CA, NY Attorneys General sue to resume federal funding of Medicaid, FEMA, PEPFAR

Well, we know there is some autoregression, some reversion to the mean, some rich time structure.

But crucially, it's an online learning system, with a decaying memory. Voters forget populists are bad, and vote for them from time to time. Then one of two things will happen: either we're all wrong and populists are actually ok, or they really are terrible, they do their terrible stuff and eventually get ousted, with voters memory refreshed.

It's not that it's a good thing, rather it's baked into how democracy works. Same as winters are baked into the progression of seasons, and there's no point despairing about them every year.

So it's a "let it rip", not as a vindictive response, but rather that's a sad but necessary part of democracy.

When it comes to economic matters and running the federal government, I say we should let them open the door. Americans desperately want to try dumb things and democratically voted for it, I say we let it happen and fail of its own accord. At the end of the day it's just money and they won the vote - let them smoke the whole pack.

When it comes to political retribution, dismantling independent news, rewarding cronies, attacking democracy - we should personally oppose it whenever we can, but I cannot go into a room and be the only one who cares. I will not stop robbery on my own.

When it comes to real matters - our friends and family who have lives here and may be deported back to hostile warzones because of racist BS - this is the hill I am dying on and for this I will keep my powder dry.

And it's still just getting started.

https://www.cbpp.org/research/correcting-seven-myths-about-m...

> Medicaid provides more comprehensive benefits than private insurance at significantly lower out-of-pocket cost to beneficiaries, but its lower payment rates to health care providers and lower administrative costs make the program very efficient. It costs Medicaid much less than private insurance to cover people of similar health status. For example, adults on Medicaid cost about 22 percent less than if they were covered by private insurance, Urban Institute research shows.

> Over the past 30 years, Medicaid costs per beneficiary have essentially tracked costs in the health care system as a whole, public and private. In fact, costs per beneficiary grew more slowly for Medicaid than for private insurance between 1987 and 2017, and are expected to continue growing more slowly than for private insurance in coming years, according to the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission.

https://www.cms.gov/data-research/statistics-trends-and-repo...

It is crazy world to be spending so much money on employer provided private insurance, and only allow limited deal-making from the biggest customer...

To the extent that many state Medicaid plans rely to some degree on private insurance providers as the direct insurers, and those private insurers receive monthly capitation payments from the state, possibly, though for Medicaid specifically the direct impact would be to the states, who are the direct recipients of the federal dollars as reimbursement for the federal share of the joint state-federal program. But Medicaid is typically a very large portion of state spending, and the federal share of Medicaid costs varies by state and subprogram but is at least 50% -- so if reimbursement stops it produces a cash flow problem very quickly.

Also, they keep working class folks occupied with work and just poor enough, so that working class people don't have time to engage in politics, don't have time too think too much about the future, and mainly worry about paying this month's rent and feeding their families.

So, I don't blame the people, I blame the system that working exactly as designed. Question is, how can we change this system?