Saturday, September 22, 2007

John Conyers for President

No, John Conyers is not running for President, but I wish he would. My dream ticket [of the current crop of Democrats] would be Edwards/Gore or Gore/Edwards, but if Al Gore absolutely cannot be persuaded, I'd happily vote for Edwards/Conyers.

Meanwhile, John Conyers has already done the heavy lifting on health care reform. In the 109th Congress, he introduced HR 676, The United States National Health Insurance Act, aka Medicare For All.

Some highlights [from the fact sheet]:
  • Who is eligible? Every person living or visiting in the United States and the U.S. Territories
  • What would be covered? This program will cover all medically necessary services, including primary care, inpatient care, outpatient care, emergency care, prescription drugs, durable medical equipment, hearing services, long term care, mental health services, dentistry, eye care, chiropractic, and substance abuse treatment. Patients have their choice of physicians, providers, hospitals, clinics, and practices. No co-pays or deductibles are permissible under this act.
  • How much would it cost me? Currently, the average family of four covered under an employee health plan spends a total of $4,225 on health care annually – $2,713 on premiums and another $1,522 on medical services, drugs and supplies. Under H.R. 676, a family of four making the median family income of $56,200 per year would pay about $2,700 for all health care costs, including the current Medicare tax.

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

How about Edwards/Kucinich?

hipparchia said...

i like kucinich's politics a lot, and i love the idea of his department of peace. of all the announced candidates [to date], he's the closest to my own views [except abortion, only gravel gets that one right].

kucinich and conyers are about equally far-enough left, that i can see, but while kucinich would work towards improving racial equality, having conyers on the ticket would be an improvement in racial equality.

plus, that text messaging stunt kucinich pulled in the youtube debate, wtf? that kind of fractiousness would be perfectly appropriate in a lot of congressional debates [and races], but i don't think i want it in the white house.

obama/clinton or clinton/obama would be a huge step forward in equality for all kinds of currently oppressed groups of course, at least as far as representation goes, but that's all they've got going for them [for me].

it's just my impression, and i'm not going to go looking for hard data to back it up just yet, but clinton and obama both strike me as being moderates who are pandering to the right, while edwards is a moderate who is pandering to the left. i like that in a candidate. if i'm not going to be represented, i'd at least like to be pandered to.

Anonymous said...

My thought is that we should try to build a whole cabinet out of as many of the announced candidates and other leading figures in the Democratic party and maybe some independents, as possible.

I don't want to say bad things about Hillary Clinton but I won't vote for her.

I like John Conyers and if he wants to be on a ticket I'd certainly think it's worth considering. Or to be attorney general, for that matter.

Anonymous said...

I think Hillary Clinton would make a good secretary of health and human services.

Anonymous said...

At this point, the head of the ticket should be John Edwards in my opinion. That doesn't mean he's perfect but he's someone that has been willing to admit mistakes and I respect him for that. So he's trying the best he can, I think, and his wife is amazing too.

Anonymous said...

Oh, and if Nancy Pelosi would like to be president (or even if she doesn't like the idea very much herself), I think it would be a marvelous thing to impeach and remove the current administration.

Unknown said...

I could go with either of the tickets you suggest. Do you think we’ll nominate either Hillary or Barack? If so, do you think either has a chance considering the conservatives (even Dem conservations) who remain prejudiced against women and people of color? We definitely need to win this next presidential election!

hipparchia said...

president pelosi would have been a dream come true, but i've wondered sometimes if she said impeachent is off the table precisely because she does not want to be the one to inherit the present mess. i can't say i blame her, if that's the case.

conyers would be a great choice for attorney general. an aside: i just now looked at his bio [more carefully], i didn't realize he was that old. that would be a tough sell, getting people to vote for a president or vice president who would be 80 years old at the beginning of his term.

i like edwards best of the three, in part for the reasons you mention, but also because getting him elected president is the closest we're likely to get to having elizabeth edwards in the white house. i really like her.

i won't be voting for her in the primary, but if we get hillary clinton as the democratic nominee, i'm not yet sure how i'd vote in the general election. it would probably depend who she picks as her running mate. if she picked gore, she'd probably have my vote.

hipparchia said...

nick,

you're right about the racists and misogynists in the general population, but i don't think a clinton/obama ticket would necessarily lose on those grounds.

hillary is man anough and obama is white enough to win over a fair number of only moderately racist and sexist voters. and they've both acquired a lot of star power just from the media's constant trumpeting of their fund-raising prowess.

that could backfire if the big fundraisers keep getting arrested, of course. i would like to see the lobbying industry disappear almost as badly as i want the health insurance industry to disappear.

Steve Bates said...

If I had to pick among the Big Three, I'd pick Edwards. The notion that he is a centrist who has decided to broaden his appeal leftward seems about right to me. I'm not sure if his health care plan is better than Hillary's... of Hillary's plan, Edwards has basically called imitation the sincerest form of flattery... but I do have more confidence that Edwards is not faking, triangulating, etc. I wish I had that confidence in Hillary.

Obama is a bit too "let us reason together" and "we are all people of faith" for my taste. In opposing a party that views bipartisanship as "another name for date rape" (Grover Norquist, quoted from memory), I have no interest in "reasoning" together; there's too much to fix to waste time reasoning with people who are hostile to the very notion of reason. And I'm only in the most tenuous sense a "person of faith"; fundamentalists would deny that I, as a UU, am such a person at all. So Obama scares me a bit.

That said, I shall abide by my long-ago promise to vote in November 2008 for the Democratic nominees for president and veep. Hey, it may be our last presidential election, if it happens at all... I may as well "dance with them as brung [me]" (Darrell Royal, UT coach a few years back).

[bbhun - Bush be the Hun]

hipparchia said...

...there's too much to fix to waste time reasoning with people who are hostile to the very notion of reason.

amen, bro.

they all 3 have the same [lousy] health plan, with but a few insignificant differences to distinguish them from one another. i was truly saddened that krugman seems to approve of them. i thought he was on our side.

Steve Bates said...

My guess is that Krugman is well-insured by Princeton. People who have decent medical insurance paid for by someone else tend not to have the same perspective as those who lack insurance or who pay exorbitant sums for private insurance. The need for reform is somehow never quite as urgent to them as to us.

That said, I'd probably be marginally better off under HillaryCare than I am now. The problem is that our political adversaries would see HillaryCare as the end of the reform process, not the beginning (at best).

hipparchia said...

The problem is that our political adversaries would see HillaryCare as the end of the reform process, not the beginning

right on.

i would probably be better off under hillaryedwardsobamaromneycare too, in that i'd at least have insurance. i don't know what the premiums would be, but realisitically, it would have to cost enough that i'd be squeezed pretty hard to pay it. and i make just enough money that i'd probably not qualify for help.

without a huge amount of expensive regulation and enforcement [thus needlessly driving up my premium that i'm going to have trouble paying], i'd also probably be facing the claims denial merry-go-round again too. ugh.