Um, they could have purchased “white” slaves in the Ottoman empire until the 1850's. People from Georgia and other regions of the Caucasus. Literally caucasians. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_Ottoman_Empire).

Apologies for the tardy reply

The NHS isn’t “single payer”. It’s “single provider”. The government doesn’t just pay for peoples’ care. It actually provides the care through government employed and owned providers and facilities. The equivalent in the US would be the VA which is the system for military veterans.

Just as an aside, because I can already anticipate idiots saying “but Obama!!!”, saying he was “nominated by the Obama administration for the Republican seat on the Federal Labor Relations Authority” is slightly misleading.

Good point. Just like how my car is now worth more because I let a guy use it to do rideshare driving while I’m chilling at home and take a percentage of his fares. Elon, bro. Don’t you have real work to do that isn’t shitposting on anonymous Kinja boards?

Using IP to defend enormous wealth on a “moral level (she “earned” it) is like almost the worst possible argument. IP isn’t a “thing”! It’s not a factory or a machine. It’s an intangible social product which only exists as “property” because as a society we let it be so. Each copy of a Beyonce song has a marginal cost…

There are multiple solutions on the table. Many of them have been put in to the form of legislation which could “actually happen” immediately.

He’s lying and he thinks we are dumb as shit.

Just by signing up for the insurance and using it they probably “agreed” to some sort of expansive HIPAA waiver which allows the “concierge” to access what would otherwise be HIPAA protected info. There’s no way the company would have created the “concierge” (ugh...) program without running it by a employee benefits…

Not because they are “really men”. But because they were at least for some portion of their lives socialized as male and maybe retain that early form of socialization. In the same way trans men were for part of their lives socialized as women and may retain elements of that socialization even after transitioning. Is…

So recognizing how trans women were for at least a part of their lives socialized as males, which in our society means they were socialized to be confident that when raising their voices people will listen, is now “terfy”? Does male privilege no longer exist? Or is male privilege now the only form of privilege that…

What it reveals is their desire for diversity is really just for more people who totally agree with them, but look a bit different. It’s the “diversity” of corporate boardrooms. Giving an inclusive gloss to the same old political program. As if the current system would be totally fine as long as the composition of the…

a) The ACA under Obama didn’t require abortion coverage and in fact required people who wanted abortion coverage to buy a separate rider policy which could not have its costs subsidized by any federal dollars. I.e. the ACA subsidies. So you’re concerned about M4A under republicans being exactly the same as the ACA was…

If you’re jacking the car up anyway why not take off a tire from the car? That’s what I do. I only have doughnut spares so I feel much safer with a full size tire down next to me. Though I don’t think it would be thick enough to save me if the car came down. I’m working on either a Volvo 245 or a Mazda 3 and neither…

If Medicaid expansion went “according to plan”, and then the benefit income cap was raised gradually over time, it would be a public option. The public option would eventually “poach” all the customers on the exchange because plan would be so much better value (assuming it wasn’t sabotaged to protect the private…

1) is not necessarily true. If coverage is written in to the statutory language of a M4A bill then it won’t matter who is President. But since Obama promised Bart Stupak he would sign an executive order outlawing the use of federal funds abortion coverage, a person seeking coverage for abortions must pay the full…

There have been multiple single payer bills introduced in both the house and Senate over the past couple of years. Those bills set out in the kind of detail typical of legislation (i.e. it doesn’t address every possible scenario in the entire universe because, like almost all legislation, it delegates responsibilities…

The Medicaid expansion is a classic single payer system of providing health care. Raising the income cap would have expanded the reach of the program into a larger, healthier pool of insured. At some point it would become a de facto public option and would out compete individual insurance bought on the exchange. Since…

Medicare and Medicaid are structured differently. Medicare is administered by the federal government. Medicaid is administered by a state and federal partnership. In NFIB v. Sibelius there was a discussion about how the different relationship between the states and feds with Medicare and Medicaid meant a Medicare…

No. His uselessness and lack of substance was pretty obvious before he launched his campaign for the Democratic nomination. Any popularity he’d been able to attain from his run for senate was despite his suckiness. The sheer horribleness of Ted Cruz served to make whomever ran against him look much better than they…