness! Please take care of yourself!
Juice Box
@opiejeanne: I lost my appendix a few years ago. Good riddance to bad rubbish! I hope things go well for you. You may get antibiotics instead of surgery now though.
Miss Bianca
@liberal: Um…didn’t I actually *say* that part of the reason we have Putin is because of what the West did to Russia? Not sure what additional point you’re trying to make.
jonas
The US has three very significant hurdles to implementing anything like a Canadian/UK/Scandinavian-style national health system or single-payer system: 1. the powerful IGMFY ethos that basically makes it impossible to raise the necessary taxes, 2. federalism, and 3. an entrenched for-profit health care system in which a number of people — from insurance and hospital executives to surgeons — make gobsmacking amounts of money and will raise whatever hell is necessary to not change a thing.
Brett
Could a state try a lighter version of single-payer? Make Medicaid the default secondary insurance for all residents, then couple that with restrictions to prevent private plans from dumping really sick patients on to it? It at least seems like it would be cheaper and easier than going for the full single-payer. And it could evolve into single-payer over time, or something like the French system where everyone’s in one of three funds.
Betty Cracker
@opiejeanne: Zikes! Hope you’re okay!
grrljock
@Richard Mayhew: I’d be very interested to hear your thoughts about CA’s Prop 61. I couldn’t find any in-depth analysis the weeks before the election, so I ended up advising folks to vote Yes on the basis that it would go against Big Pharma and as as encouragement for similar price negotiation efforts. It was another one of those proposals that made me wish CA would just do away with its proposal system.
As well, thank you for all your thoughtful posts on healthcare and insurance issues, particularly this one. Seems to me that too many people who blithely say, “Single Payer!” have no idea of how complicated that is to implement here. Maybe they’re the flip side of the people who clamor for the repeal of PPACA, in the sense of having this really superficial sense (definitely not understanding) of how access to healthcare works in this country.
cosima
@Miss Bianca: I don’t think that CO is over-taxed, but we paid more there than the other states that we’ve lived in (as home-owning, non-college adults). We have spent more of our adult (home-owning, non-college) years in the UK than the US. We pay the 40+% here and also pay taxes in the US — something along the lines of getting a pass on a certain amount of salary & taxes paid, taxed (US) on the $/£ above that number. What it works out to is that what we live on is barely 40% of what my husband earns (I’ve only ever worked part-time here, and no longer do because that small amount of money pushed us into a US tax bracket that meant that paid taxes zeroed out what I earned). So, our recent(ish) stint in CO we were quite happy to pay taxes, and would have paid more if it meant better schools/housing/roads/healthcare/etc.
My larger point, though, would be that most people in CO would feel that they’re paying enough in taxes. We would not have been such. But the question about how in the world CO was planning to pay for single-payer was still my number one reason for voting no.
Applejinx
@Miss Bianca: Absolutely. Can’t agree more. Right around now, we have to keep a sharp eye out for ‘shock model’ disaster capitalism in our own country, not just abroad. We haven’t been nearly as wedded to austerity in part because Obama wasn’t that impressed by it, but it’s still a danger.
I like the idea of doggedly resisting Paul Ryan’s granny-starving nonsense. In some areas we have absolutely no ground to give, and it’s good to stay wary of shock-based attempts to ‘change everything’.
quakerinabasement
Colorado voter here, and this:
was the main reason for my No vote on the amendment. The amendment proposed a monumental change without a careful examination of its obstacles and systemic effects. I love the idea of single payer, but the stakes are too high to push the whole state in with nothing more than hope that it will work for everyone.
Miss Bianca
@cosima: Well, if youre living and working in the UK you are definitely getting it coming and going – seems like the US has a pretty punitive tax policy towards ex-pats working abroad.
And yes…people are not going to vote gladly for a tax increase in CO unless the ground work is carefully laid – which, in the case of something state-wide, could take years, if not decades. It would help if we could get TABOR repealed, but I don’t see that happening any time soon – particularly since that’s going to have to be another constitutional amendment, and we’ve just passed an amendment that will make amendments harder to pass. Yay, us!
Raven Onthill
I think the lesson is much simpler: many of us are miserly and afraid of change, and will reject a radical solution that might lead to tax rises, even if it would lead to vast savings in other areas of our household budgets.
We are also vastly afraid of socialist solutions, even when they are far and away superior to private solutions.
Miss Bianca
@Raven Onthill: Yeah, that’s a simple message. Simplistic, even. If your takeway from this is just that people are miserly and afraid of socialistic solutions, even when those of us who were in a position to vote for the plan enumerated our objections to how it was structured, which had less to do with the tax increases per se than than with how the financials were worked out, or not, then I suggest that at a minimum you go back and re-read.
Sure, some people arte just knee-jerk against tax increases. But you have to be able to make a case for exactly how something is going to work if you’re asking for a hefty tax increase to fund it. Colorado Care, despite its nifty little calculator, couldn’t do it, and wasn’t honest when it came to dealing with educated objection – just repeated its same talking points. They couldn’t do the job of selling their program even to people who supported the idea, like me. Can I make it any plainer than that?
SW
Single payer is going to look a lot more attractive after this gang loots Medicare.
Eric Lindholm
@Raven Onthill: Let me fix that for you: people love free stuff as long as “somebody else” is paying for it. As soon as the bill comes due to the people enjoying the benefit, well, you get the Colorado single-payer smackdown.
Erich O'Keefe
Ballotpedia is a project of the Lucy Burns Institute, which is a satellite of the Franklin Center and affiliates all funded through Koch money. More specifically, the director of the organization that produces Ballotpedia is married to the activist who is one of the major behind-the-scene players in Wisconsin’s veer into right-wing policy extremism. The website, if you look at how it describes itself, political funders and its frames of the role of money in politics, is a stalking horse for a baldfaced pay-to-play agenda that is now matter-of-course for the right. It’s probably not a good idea to normalize them by citing it.
Richard Mayhew
@Erich O’Keefe: good to know