Originally published at: NSPSC: An Open Letter to Congressional Sponsors of Medicare for All – Progressive Dreamers
Published originally at Common Dreams on March 7, 2023 under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license Dear Member of Congress: As legislation for national single payer health care, an Improved Medicare for All, has not yet been introduced into the current Congress, now is the time to work to make that bill what it must…
Though I realize there’s zero chance of any bill passing in 6 years (neither Biden, nor the Republican were Biden to lose, would sign even if we had the sea change in Congress needed), I’m all for moving the ball forward.
I feel strongly that this email is not sufficient. We need to make it very easy for the politician - the email should include a link to a prominent site (most likely pnhp.org) which has the letter in expandable outline form and all the points should have supporting documentation and ideas. I know there have been lots of ideas on taxing - I’d rather we (the pro-M4A community experts, not so much me) were in the driver seat on tax details since that party of the equation is definitely going to make or break us. I don’t want to leave it up to Jayapal or whoever else this was letter was meant for. I wish it was different, but I don’t have as much respect for politicians as I do say the folks at PERI or similar research groups.
We need a fantastic tax funding tax plan. It must:
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Be simple enough to be understood by most anyone who puts a bit of effort in (so simple, but not too simple).
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Go along with a simple to use calculator so that for any taxes paid by the person, these can be itemized with basic information (like the CalCare cost calculator). Costs not paid by the person but that might be expected to affect salary (e.g. if payroll tax goes up, companies are likely to forgo raises), those should also be called out in the calculator.
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It must not any new burden as far as paperwork (taxes are a mess as it is). Should use only exiting tax “pipes”, just adjust the numbers in as many pipes as are needed (but not too many as that makes the calculator more confusing).
My first comment!
Thanks for commenting Dara - it seems the website is actually working!
For your calculator idea - it would be great if people could enter therir previous situation and the software could spit back something like
“under your previous policy including all taxes, premiums, and out of pocket expenses adjustment for inflation you would have been paying approximately xxx
under the new Medicare For All policy, including all taxes you will be paying yyy. (following the calculation you mention)”
BTW - there is a setting in Discourse asking for how long a user can still edit their post. Any thoughts on how long that should be?
I don’t know what that setting is on Reddit (seems longer when posting at r/WayOfTheBern and r/vegan, my two favorites so far than CD was), but I really don’t want any limit. commenters should be free to fix a typo anytime and if it’s a change that will confuse subsequent replies, use EDIT: or similar.
I agree we want to be as generous as possible with respect to almost all rules - and would certainly like your solution if everyone maintained etiquette like using EDIT. My worry would be about people that get into back and forths and then someone changes a previous post to get their story straight and make responses look foolish. I’ve seen lots of automated messages under different circumstances on CD so I’ll check into whether there’s a way for the system to send automatic messages after edits when there’s already been a reply like: “When you edit posts after others have replied, it can confuse the flow of a conversation. Please be sure to make an explicit note about the timing and reason for any substantive edits.”
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