Folks:
I was staying in the Trump Hotel in Chicago (magnificent) during the last presidential debate so I felt compelled to watch at least some (see Presidential Debate Thoughts: Did Trump miss some simple answers?). However, tonight I am home and reverting to my usual practice of not spending time watching or listening to politicians.
The transcript seems to indicate a collapse of American decorum, e.g., “Moderator: For the record, are you saying what you said on the bus 11 years ago that you did not kiss women without consent or grope women without consent.”
A few more things that have jumped out at me so far…
Hillary Clinton cites Michelle Obama, the spouse of a politician. This underlines the difference between the U.S. and parliamentary democracies (in which nobody is interested in what the spouse of the Prime Minister might have to say about politics; Germans aren’t listening to speeches by Angela Merkel’s husband and Margaret Thatcher’s husband was not cited by British politicians).
More discussion of Barack Obama’s birthplace. Can that be relevant to the challenge of growing our economy faster than our population, something that we’ve failed to do recently?
Finally a question that might matter: “The Affordable Care Act known as Obamacare, it is not affordable. Premiums have gone up. Deductibles have gone up. Copays have gone up. Prescriptions have gone up and the coverage has gone down. What will you do to bring the cost down, and make coverage better?”
Hillary says that she is happy that there are no limits to how much can be wasted on medical care for any given person (presumably most of what is spent is waste). Her idea for controlling the cost is to raise participation in this system from 90 percent of the U.S. population to 100 percent. Essentially she has no answer to the biggest economic problem facing the U.S. (i.e., that we spend 2-4X as much on health care as the high-growth and high-wealth economies, with no better results).
Donald Trump points out that “Obamacare will never work. It’s very bad. Very bad health insurance. Far too expensive. And not only expensive for the person that has it, unbelievably expensive for our country. One of the biggest line items very shortly. We have to repeal it. And replace it. With something absolutely much less expensive.” Absent spectacular economic growth, this is unarguably true.
Specific remedies? Donald Trump starts by suggesting repealing Obamacare, which leaves us with the old oligopolistic system. He then talks about giving block grants to states for Medicaid, which doesn’t address the bigger expense of Medicare.
On Muslim immigration: Hillary points out that Muhammad Ali was a successful citizen. Donald Trump says build a “safe zone” somewhere other than the U.S. for Muslims fleeing their civil wars and have the gulf Arabs pay for the zones. Trump says “hundreds of thousands of people coming in from Syria when we know nothing about them. We know nothing about their values and we know nothing about their love for our country.” Hillary responds that she has seen pictures of “children suffering in this catastrophic war.” She blames the Russians. [But isn’t the U.S. to blame as well? If we weren’t propping up various factions in Syria, mightn’t the government there, with Russian assistance, be able to win the civil war and restore order, if not democracy? Wars never lasted this long in the old days because someone would lose.]
Folks who watched instead of simply read the transcript: Is this debate going to change anything?
Phil,
Change anything? No.
Trump will still lose badly and our country will still follow the same precipitous decline that’s it’s on currently. Although the folks who will vote for HRC will look slightly crazier after tonight, being as Hillary didn’t address the single most important problem we face as Americans, the healthcare disaster, with anything remotely resembling a lucid idea to fix such.
Isn’t this a “damn if you do it, damn if you don’t do it” issue? If the government let the market to deal with its own issues we we will see the prices for drugs increased over and over (daraprim, epipen, insulin etc). If the government intervenes to stop the price increases, the lobbyists will push the buttons of their representatives so that they will start screaming that this is socialism, government is destroying the economy, government is crushing the American entrepreneurial spirit etc
It was a strong enough performance by Trump that it staunches the bleeding from the video. No more talk about how he should step down, is likely.
watched both debates and I think Trump looked a lot better in this one. Re healthcare, he did suggest one improvement- remove “state lines” which currently make insurance companies monopolies within a geographical region. It sounded reasonable to me..
The Honest Abe comeback was brilliant.
Having avoided the media during that 90 minute period of time, if the only options were Donald & H-Rod, the answer would still be The Donald on the sole basis that the largest impact on us these days is the cost of subsidizing the healthcare industry. Minimum wage workers & farmers are being forced to pay 7 figure doctor salaries through ever escalating taxes & mandates. Doctors aren’t NBA players that you don’t have to pay if you don’t buy a ticket anymore. If they’re going to be public servants, they need to be paid less or we need to opt out. Since votes in Calif* don’t count, we might as well go for Gary whatshisname just to recover something from 4 years of jury summons.
The only bit of information that I got from it was that both of them intend to raise carried interest tax level. But Clinton less so than Trump, which is quit interesting and understandable for a real estate developer (he explains why in his The Art of Comeback).
Fixing insurance is easy. GET EMPLOYERS AND REGULATIONS OUT OF THE PICTURE. Two things need to happen simultaneously. First, employers need to simply pay employees what they’re paying their insurance companies so that employees have that money to go shopping. Second, remove any and all regulations — like Presidentpicker talked about — to make it possible to sell health insurance like buy auto and home and life insurance, and the market will sort it out. When the majority of working people have the money, the incentive, and the ability to go shop for health insurance like they shop for anything else — when it’s in their interest to minimize their health insurance spending out of the “extra” money they’re seeing in their paycheck — for a plan that works for them — the prices will come down over night.
Healthcare reforms:
Get rid of HSAs and the tax deductability of healthcare/insurance spending. These artificial manipulations drive up prices and distort the market in other ways. Spending on doctors and drugs should be thought of as a consumer choice like any other. Severing the employer link to insurance follows naturally from here.
Mandatory cash price lists for all services and procedures. None of this “Here’s the bill we arbitrarily made up. Let’s haggle now.” You can hop on the web and in ten minutes be pretty sure you’ve found the cheapest appendectomy and know pretty close to what it will ultimately cost you.
Anti-trust action against hospital networks. They’ve been blatantly caught colluding in regions to raise prices, as well as consolidating for the clear end of raising prices. There must be a lot of backroom payola going on because there are reams of papers proving anti-competitive behavior that goes unchecked.
Fix/clarify the law so that emergency rooms are free of liability to turn away people not in imminent danger of death. Emergency rooms and ambulances are being abused by illegal aliens and medicaid patients, costing people who actually pay for insurance billions.
As came up in the debate there does need to be some sort of fix for handling people too dumb or poor to have bought insurance before they wound up with a serious condition. I don’t know what the fix is, but it can’t be a tiny financial penalty and normally priced premiums as under obamacare. There has to be some sort of penalty.
Mark, the single biggest problem we face is immigration, which oddly hasn’t come up in the debates. If immigration is not massively curtailed in the next presidency then the demographics will be such that a left coalition promising more and more free stuff will be in power until the republic falls. It’s practically game over on America unless Trump gets in and actually follows through on his immigration rhetoric.
“If the government let the market to deal with its own issues we we will see the prices for drugs increased over and over”
What we have now is a system where you socialize losses and privatize profits. In the past, we realized (e.g. with public utilities) that if the government gives someone a monopoly on something the government also has to create a regulatory structure to limit prices or the monopolist will rape the public. If the public isn’t paying out of their pocket, then they will double rape the government who is. Either you deregulate fully or you regulated fully but if you take half measures the result will be the mess that we have now.
If the government (or gov. mandated insurance) wasn’t paying for these drugs and creating artificial patent and regulatory monopolies for them, and creating huge product liability risks from the tort system (also a creature of law) they would be subject to the same market forces that allow me to buy a bottle of generic aspirin for $1 (and even that $1 bottle includes cost for the above). Epipen’s are filled with ten cents worth of epinephrine, which was first isolated in 1901. Add in another 25 cents for the spring loaded hypodermic auto-injector. The rest of the costs are all a result of government imposed or created costs. It’s just like Trump says when it comes to his income taxes – Epipen (and Trump) are only taking legal advantage of the framework that politicians created – they didn’t write the laws.
“a left coalition promising more and more free stuff will be in power until the republic falls.”
Actually (barring a miraculous Trump victory) I think we are there already – the handwriting is on the wall. People say that future America will be Brasil do Norte, but why not Venezuela?
Yes the debate did something. It put Hillary one step closer to a landslide victory. It also made me question the sanity of anyone who remains undecided.
While I will vote for H, I can understand many of the sentiments of Trump voters, but I just don’t get how a reasonably alert adult could be undecided between these two highly flawed candidates.
The most hilarious thing about this election cycle is that it’s been continuously obvious how far Trump is ahead by the hysterics of his detractors. All the way back to the primaries. You know that Trump really did well in the debate because the media and people like Raleigh are flipping out.
It’s either going to be quite close (as the polls have been indicating for many weeks) or it’s going to be a Brexit scenario where the polls turn out to “unexpectedly” be over 10 points wrong and Trump wins very decisively. Bradley effect and media rigged polling. My bet is the latter and we are on course for president trump. This was pretty much the reagan scenario.
Allowing cross state selling of health insurance might help with prices in some smaller states. However, without community rating that would just produce cheap policies for young healthy men which they would lose if they got sick. Anyone with a bit of gray hair or bad numbers who couldn’t hide under an employer’s skirts would be SOL.
bobbybobbob: At this point FiveThirtyEight is predicting a six-point lead for Clinton (49.1% to 43.2%). And it’ll take a while for the impact of Trump’s bragging about being able to grope women to show up in the polling data. A week is a long time in politics, but if Trump’s going to stage a comeback, he’s running out of time. He did better in the second debate than in the first debate — after a shaky first 30 minutes, he was able to stay focused enough to attack Clinton, which he had failed to do in the first debate — but his aim seemed to be more pumping up his base than winning over undecided voters. (Vowing to throw his opponent in jail, which is something Putin would do, is popular with his base, but deeply scary to other people.)
And his base just isn’t big enough to win. Samuel Goldman:
“Did Donald Trump do any better in this debate than in the last one?”
No…in fact it reinforced the obvious fact that trump is not fit to be president of a school PTA, let alone the president of the USA.
Russil: I’m not sure if you noticed or not but Nate Silver style models have been totally wrong about everything for a year now. This is not like the last handful of election cycles. It’s a paradigm shift and the models are breaking.
“Russil: I’m not sure if you noticed or not but Nate Silver style models have been totally wrong about everything for a year now. This is not like the last handful of election cycles. It’s a paradigm shift and the models are breaking.”
bobbybobbob: if Nate Silver’s odds are wrong (he has HRC at around 80% I think), what odds will you give me on a Trump loss? We can have a friendly bet, if you can to better than the implied 1:4…
If you aren’t sure how accurate your preferred model is, just pad the margin on your odds.
Well, Ed, you’re just anxious and posturing on the internet because you’re worried. I’m not interested in setting odds with you. But as it happens I have $1k riding on Mr. Trump with various dumb money at even odds. Mr. Obama in his previous two elections netted me about $1.5k. This is all cash money bets at even odds.
Very happy at even odds; wife would kill me for a bet involving 3 zeroes, but how about $100 at even odds? Kudos for putting your money where your mouth is. I’ld be betting $100 on HRC to win; if Mr. Trump wins, you get to take $100 from a foreigner!
Obviously, if you take even odds bets about the elections while the real odds are more 1:4 or 1:3, you are doing something wrong as Nate Silver explained himself in his book. This just allows the person you are betting against to simply hedge against you with the bookies and make a profit anyway, resulting in you being the “dumb money”.