Hi dgiharris,
Well, as far as other nations running circles around us, I'd like to think that there are others who have some input with the president to point out such things as they may arise. For me, my biggest anxiety is that the man just acts like some bull in a china shop in his diplomacy and efforts to get his agenda done. That isn't usually particularly successful in politics and can be quite dangerous in international discourse.
However, I do agree that President Trump, the man himself, doesn't seem to have a clue regarding how to get things done in the arena that he's chosen to insert himself. His administration just seems to constantly be in damage control mode and pretty much everything that he's made an attempt to do has been rebuffed in some way or another. The healthcare issue is likely about dead. Although the Senate says that they are still going to attempt to put together a wholly separate and different healthcare bill than what the House passed, but that's just another indication that the House bill was really, really bad. And all indications are that the Senate, as yet, hasn't really been able or willing to put any real effort into getting a new bill up and running. I was reading yesterday that a lot of the Republican Congressmen involved are flat out saying that this healthcare issue is turning out to be a whole lot tougher than people expected in the beginning of all this and that's pretty much what the president found out also. I honestly think that we're going to find, that as far as achieving the goal of getting most Americans covered for health insurance, the current bill is really pretty good. Yes, it has created some other unintended consequences, but...
I lived in south Florida through hurricane Andrew. A lot of home owner insurance companies left and the state wound up creating a state operated insurance pool. For years, if you lived in many designated coastal regions, the only windstorm insurance you could get was through the state pool. Even today, after 25 years, getting homeowners insurance for windstorm peril is pretty slim and there are only a couple of companies that have stepped in to take these homeowner policies out of the state pool. This issue with the health insurance companies pulling out of a lot of areas may cause us to cover people in those regions under some expanded medicare coverage. The next step would logically be to just go over to a nationalized system nationwide. Do like the Brits and Aussies have done. Provide a basic medicare funded floor of coverage. Charge through the general federal tax process a percentage of income assigned just for the medicare pool. Allow private insurers to offer private policies to those who can willingly afford to pay for some sort of special or better coverage.
In Australia, they found that they actually had to add a surcharge to high income earners in order to encourage them to leave the government paid system. Apparently most high income earners were pretty satisfied with the government provided coverage. So yea, when you're making three hundred thousand dollars a year and your 'medicare fee' is 10 or 12 thousand dollars, you're more likely to be able to find a private insurance policy that is cheaper. However, when you're only making 50 thousand dollars and your 'medicare fee' is only one thousand dollars, you're glad to have the government coverage.
A system similar to this is currently working pretty well in nearly every other developed nation. Here's a blurb from 'The Atlantic' that did an article on the issue:
Nearly the entire developed world is colored,(referring to a map showing all the nations that have universal coverage in green) from Europe to the Asian powerhouses to South America's southern cone to the Anglophone states of Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. The only developed outliers are a few still-troubled Balkan states, the Soviet-style autocracy of Belarus, and the U.S. of A., the richest nation in the world.
It seems to speak volumes to our wisdom that all these other nations can make this work, and many have for some 50 years or better, but we can't. The supposed smartest and richest nation on the face of the earth can't seem to figure out an affordable and doable way to open our hospitals and doctor's offices to pretty much everyone. I mean it's not like Canada and Great Britain are some backwards podunk countries with millions of poor people that can't take care of themselves any more than we are. It also speaks volumes concerning our allegiance to a capitalistic, for profit insurance system that we will cling to even despite the cost and damage created by such a system for the care of our people.
The wall, so far, is pretty much completely unfunded with a lot of opposition in the legislature to provide funding in the new budget. The travel ban is pretty much a dead issue now. The president and his staff did rewrite and make some adjustments to the ban from what it actually started out to be, but the new and improved ban was just declared illegal by the courts. So, like I say, the Trump presidency, at this point, looks like a lot of people running around in the White House doing damage control and little, if anything, of any substantive government direction or policy issues getting done. It seems to be pretty much like his game show. Pitting everyone against everyone else and watching the turmoil that ensues.
Please forgive me. I digress.
God bless you,
In Christ, ted
