All those countries achieve multi-payer coverage using government price controls to make sure health care costs remain sustainable for the payers and individuals. At some level of government there are active controls over what two parties engaged in a private contractual agreement may charge and accept for payment.…

Of course many will oppose it. They opposed Medicare too. Have you ever heard still-an-actor Ronald Reagan’s classic anti-Medicare AMA funded LP? It was part the 1961 Operation Coffee Cup where the AMA tried to convince people Medicare was a step on the road to a Socialist Dictatorship (that’s literally what Reagan…

But why wouldn’t the organization immediately blame some outside vendor who maliciously sabotaged their great event featuring their great president? These kind of people love to feel as if they are fighting against an evil conspiracy hell bent on taking them down (and taking down America itself) by any means…

Where in MO were you working? I was in the Mid-Missouri region (Boone, Callaway, etc. In Callaway they wouldn’t let the young Black organizers from out of state go to the doorsteps by themselves without a white organizer for fear of the Black person’s safety. It’s not called “Little Dixie” for nothing) and further…

That’s a huge part of this. Wealthy, older people outside of a small number of very specific places can no longer say in public they’re voting gop because the gop understands bad people need to take their bad medicine and good people need to be incentivized to be even better which will help everyone else. i.e. we need…

The pizza delivery people were employees and covered by state and federal wage & hour laws which governed what the employer may do with the employees’ tips. Doordash has “creatively” decided they will declare everyone an “independent contractor” so they don’t need to worry about even those weak and barely adequate…

This was in Missouri with a completely different system. The caregivers only received payments from the state, but otherwise there was minimal oversight once the caregiver was initially approved. There was no agency involved and no county employment. The caregivers were by law considered “employees” of their patient…

These weren’t “professional” caregivers. They were essentially family members of the disabled person “hiring” them to provide in home care. So any “association” could never be a real union because industrial action was impossible and there was no central employer with which to bargain. The idea was AFSCME could lobby…

That’s why the whole thing is frankly concerning on a 2020 election level. The gop, aided by some Very Serious people who are given lots of space to air their views in places like the NYT editorial page or on Sunday news shows, have been able to get lots of regular people to consider that maybe it’s kind of racism to …

I was an organizer with AFSCME in the mid 2000's. Not to say AFSCME was perfect because I was involved with some campaigns I didn’t agree with (like in-home caregivers faux “unions”). But others I was really passionate about like non-professional hospital workers (e.g. cleaning staff, cooks, CNA level caregivers,…

What’s actually possible?! Jesus christ, what’s actually possible with judicial nominations is whatever the party in control of the Senate want to do. We’re talking about what to do in the case of a Democratic Senate majority. Dick Durbin et. al. are already talking about bringing back fucking blue slips for god’s…

The minimum wage has existed in this country for almost 100 years. The “consequences” for this form of “price control” have been studied in enough depth with enough opportunity for the kind of “natural experiments” usually not available with empirical economics that there is nothing which could be "unintended”

Anti-minimum wage arguments are usually either facile econ-100 “but the graph! The world is exactly like the graph!“ nonsense or insane ideologically based normative claims which only make sense if you’re a hardcore randist. At least those arguments are “true” in the most simplistic kind of “all else being equal” way…

Reconstruction was way too lenient and way, way, way too short. Unfortunately it is clear that most of those in power were more interested in reconstituting the Union than punishing traitors. Let alone empowering the newly freed slaves. And the traitors were fine with reestablishing the Union without formal, legally…

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…