Chetzemoka

The irony that phenylephrine intravenous is actually effective at maintaining blood pressure in people who are trying real hard to die on ya. (Our ICU uses it sometimes.)

https://www.lhsc.on.ca/critical-care-trauma-centre/phenylephrine-neosynephrine

Preach. I hate the shit, it makes me feel shaky, but god damn does it work.

Oh noes! If he pays more in taxes he might be just regular old dirty rich instead of obscenely-no-one-could-ever-contrubute-enough-to-the-world-to-justify-this-level-of-wealth-accumulation rich. I feel so sorry for him.

NLRB and DOL tend not to fuck around

So… Republican standard operating procedure then?

Almost nothing but. It’s a very insular community. Lots of nepotism and government work is seen as a means to enrich yourself and your family

As a person who lived in the Virgin Islands for some time: Zero shock

“Robert Carlyle Byrd served as a United States senator from West Virginia for over 51 years, from 1959 until his death in 2010. A Democrat, Byrd also served as a U.S. representative for six years, from 1953 until 1959. He remains the longest-serving U.S. Senator in history”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Byrd

has been turned

You say as if it weren’t always like that. Because it definitely has always been like that from the dawn of civilization, sadly.

These corporate instruments are quite efficient. Unfortunately you and I just happen to disagree with the rich and powerful about what we should be efficient at doing

What state are you in? Was it one that refused to expand Medicaid? Because here in Massachusetts, which is the model state for the ACA, our Medicaid (Masshealth) is actually the best insurance I’ve ever had in my entire life. The individual mandate HAS to be accompanied by subsidies and expansion of Medicaid or it doesn’t work.

I appreciate that some people are able to afford to forego insurance, but most people can’t in reality. (I can’t. I have a chronic illness. I require daily meds for life.) And when they get sick, their cost still exists in the system and it’s more expensive. It’s not different from being forced to carry car insurance, if you drive.

That said, housing costs are out of control. I advocate at every moment to increase the housing supply. (Currently in polite disagreement with my NIMBY neighbors over a proposed new housing development near us.) Drug costs are out of control and need to be regulated. (I prefer nationalized, actually. But I know that’s a nonstarter in the US).

Ok, well you didn’t say that in any comments to me, so I didn’t see it. But also, let’s not pretend like there aren’t right-wing bad actors out on these platforms pushing that exact “both sides” message to discourage people from voting. Because you and I both know there are. These public comments have consequences

The Republican gutting of the individual mandate and refusal to accept federal funds to expand Medicaid is what crippled the ACA.

We only got to see the actual ACA in action for like two years and it was working. It always comes down to the Republicans actively working to ruin any progress we make.

https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2019.01433

Single payer is the only actually viable option. The more change we make, the more obvious that will become. Probably single payer with private supplementation is where we’ll end up because America will never settle for rich people not being able to buy nicer lives than the rest of us.

Republicans are actively working to make it worse on purpose

What do you propose? Give me something that is viable.

People are going to die. Our stupid populace always refuses to come around and pay attention to an issue until they see bodies in the streets. That’s the real reason we haven’t seen major action on climate change until now. I don’t prefer that reality, but it is sadly the one that we are working with whether we like it or not.

The climate bill isn’t enough, but is that a reason to throw all progress out the door and allow the ones who are actively trying to destroy the world into power?

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-scientists-say-about-the-historic-climate-bill/

The ACA was only ever meant to be a first step. It was never intended to be the end goal. The Republicans gutting the individual mandate is what stole that momentum because it leaves simply being uninsured as an unfortunately viable financial option for enough people that it reduced pressure to reform the rest of the system.

The end goal is single payer. But it’s difficult to the point of bordering on impossible to shift from what we had instantly into single payer in the third most populous country on the planet. It’s estimated that single payer will put nearly 400,000 private insurance middle-people out of jobs. That’s not a negligible problem. We’re going to need a way to address that in the process of making the shift.

The ACA open markets have allowed me to leave jobs that I otherwise would not have been able to leave because I can’t afford to go 30-90 days without health insurance. That open market didn’t even exist when I was a young adult 20 years ago. Insurance gaps between jobs were simply a fact of life that a lot of people couldn’t abide

The ACA, the infrastructure bill, the climate bill, getting sick days for rail workers without crashing the entire country

It’s not perfect, but it is progress

It’s the almost invisible boring little bureaucratic improvements that I actually find most exciting because they signal the real intent of the administration: https://prospect.org/labor/2023-08-07-biden-admin-labor-rule-davis-bacon/

I’ve been voting regularly for 20 years and the ACA was a massive move in the correct direction…until Republicans gutted the individual mandate and refused federal funds for Medicaid expansion. It’s always the Republicans ruining any semblance of progress that we make. I find Dems most guilty of trusting SCOTUS to do their jobs for them.

I want to see Dems again get a solid, undeniable majority in both chambers in 2024. Then push the priority passage of voting rights and anti-gerrymandering legislation. Those are concrete fixes to the system.

Yeah, I sort of feel like something like this would be a horrifying death process followed by an afterlife of “yeah, ok, that was a pretty funny way to go out.”

You can only hope that the end arrives quickly with something like this.

Enjoy: https://youtu.be/OGldNpngDws

Republican obstructionism is worse than Democrat foot-dragging. Sorry, I know people get frustrated with the lack of progress, but one of those things is clearly a bigger problem than the other.

If a third party revolutionary candidate were actually viable and likely to provide even incremental improvement in the lives of real people, then I’d be on board. But it’s not viable. Incremental progress is preferable to no progress or negative progress.