+ The George HW Bush trend I think is instructive, in that he started with high enough favorables in-party, but the surprising semi-success of Buchanan eroded [. . .]
The George HW Bush trend I think is instructive, in that he started with high enough favorables in-party, but the surprising semi-success of Buchanan eroded them and then it became a self-fulfilling downward spiral.
That said, what's also notable is that every primary challenger has been from the wings, not the center. The wings are getting what they want, so nobody's going to primary Trump from that angle. 'Centrist' intraparty insurgencies are as pointless and useless as John Anderson's 1980 run (or McMuffin's 2016 one).
+ Sure.
Most of the time though when Medicaid refuses to enroll a provider it is because they’ve been excluded, meaning they can’t participate in any [. . .]
Sure. Most of the time though when Medicaid refuses to enroll a provider it is because they’ve been excluded, meaning they can’t participate in any government payer program- Medicaid, Medicare, or Tricare. That’s typically because of a conviction for fraudulent billing. Most others will be enrolled without issue, if properly credentialed and the paperwork is in order. But they can be disenrolled for things like not submitting renewal paperwork on time, not cooperating with records requests, or frequent denied claims.
A bigger issue is that Medicaid is rapidly switching over to Managed Care Organizations, which are private companies like Aetna who get monthly capitation payments by the program in order to cover a segment of the Medicaid population. They are allowed to create their own “networks” of providers, which is where I could see this being an issue. The Medicaid recipients don’t get to choose whether or not they’re placed in an MCO or traditional Medicaid, so that may be an instance where the ability to sue the program for access to your preferred provider may come into play.
Right. Subsidies are fine (or can be) but we have to do a good job of differentiating "Cheap for the end consumer" and "cheap". A lot of the discussion have historically done a very good job of that.
I've said things along these lines before about higher ed: We need to not only have cheaper college options for families, but also cheaper overall.
At least a couple of the economists that did the original work for CATO have recanted -- they now assert that in practice, a market system with all the bells and whistles needed to provide long-term stability doesn't produce electricity at lower prices or with higher reliability than the old rate-of-return regulatory system.
In practice, CATO's "separate generation from distribution and have a neutral operator run a market to match them" approach was overly simplistic. The PJM is the premier market-based system in the US. First, they have more than a thousand generating companies and dozens of utilities -- a situation that doesn't exist elsewhere in the country -- so everyone is, as the economists say, a price taker. Second, almost from day one, they've had to keep tinkering with the system. They had to tightly couple the transmission market with the generation market in order to avoid some of the problems of the California debacle. They had to add a spinning reserve market. They had to add a capacity market to meet future needs. There's now a distinct non-zero chance that the thing will come largely apart because the operator hasn't been able to find a way to meet both federal rules for markets and some states' rules mandating renewable share. That's mostly just the nature of the beast. Absent vast amounts of storage, large scale use of renewables means you need both interstate-scale geographic diversity and rules that say non-renewable sources only get used for demand in excess of what renewables can provide. FERC says that combination violates their rules and/or the enabling federal statutes.
+ I'm fine with subsidizing something, if it's important*, while it's getting it's feet under itself. But just straight up subsidize it. Don't subsidize [. . .]
I'm fine with subsidizing something, if it's important*, while it's getting it's feet under itself. But just straight up subsidize it. Don't subsidize it by forcing A to pay $X to B, and then holding B up and saying "Look, it makes good economic sense!"
Just give B a tax credit, or give A a break on interest rates, or something along those lines. And be upfront. We need to ween ourselves off of oil/NG, and nukes are a political hand grenade, so we are supporting solar and wind (and hydro?) while we work out the kinks and make the transition.
This is one of my favorite things about growing a beard.
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