JRP3
Hyperactive Member
The obvious difference is insurance companies need to extract profits and are incentivized to maximise those profits.
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lolachampcar
Well-Known Member
Sounds like the money should go while we keep the corporations. Our values should be setting the standards for the corporation's behavior.
lolachampcar
Well-Known Member
Bummer that you have to go on the warpath. As painful as it is, only reasoning (even in the face of obstacles) will win out.
Coming from a business point of view, if you force hospitals to treat the injured without regard for ability to pay, you already have universal healthcare. It is the most expensive and least effective universal healthcare. It is an un-funded mandate. But it is universal healthcare.
Its not a question of being pregnant; it is a question of managing the pregnancy.
lolachampcar
Well-Known Member
Using a decorator as an example....
Bad ones charge a fee and bring no value.
Good ones have relationships with vendors that bring cost benefits to their clients more than offsetting the decorator's fee.
With regard to insurance, the industry exists to spread risk which adds value. Teeth cleaning is preventative in nature and thus lowers pool risk. The insurance company adds no value paying for your teeth cleaning but they do add value to the pool by making sure the pool's teeth are cleaned.
You folks keep thinking business is bad. It is not. Bad business is bad. Unregulated capitalism is pure greed but there is capitalism that adds value and earns its profits.
You throw the baby out with the bath water and you gonna miss that baby
STARR X
Member
I have a small business and in 2018, 6% of my gross sales went to medical insurance. And that is a policy with a $2,000.00 deductible too. Total BS.
I think a simply solution would be to give the option for people to opt in to Medicare if they wish. Once insurance companies finally have competition, we will see how things play out.
I think a simply solution would be to give the option for people to opt in to Medicare if they wish. Once insurance companies finally have competition, we will see how things play out.
For people who need cutting edge medical procedures and have lots of money, the US has some of the best options in the world. But most people most of the time don't need cutting edge health care, they need care well behind the cutting edge of technology. For those with good insurance, the concerns are the procedure itself and aftercare, for the rest of the population worrying about paying for it is a big deal.
The insurance labyrinth around health care is a major headache for every medical provider. Most doctor's offices need at least one person employed full time to handle insurance claims. Because insurance companies haggle over everything, just about every single claim requires several calls back and forth. It's a huge time and money suck on both ends.
Insurance keeps climbing higher and higher every year. The law mandates that hospitals much treat everyone regardless of their ability to pay, but the people who can't pay are usually going to the ER which is the most expensive type of care and the rest of us pay for it in higher insurance rates. The Republicans have made every attempt to hurt the ACA and a lot fewer people were insured than originally hoped for.
As for popularity of health care providers, the government health care providers ranked best in a Gallup Poll:
Americans With Government Health Plans Most Satisfied
The VA has become a mess, but that was more due to politics than the government being incompetent in general. The problems with the VA are that Congress has failed to fund it adequately for years. Before 9/11 the number of vets seeking services was dropping as there hadn't been any significant wars since Vietnam, but the wars since 9/11 have increased the number of vets and Congress didn't provide funds for expansion or to pay the medical staff they already had. As a result the system got overloaded. Adding to this burden was the new vets are needing health care at a much younger age than previous vets. Many have traumatic brain injuries and some suffered injuries that would have killed someone in an earlier war, but they survived to require lifelong medical care.
The Republicans also want to pay off the medical insurance lobby by privatizing the VA, which will make the insurance companies a lot of money, but will probably result in less money making it to health care.
Medicare is funded directly through a payroll tax and is both very efficient and very popular. The Republicans have fudged the figures to claim the fund is going to run out soon, but other, more rational analysis shows we're not going to run out for a couple of decades, if at all. The baby boomers are stressing Medicare a bit now, but as they pass on, the Gen Xers won't put as much of a load on the system because they are a much smaller generation.
The trust fund is projects to run out by 2026, but that's just the reserve put away for the boomers. Income from payroll taxes is still expected to cover 91% of needs then. If we put off buying a new aircraft carrier or a few tanks the Army doesn't want, we can easily pay the shortfall.
Medicare Is Not “Bankrupt”
As far as medical research goes, a lot of it goes into drugs that are later withdrawn for being ineffective or dangerous. 1/3 of new drugs were found to have problems after approval:
One-Third Of New Drugs Had Safety Problems After FDA Approval
A lot of cutting edge medical procedures much better than what's available in the US are being developed in other countries. For example there are two technologies developed and available in Europe for tinnitus that have been shown to reduce or even eliminate symptoms that are not available to Americans unless you want to go to Europe. The only treatments in the US are drugs that have limited effectiveness and side effects.
I worked for a medical instrument company for a short while. I am not impressed on whit at the quality of US medical research. The company was hemorrhaging money, as well as employees, and was turning out pretty low quality products that cost and arm and a leg.
The whole way we do health care in the US is bass ackwards and the waste is astronomical.
Politically eliminating private insurance and going single payer is probably too heavy a lift, but I think offering the option that people could buy into Medicare would be a good start. On top of your payroll tax which funds your retirement insurance, you can get Medicare now with another payment. It would most likely be less than any insurance company offers, or it will force insurance companies to compete. Either way it will either drive down insurance costs or push the private insurance companies up market. People can still by a fancy plan if they want to pay for it, but anyone can buy in. Though we'll also need to keep the subsidy to allow the poor to get insurance.
All this talk of the free market in health care is bunk. Most health care is a natural monopoly. If they are taking you to the hospital in an ambulance they aren't going to take you to a place that has a cheaper ER. And the pricing is so complex with all the insurance negotiations that few health care providers can tell you what it's going to cost up front, even if you did ask.
Places like dentists and optional medical places like plastic surgeons can tell you because a lot of people do pay for everything out of pocket, but where few, if any pay out of pocket, literally nobody knows what it really costs. They might be able to give you a number, but the real number could be wildly different. A minor complication can add many thousands to the bill.
Natural monopolies need to be heavily regulated or they price gouge because people don't have a choice. When people have a choice, regulation just has to be for safety and monitoring that competitors aren't working together to price gouge.
On top of all that, the book I've been reading Utopia for Realists points out that some things shouldn't be super efficient. He makes the point that health care works best when doctors and other medical people have the time to do the job right. Another area where trying to be over efficient is bad is in education. People take time to learn and some take more attention than others.
Ultimately the question is not what it costs, but are the "customer's" needs met? There are some things that go beyond a price tag. The developed world has become obsessed with making money and how much everything costs that we've lost sight of the deeper things about life: health, happiness, meaning. Being a billionaire solves some problems, but it doesn't answer the things that money cannot fully buy.
As a culture we live in a Medieval utopia. Most utopian ideals then focused a lot on having a lot of good quality food. We're so rich in hat regard we're literally killing ourselves. The average teen has more access to more detailed information about the economy in five minutes than Herbert Hoover did in his entire 4 years in office during the worst economic downturn in modern history. We are awash in data undreamed of even a couple of decades ago. Most of the poorest people in the US live a better standard of living than monarchs did a couple of centuries ago.
We've achieved quite a bit our ancestors were seeking for. But we still have issues that need attention. There is a concept in Psychology called Maslow's Hierarchy or Maslow's Pyramid. The lower layers are physical needs like food, shelter, etc. Once those are achieved, you move on to safety issues, then relationships (friends, family, etc.), then self esteem, and finally self-actualization. Maslow later added Transcendence above Self-actualization.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs - Wikipedia
Culturally we're stuck at lower levels of the hierarchy than we need to be. The Republicans get elected by psychologically dragging people down the hierarchy and triggering fears.
The current under 40 generation is feeling their way with new ways to relate. And a lot of young people have a warped sense of Esteem, but there are a lot of people who could easily move towards the Self-actualization or even Transcendence levels if they had a little guidance out of the forest of BS that has been thrown at them. Our whole economy is built around people seeking esteem in artificial ways: get likes, buy the latest and greatest to impress your friends, etc.
Collectively we need to consider what we really want to evolve towards as our next step. We pretty much accomplished what our ancestors set out to do with the renaissance. There is more to learn and more science and technology to crack, but we don't know what to do with ourselves from here. The people with minds capable of tacking the cutting edge are relatively few. What about the rest?
Dealing with healthcare for all is a part of this equation, but we are also on a cusp of making work obsolete for a big chunk of the population. Are they going to be shoved back to the base level of the hierarchy where there will be the constant threat of a civilization topping uprising, or do we head off together on a new goal we haven't figured out yet?
The insurance labyrinth around health care is a major headache for every medical provider. Most doctor's offices need at least one person employed full time to handle insurance claims. Because insurance companies haggle over everything, just about every single claim requires several calls back and forth. It's a huge time and money suck on both ends.
Insurance keeps climbing higher and higher every year. The law mandates that hospitals much treat everyone regardless of their ability to pay, but the people who can't pay are usually going to the ER which is the most expensive type of care and the rest of us pay for it in higher insurance rates. The Republicans have made every attempt to hurt the ACA and a lot fewer people were insured than originally hoped for.
As for popularity of health care providers, the government health care providers ranked best in a Gallup Poll:
Americans With Government Health Plans Most Satisfied
The VA has become a mess, but that was more due to politics than the government being incompetent in general. The problems with the VA are that Congress has failed to fund it adequately for years. Before 9/11 the number of vets seeking services was dropping as there hadn't been any significant wars since Vietnam, but the wars since 9/11 have increased the number of vets and Congress didn't provide funds for expansion or to pay the medical staff they already had. As a result the system got overloaded. Adding to this burden was the new vets are needing health care at a much younger age than previous vets. Many have traumatic brain injuries and some suffered injuries that would have killed someone in an earlier war, but they survived to require lifelong medical care.
The Republicans also want to pay off the medical insurance lobby by privatizing the VA, which will make the insurance companies a lot of money, but will probably result in less money making it to health care.
Medicare is funded directly through a payroll tax and is both very efficient and very popular. The Republicans have fudged the figures to claim the fund is going to run out soon, but other, more rational analysis shows we're not going to run out for a couple of decades, if at all. The baby boomers are stressing Medicare a bit now, but as they pass on, the Gen Xers won't put as much of a load on the system because they are a much smaller generation.
The trust fund is projects to run out by 2026, but that's just the reserve put away for the boomers. Income from payroll taxes is still expected to cover 91% of needs then. If we put off buying a new aircraft carrier or a few tanks the Army doesn't want, we can easily pay the shortfall.
Medicare Is Not “Bankrupt”
As far as medical research goes, a lot of it goes into drugs that are later withdrawn for being ineffective or dangerous. 1/3 of new drugs were found to have problems after approval:
One-Third Of New Drugs Had Safety Problems After FDA Approval
A lot of cutting edge medical procedures much better than what's available in the US are being developed in other countries. For example there are two technologies developed and available in Europe for tinnitus that have been shown to reduce or even eliminate symptoms that are not available to Americans unless you want to go to Europe. The only treatments in the US are drugs that have limited effectiveness and side effects.
I worked for a medical instrument company for a short while. I am not impressed on whit at the quality of US medical research. The company was hemorrhaging money, as well as employees, and was turning out pretty low quality products that cost and arm and a leg.
The whole way we do health care in the US is bass ackwards and the waste is astronomical.
Politically eliminating private insurance and going single payer is probably too heavy a lift, but I think offering the option that people could buy into Medicare would be a good start. On top of your payroll tax which funds your retirement insurance, you can get Medicare now with another payment. It would most likely be less than any insurance company offers, or it will force insurance companies to compete. Either way it will either drive down insurance costs or push the private insurance companies up market. People can still by a fancy plan if they want to pay for it, but anyone can buy in. Though we'll also need to keep the subsidy to allow the poor to get insurance.
All this talk of the free market in health care is bunk. Most health care is a natural monopoly. If they are taking you to the hospital in an ambulance they aren't going to take you to a place that has a cheaper ER. And the pricing is so complex with all the insurance negotiations that few health care providers can tell you what it's going to cost up front, even if you did ask.
Places like dentists and optional medical places like plastic surgeons can tell you because a lot of people do pay for everything out of pocket, but where few, if any pay out of pocket, literally nobody knows what it really costs. They might be able to give you a number, but the real number could be wildly different. A minor complication can add many thousands to the bill.
Natural monopolies need to be heavily regulated or they price gouge because people don't have a choice. When people have a choice, regulation just has to be for safety and monitoring that competitors aren't working together to price gouge.
On top of all that, the book I've been reading Utopia for Realists points out that some things shouldn't be super efficient. He makes the point that health care works best when doctors and other medical people have the time to do the job right. Another area where trying to be over efficient is bad is in education. People take time to learn and some take more attention than others.
Ultimately the question is not what it costs, but are the "customer's" needs met? There are some things that go beyond a price tag. The developed world has become obsessed with making money and how much everything costs that we've lost sight of the deeper things about life: health, happiness, meaning. Being a billionaire solves some problems, but it doesn't answer the things that money cannot fully buy.
As a culture we live in a Medieval utopia. Most utopian ideals then focused a lot on having a lot of good quality food. We're so rich in hat regard we're literally killing ourselves. The average teen has more access to more detailed information about the economy in five minutes than Herbert Hoover did in his entire 4 years in office during the worst economic downturn in modern history. We are awash in data undreamed of even a couple of decades ago. Most of the poorest people in the US live a better standard of living than monarchs did a couple of centuries ago.
We've achieved quite a bit our ancestors were seeking for. But we still have issues that need attention. There is a concept in Psychology called Maslow's Hierarchy or Maslow's Pyramid. The lower layers are physical needs like food, shelter, etc. Once those are achieved, you move on to safety issues, then relationships (friends, family, etc.), then self esteem, and finally self-actualization. Maslow later added Transcendence above Self-actualization.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs - Wikipedia
Culturally we're stuck at lower levels of the hierarchy than we need to be. The Republicans get elected by psychologically dragging people down the hierarchy and triggering fears.
The current under 40 generation is feeling their way with new ways to relate. And a lot of young people have a warped sense of Esteem, but there are a lot of people who could easily move towards the Self-actualization or even Transcendence levels if they had a little guidance out of the forest of BS that has been thrown at them. Our whole economy is built around people seeking esteem in artificial ways: get likes, buy the latest and greatest to impress your friends, etc.
Collectively we need to consider what we really want to evolve towards as our next step. We pretty much accomplished what our ancestors set out to do with the renaissance. There is more to learn and more science and technology to crack, but we don't know what to do with ourselves from here. The people with minds capable of tacking the cutting edge are relatively few. What about the rest?
Dealing with healthcare for all is a part of this equation, but we are also on a cusp of making work obsolete for a big chunk of the population. Are they going to be shoved back to the base level of the hierarchy where there will be the constant threat of a civilization topping uprising, or do we head off together on a new goal we haven't figured out yet?
JRP3
Hyperactive Member
Throw out the profit taking inefficient middle man and I'm not going to miss it at all. Single payer system means drug companies and health care providers have to negotiate pricing with a single entity. How much more data do you need do see comparing U.S. healthcare to universal care in all the countries above us?
JRP3
Hyperactive Member
I don't want to get too political here but do remember two things, he lost the popular vote and has turned off a number of people who voted for him last time.
I agree. In particular, much of the insurance industry paperwork is about denying healthcare, which a government single payer system has no incentive to do. Manage it, yes.
"On top of that, experts explained that unlike Medicare, private insurers take on more responsibility than simply paying claims or occasionally going after fraud. Before a claim is even filed, they check its appropriateness, assess whether it is medically necessary, and whether it can be done in a cheaper way (outpatient versus inpatient care, for example)."
Administrative costs for private insurance versus Medicare
EVNow
Well-Known Member
If FCA's strategy depends on reelection of Trump, they are indeed in trouble.
RealClearPolitics - 2020 - Latest 2020 General Election Polls
Here is the footnote to a handout on energy I had for my classes in the 90s. It is relevant now for the upcoming election since it appears we have another possibility for abrupt change in the right or wrong direction, both in health care, immigration, foreign policy, and the future of the economy.
"Nicolis and Prigogine have mathematically modeled a town. Although some of their conclusions may appear trivial, they have provided us with confirmation of our intuitions regarding evolving social systems. It is important to preserve the openness of the system to its environment while promoting innovation and adaptability. Their model had an additional conclusion consistent with the notion of innovation's key to success in the long term. 'A very interesting result emerging from the model is the following. If a new activity is launched at a certain time, it will grow and stabilize. If the place is well chosen, it may even prevent the success of similar attempts made nearby at a later time. However, if the same activity is launched at a different time, it need not succeed; it may regress to zero and represent a total loss. This illustrates the dangers of short-term, narrow planning based on the direct extrapolation of past experience. Such static methods threaten society with fossilization or, in the long term, with collapse. The principal message of the dynamical modeling advocated in this section is that the adaptive possibility of societies is the main source allowing them to survive in the long term, to innovate of themselves, and to produce originality.' Grégoire Nicolis and Ilya Prigogine, Exploring Complexity: An Introduction. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1989, p. 242. The selection comes from a passage entitled 'Self-Organization in Human Systems,' pp. 238-42."
Trump and the Republication leadership are augmenting tribalism while the Democrats are, as usual, having trouble working toward a consensus. The Green New Deal is a framework in the form of a resolution, not a final document. Nate Silver has a conversation with one of the authors. (Caveat emptor, I haven't time to listen at the moment but list it here for reference.)
Meet the policy architect behind the Green New Deal from The Ezra Klein Show
Even tribalists recognize the greatest threat their cause faces is not the enemy but disunion from within. That is why Georgi Arbatov, often a spokesman for Gorbachev said we are going to do something terrible to you, “We will deprive you of an enemy.” The functional solution to tribalism is expanding the definition of who belongs to the tribe. We messed up big time by not including Russia in NATO when the government wanted to join. That was scotched by the western military complexes—the danger of short term thinking.
In Christianity the tension between Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox is mere ritual and no longer a life or death distinction. So too should it be in Islam. So it is becoming with the tempering of Socialism in the West into Democratic Socialism. So too is learning from capitalism in China, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and even North Korea.
I suppose I must apologize for stepping on neroden above. I just hate it when we degenerate to acting like monkeys in a cage throwing excrement at each other. A reversion down the neural evolutionary scale egged on by the Monkey in Chief. There, the root of my anger at so-called American democracy. Just as it did not begin with Trump, it may not end with him.
"Nicolis and Prigogine have mathematically modeled a town. Although some of their conclusions may appear trivial, they have provided us with confirmation of our intuitions regarding evolving social systems. It is important to preserve the openness of the system to its environment while promoting innovation and adaptability. Their model had an additional conclusion consistent with the notion of innovation's key to success in the long term. 'A very interesting result emerging from the model is the following. If a new activity is launched at a certain time, it will grow and stabilize. If the place is well chosen, it may even prevent the success of similar attempts made nearby at a later time. However, if the same activity is launched at a different time, it need not succeed; it may regress to zero and represent a total loss. This illustrates the dangers of short-term, narrow planning based on the direct extrapolation of past experience. Such static methods threaten society with fossilization or, in the long term, with collapse. The principal message of the dynamical modeling advocated in this section is that the adaptive possibility of societies is the main source allowing them to survive in the long term, to innovate of themselves, and to produce originality.' Grégoire Nicolis and Ilya Prigogine, Exploring Complexity: An Introduction. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1989, p. 242. The selection comes from a passage entitled 'Self-Organization in Human Systems,' pp. 238-42."
Trump and the Republication leadership are augmenting tribalism while the Democrats are, as usual, having trouble working toward a consensus. The Green New Deal is a framework in the form of a resolution, not a final document. Nate Silver has a conversation with one of the authors. (Caveat emptor, I haven't time to listen at the moment but list it here for reference.)
Meet the policy architect behind the Green New Deal from The Ezra Klein Show
Even tribalists recognize the greatest threat their cause faces is not the enemy but disunion from within. That is why Georgi Arbatov, often a spokesman for Gorbachev said we are going to do something terrible to you, “We will deprive you of an enemy.” The functional solution to tribalism is expanding the definition of who belongs to the tribe. We messed up big time by not including Russia in NATO when the government wanted to join. That was scotched by the western military complexes—the danger of short term thinking.
In Christianity the tension between Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox is mere ritual and no longer a life or death distinction. So too should it be in Islam. So it is becoming with the tempering of Socialism in the West into Democratic Socialism. So too is learning from capitalism in China, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and even North Korea.
I suppose I must apologize for stepping on neroden above. I just hate it when we degenerate to acting like monkeys in a cage throwing excrement at each other. A reversion down the neural evolutionary scale egged on by the Monkey in Chief. There, the root of my anger at so-called American democracy. Just as it did not begin with Trump, it may not end with him.
The people who disapprove of Trump has cemented. As Rick Wilson has put it, over 1/2 of American voters are willing to crawl over broken glass to vote against Trump. That makes re-election very difficult.
Here is an interactive Electoral College map:
2020 Presidential Election Interactive Map
You can play with different starting positions. In the midterms Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa all had big swings back to the Democrats. Arizona also went further left than it has in more than a generation.
There are also two factors coming at Trump that will cause his fair weather friends to abandon him. The first is the economy is going bad and it's doing it fast. All the indicators are a recession is here. There are many factors that could make it a bad one: first the business cycle was due to go down; then Trump started a trade war which started negative ripples in the economy; then the big tax scam which temporarily boosted the economy, but will have a big impact as the bills come due; and finally the long government shutdown. People were breathing a sigh of relief that the economy didn't take a big hit during the government shutdown, but the experts were saying it was going to take about 3 months to hit.
About 1/2 of Trump's support are true believers and the other half are fair weather friends who don't like him, but have liked the fact the economy is doing well and are too stupid or too blinded to realize the good economy wasn't his doing. The ability of the president to control the economy is limited and has a big time delay. Obama's economy was just hitting its stride when he left office. Trump did a number of bad things to the economy, but they have taken two years to work their way through to the actual day to day economy.
It is possible we might see an economic crash worse than 2008. Though I don't think that's a high probability.
There are about 20% of Americans who are true believers who think Trump is great no matter what. A lot of those people are concentrated in certain areas of the US, so they have an outsized impact.
It hasn't always been this way, but for just about all of us here, the US has always had an enemy. First it was the Germans, Italians, and Japanese, then the red menace which went up in the 1980s just before the Soviet Union collapsed. Then instead of returning to a national meme where we had no major enemies (which was the case for most of American history before 1940), the right decided to demonize Democrats and the current political climate evolved.
It didn't have to happen this way. If we had embraced Russia as a new friend in 1990 instead of leaving them to rot, they would have evolved very differently and Vladimir Putin would have never come to power. George HW Bush had a plan, but he couldn't even get the Republicans to go along with it.
I was going to speak up and make the point that we can disagree with someone's opinion without throwing epithets at them personally, but the conversation had moved on. People disagree with me all the time, sometimes subsequent events show I'm right, sometimes they show I was wrong. I always try to hold the humility that even when I'm sure I'm right, I might be wrong.
People who are not doctors, trying to deny necessary care.
People who are not doctors, trying to deny necessary care. A.k.a "Death Panels"
People who are not doctors, trying to deny necessary care.
For all this extra money wasted on DENYING CARE, the private insurers have WORSE HEALTH OUTCOMES and end up COSTING MORE to the patient.
It's interesting to know, Steve, that you're a big fan of bureaucrats with no medical expertise, who have never seen the patients, running "death panels" to deny care to people -- care which their doctors have determined is medically necessary. You're so much a fan of this that you think we should spend lots of extra money to make sure more people die unnecessarily. A strange point of view, and I think very few will agree with you.
lolachampcar
Well-Known Member
You doubt and discount the "quiet trumpsters" at your own peril. I suspect there are a lot of people out there who voted, and may very well vote again, for Trump but would never admit it. He has followed Herman Cain in finding and appealing to our dark underbelly; he is just doing a better job of it than Cain did.
Most people haven't even *heard* of Buttigieg (and most of those who have can't spell his name) and he's running at +4%? Wow.
Obviously, I agree 100% with this. I've spent a long time working out which parts of the economy work best under markets and which ones don't.
In the case of health care, nearly all of it should be government run, with the option of patients paying cash (no insurance) to doctors for unconventional (i.e. unproven) medical choices. Government should sponsor R&D with prizes and government contracts for companies which develop improved medical techniques or devices. Government will be looking for techologies which benefit the government health plan by curing or preventing expensive diseases and by helping people with rare diseases and by reducing costs of common treatments.
With government contracts dangling, there can be a free market in developing this R&D, but the government has to decide *what* to research, because the market is no good at it.
We can. It's not always a good idea. When someone is actively hurting me and my family and friends, and completely immune to rational argument or evidence, they need to know that they deserve epithets, and other people need to know that they should be shunned.
I'll leave it at that.
Polling shows that Trump doesn't have a chance in hell of winning Pennsylvania, Michigan, or Wisconsin, barring an "October Surprise". Also no chance in New Hampshire and no chance in Virginia. No way to flip New Mexico or Colorado or Minnesota. Combined with the solid blue states that leaves no path at all; he'd have to sweep everything else including Maine. Not happening.
This is of course why everybody and their brother is entering the Democratic nomination contest; the Democratic nominee has over 95% odds of becoming President this time.
Only way for the Republican candidate to win is if it isn't Trump running. Bill Weld is actually a pretty decent guy and could draw a lot of support. I don't see how Weld could win the nomination, but there are a lot of open primaries and a lot of ways for Trump to damage his own campaign -- so Weld being the nominee is much more likely than Trump winning the general.
POLL: Weld Closing In On "Buchanan Benchmark" in New Hampshire – InsideSources
The Trump crime gang, which has taken over most of the Republican institutions, is doing their best to prevent honest primary elections so that they can make sure Trump is renominated though. There are all kinds of shenanigans going on -- they were even trying to cancel the South Carolina primary.
South Carolina GOP could scrap 2020 primary to protect Trump
In terms of Trump having no chance in New Hampshire my favorite number is that over 19% of New Hampshire Republicans explicitly said that they would vote for a "Democrat who embraces Socialism" over Trump.
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Why would we want medical procedures to be evaluated rather then just blindly paying for them. Like Medicare does.
"Medical research published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2010 -- six years before her diagnosis -- showed that a condensed, three-week radiation course works just as well as the longer regimen. A year later, the American Society for Radiation Oncology, which writes medical guidelines, endorsed the shorter course."
"In 2013, the society went further and specifically told doctors not to begin radiation on women like Dennison -- who was over 50, with a small cancer that hadn't spread -- without considering the shorter therapy."
"It's disturbing to think that I might have been overtreated," Dennison said. "I would like to make sure that other women and men know this is an option."
How unnecessary tests, scans, procedures and surgeries are affecting your patients
"Medical research published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2010 -- six years before her diagnosis -- showed that a condensed, three-week radiation course works just as well as the longer regimen. A year later, the American Society for Radiation Oncology, which writes medical guidelines, endorsed the shorter course."
"In 2013, the society went further and specifically told doctors not to begin radiation on women like Dennison -- who was over 50, with a small cancer that hadn't spread -- without considering the shorter therapy."
"It's disturbing to think that I might have been overtreated," Dennison said. "I would like to make sure that other women and men know this is an option."
How unnecessary tests, scans, procedures and surgeries are affecting your patients
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