Watch And React Live: The Harris Trump Debate
The seal of the Commission on Presidential Debates reading, “THE UNION AND THE CONSTITUTION FOREVER,” hangs above the stage of the first presidential debate of 2016 at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York. Photo cropped from photo by Brian Allen, Voice of America (Public Domain).
Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump will face off at 9pm EDT. Watch it live, react, and discuss at Ordinary Times.
The PBS Newshour simulcast:
Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump face off Tuesday night for their first and possibly only debate before Election Day. The state of the race as they meet in Philadelphia is starkly different than it was just more than two months ago, when Trump debated President Joe Biden in a performance that accelerated calls for Biden to leave the race. Since then, Biden ended his campaign and endorsed Harris, Trump survived an assassination attempt, and both tickets named running mates and made their cases to voters at their national party conventions.
PBS News’ special coverage will begin with the PBS News Hour at 6 p.m. EDT.
At 8 p.m., our digital special preshow begins, with a look back at major moments from the candidates and where they stand on key issues.
The PBS News simulcast of the ABC Presidential Debate will begin at 9 p.m. EDT. After the debate concludes, PBS News special coverage offers debate analysis from Amy Walter, of the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, Republican strategist Kevin Madden and Democratic strategist Ameshia Cross.
Around 11 p.m., coverage continues online, as PBS News’ Deema Zein hosts a post-debate show with correspondents Lisa Desjardins and Laura Barrón-López about the night’s major moments and what’s next for both candidates.
We’re in the basement. We’ve got the 86″ television tuned into CNN.
Trump is deplaning.
2 hours, 8 minutes until showtime.
Biden has declared that Harris is “Calm, Cool, and Collected”.Report
CNN just said that this was the “first, and maybe only, debate”.
We could have a new candidate next week, folks.Report
Okay, the CNN talking heads are setting the bar like this:
This is Trump’s debate to lose and he can lose it in the following 18 ways (distilled down to one: be too much like Trump).
Kamala, by contrast, has to be an effective communicator and introduce herself to the American People and talk about her policies and set herself not only as an alternative to Trump but also as an alternative to the present Administration.
Here’s the r/politics thread sorted by “Top”, for your convenience.Report
THEY SHOOK HANDS
They’re both smiling.Report
They said that there’s no opening statements but the opening question was about the economy and then we got two opening statements.Report
Do you feel prescient about the reference to the Springfield, OH thing?Report
Nah. It was obvious.Report
Harris is on offense and Trump is on defense.Report
He turned abortion into student loan forgiveness.
It might work.Report
It is abundantly obvious that replacing Biden was the right thing to do. By this point in the first debate it was unwatchable. Harris proving major upgrade.Report
Totally – however she ends up doing, it’s miles past what Biden would’ve managed. It’s Trump vs normal politician again.Report
Agreed. The Dems traded up and it reflects well on all the parties and the Party involved that they were able to do so.Report
Let’s not talk about immigration anymore. Let’s talk about abortion.
I dunno that this will land… but maybe.
Third trimester vs. *SOME* abortions in the 2nd.Report
Let’s not talk about abortion anymore, let’s talk about immigration.
Bringing up Trump scuttling the bill that didn’t pass.
Trump talking about the rallies instead of the question.
Sigh.
As for scuttling the bill… he’s not talking about scuttling the bill. He’s back to talking about immigration.
THEY’RE EATING THE CATS!!!Report
Harris brought up all of the former Trump people who left his administration… and Trump said, paraphrased, yeah, they screwed up and I fired them. Nobody got fired after Afghanistan.
Which struck me as a solid hit.
As for deportation, he’s not talking about how he’d do it, he’s talking about how bad the undocumented immigrant problem is.
No logistics, no tactics, no strategery… just the importance of doing it.
And Harris brings up the criminal sentencing.Report
“Which struck me as a solid hit.”
Except he couldn’t identify how they screwed up.
Also… why does he keep hiring screw ups?!Report
Same reason that Biden did, I guess.
According to Trump, the difference isn’t “did they hire screw ups”.
It’s “who fired the screw ups”.Report
As the VP noted, TFG got fired by 81 Million people. Talk about a screw up!Report
Clinton missed by 61,000, but Trump lost by 81 million?Report
Pretty sure you know what she meant.Report
I’m sure Trump said stupid things, and I’m not going to repeat them in non sequiturs for cheap points.Report
VP Harris said that TFG last night was fired by 81 million people – which is the number of people who voted for President Biden.
Did you really need that explained? Really?Report
No, I didn’t need that explained. It was a stupid line and you repeated it as a non sequitur for cheap points. That’s why I replied that while I was sure Trump said stupid things, I wasn’t going to repeat them in non sequiturs for cheap points. I was drawing a distinction.Report
Jaybird was talking about administrations firing screwups. I think reminding folks of the number of people who wanted TFG fired for screwing up was entirely relevant.Report
If we are in agreement that people who screw up should be fired, can we wander back to the topic of Afghanistan?
Or are we going to be talking about Trump some more?Report
How far back in Afghanistan do you want to go?Report
…is this going to result in you talking about Trump?
Because, after you’re done complaining about Trump, I’m going to try to wander back to whether anybody should have been fired for the withdrawal and/or the lying to management about the state of Afghanistan since March of the Penguins was in theaters.Report
The military leaders Biden had who orchestrated the pull out did the best job they could in a really f’d up situation. Firing them wouldn’t really solve a problem since the problems rested on the agreement that was in force. Within the intelligence community – there were certainly some people turning a blind eye to the conditions on the ground in Afghanistan, but even had they not, I doubt a different outcome would have occurred.
At best the firings would have been symbolic and probably created rifts between DoD and the intelligence community and the WH which would have hampered the next response in Ukraine.Report
I would have been fine with intelligence community members being fired for turning blind eyes.
“We shouldn’t fire people because it’ll create rifts” is one hell of a perverse incentive.Report
They weren’t fired for acceding to VP Cheney’s desired lies about WMB in Iraq in the first place. Why would they be fired for this?Report
See? This is one of those things where I think that maybe someone should have been fired for that.
Instead of, you know, being someone we brag about having endorsed Harris.Report
I’m willing to go back to Bush. No one has clean hands here.
Hell’s bells, Russia and Britain are great historical examples of what happens when great powers mess around in that country.Report
That is the challenge with such a massive error that spanned 4 administrations. It’s hard to really know who is responsible for what.
That said I think Jaybird is right on principle, heads could have and should have rolled. But I am also so grateful and impressed that Biden actually extricated the US that I struggle to muster annoyance about it. There was every incentive and plenty of pressure to stay but he did the big picture right thing and got out. I will take the Ws where I can get them.Report
I’m with you. IIRC, the American soldiers will killed by a suicide bomber, and I don’t really know how you prepare for that. We’re probably lucky it was only 13.Report
Nice. Repeating a stupid line with a tenuous connection for cheap points. I stand corrected.Report
Just got home, what’s the score?Report
I have no idea how a normie would watch this but the ABC moderators are execrable.Report
Trump brought up the “bullet to the head”!Report
I actually started laughing when Trump talked about firing all of the officials who wrote books about what a terrible executive Trump was.Report
“Keeping the job is a great way to not write a book.”Report
He hit her with “I’m talking!”
Wait. Why was her mic on?Report
Was it? I didn’t hear anything.Report
I heard her through his mic, I guess.Report
I’m gathering the Trump answer to every question is “immigration!”Report
Unfortunately not. She’s laying bait quite regularly and he’s running after it and landing on it like the fat guy in Animal House doing a belly flop in a baby pool.Report
I’ll take your word for it, I’m coming in late – but he somehow got there from Jan 6Report
Trump is coming across as angry and not particularly charming.
But he brought up the BLM riots in response to the questions on January 6th.Report
“Hard time dealing with having been fired” was a good line.Report
If you are fired by 81 million people, are you The Biggest Loser? Wait, wrong reality show.Report
I went over to r/conservative on Reddit. DJT is killing over there.Report
All of the pinkos on twitter are saying that Harris is killing Trump.
All of the fascists on twitter are saying that Trump is killing Harris.
I have no idea how a normal person would read this debate.
The only mindsets that I’m able to put on are the nutters.Report
Are there any channels doing one of those “real-time reactions from undecided voters” things?Report
What we really need is the Manning-cast.Report
I too am wondering how this comes off for the uncommitted. I wouldn’t say Harris is killing it, but I would say she is looking plausible, even as she mostly answers the question she wants instead of the question asked. Trump is.. well Trump. All over the place. Some better jokes this time than last, but also a lot angrier and more dour.
But I’m voting for Harris so could just be my blinders.Report
https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/7456/Who-will-win-the-2024-US-presidential-election
It was 53-52 Harris pre-debate and is currently 56-48 Harris, for whatever this is worth.Report
Seems about right.Report
Huge If it holds.Report
This thing swings pretty wildly and ultimately its just a certain set of people’s opinions — though opinions they hold strongly enough to lay money on. But as a general sense of, “What are people thinking in the moment?” it may be as good of a gauge as we have.Report
Sincere question…
Besides appealing to current Trump supporters, what can you say Trump did better than Harris tonight?
I missed the start of the debate and attention waned towards the end, so I wasn’t sharply focused throughout. CNN peeps indicate he started strong, which I didn’t see.Report
I don’t think he did anything particularly better but he started out less rambling, answers a little more focused then deteriorated as it went on. It was similar to my recollection of his performance in June.Report
My wife thought he was drugged at the start and it wore off as the evening progressed.Report
That was my perception, as well. I thought at the beginning if he keeps this up, Harris is in trouble. As we all saw, the first 5-10 minutes were his high point.Report
Eh, the big point that he made well, if you ask me, is that Harris is not running against the incumbent, she *IS* the incumbent. He also did fairly well on the questions about the economy and the whole foreign wars thing pointing out that things on those two issues were fine when he was president and everything fell apart as soon as he left.
But he flailed about on abortion and health care and his answers on immigration lost him as many voters as he picked up.
If Kamala can make the election about abortion and health care (and not about the economy or immigration), she’ll win.Report
Kamala makes the point that world leaders were laughing at Trump.
Trump makes the point that the world started blowing up after he left office, not before.Report
Pointing out that Viktor Orbán likes you isn’t maybe the zinger Trump thinks it is, either.Report
Inside baseball. Folks who like Orban are already voting Trump. Folks who hate Orban are voting Harris. People who have no idea who Orban is heard that he’s a Europe guy? In charge?Report
Is this one of those things that makes me “not a normie?”Report
One of us. One of us.Report
I would pay money to watch DJT free associate.Report
Why pay when he’s giving it away for free?Report
That’s how good he is! Now I want to go to one of his rallies and bask in the idiocy.Report
Harris is talking about Israel… good points, I guess. College students everywhere screaming.
Harris talked about a 2-state solution.
Trump is pointing out that this wouldn’t have happened if he stayed president.
Trump isn’t coming out well.
Someone on Twitter said that Trump fans at home are probably feeling the way that Biden fans felt during the last debate.Report
I don’t get the sense that he’s showing his age – if you like Trump, that’s basically what you’re getting tonight.Report
At least that’s my impression – but I’ve had my fill, will check the box score in the morning.Report
Okay. Asked my buddy his take.
Trump is being Trump, he says. Exactly what he expected.
Harris is doing better than he thought Harris would do, but she’s treading water and not hitting Trump with good zingers (and Trump had some good zingers).
From my perspective, Trump is offputting but makes a handful of good points. Harris is less offputting but makes fewer good points.
But I don’t know how to read it as if I were a tabula rosa.Report
That’s a good point. Is there an American who doesn’t have an opinion on Trump? And do we want that person voting? 😉Report
According to the numbers CNN mentioned earlier, 3/10 people remain undecided.
A third, practically.Report
Mind boggling.Report
Commercial break! Let’s see who’s sponsoring this sh*tshow.Report
Turkey, apparently. And some bathroom remodelers.Report
I wonder if it was only local. I got totally different ads.Report
Wait, Turkey, the country? Or Turkey, the sandwich meat?Report
The country. We were looking at beautiful people eating dolmas and peaches and sitting on the beaches looking beautiful.
“We should go there!”, I said to my bud. “Or Alaska.”Report
He’s losing it….He’s melting….Report
I don’t know how Russia/Ukraine will hit in 2024. Trump is hitting on the importance of ending the war today. Harris wants the war to continue until Ukraine wins.Report
What are DJT’s terms?Report
He didn’t say. He said he wanted it to end.
Harris is talking about the importance of not selling our friends out.Report
Afghanistan!
She’s pivoted well away from the withdrawal to how glad she is that the war is over. Which is the right play.
Trump is talking about how his withdrawal would have been better than Harris’s.Report
“I have concepts of a plan; I’m not president right now.”Report
Harris is doing a goodish job on “health care should be a right”.
I think she may have won the debate with that.Report
We are a failing nation in decline people are laughing at us. Wow. That is not how I would have ended this.Report
I’ve had a lot of thoughts about this post from Georgia Law professor Eric Segall since reading it. Specifically:
[Emphasis added.]
The message that “We’re a failing nation. We’re a nation that’s in serious decline. We’re being laughed at all over the world. All over the world, they laugh….” seems to resonate with a certain group of people. And yeah, that’s where Trump chose to end it. The pitch, I guess, is “No matter what you think of me, she’s worse.”Report
Interesting. The student must have been looking for a fight and/or the teacher was a hack.Report
It’s not so implausible. Law school attracts a lot of people with ideas they are dying to tell you about. I can’t ever decide if I think the dynamic is good for the profession or the institutions that produce it.Report
Totally. It’s easy to imagine either of them being insufferable, or both. I don’t know the author, but the piece has an air to it.Report
Yea. Granted I went to a law school that’s probably best known for being the butt of several jokes on the Wire, if it’s known for anything at all. Needless to say we were discouraged from thinking too highly of ourselves.Report
It’s as if conservatives are deeply aggrieved and resentful and uncomfortable with the modern world and their place in it.
And like those MAGA HVAC contractors and farm owners and auto dealers,(all of whom eagerly employ immigrant labor) if you were to ask this student or any MAGA why they believe the world is in decline, they will spin you yarns about immigrants eating cats or students getting sex change operations in high school gym class or women murdering their babies three hours after giving birth.
But the real grievance is that they are somehow forced to tolerate or show respect and decency to people they consider their inferior.Report
It reminds me of this article that got some attention:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2024/aug/12/trump-maga-divide-son-father?utm_term=Autofeed&CMP=twt_gu&utm_medium&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1723469553
It reads in several different ways depending on your priors.Report
How do you believe it reads?Report
I remember Bill Bennett talking about why he didn’t want to run for president, that it’d be no fun travelling around the country for two years telling people that everything is terrible.Report
Mr. Positive with the closing statement.Report
Closing statements:
Harris: “We’re not going back”. Forward, having a plan, aspirations, dreams, hopes, ambitions, “opportunity economy”, protecting seniors, bringing down the cost of living, sustaining, respect for America and respect for the military, abortion, prosecutor. She cares and she’s not putting herself first.
Trump: She’s going to do this, she’s going to do that… why hasn’t she done it over the last 3 1/2 years? She isn’t going to do it because she doesn’t believe in it. We’re a nation in decline and the leaders don’t understand what’s going on and Russia and Ukraine and we’re going to be in a 3rd World War. I built up the military, she gave it to the Taliban. Immigration, criminals, the worst president, the worst vice-president in the history of our country.
She went positive.
He went negative.
And that’s that.
I’m going home.
Harris won… I’d probably give it 75-80/20-25.Report
Kamala the Kop, what is best in life?
Kamala: To crush your Trump, see him driven before you, and hear the lamentations of J.D. Vance.Report
Taylor Swift has weighed in.Report
The Swifties called justice down on Ticketmaster with the heat of ten thousand furious suns. What chance does a mere politician have against them?Report
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/f085b2093539f22a3852d4d9fc0349eeac572c43d570632d8eeae387b6f89400.jpgReport
In retrospect, how could this have gone any different?
Was anyone expecting Trump to be anything other than bitter and aggrieved, riven with resentment?
Was anyone expecting Harris, with a lifetime of standing up to bullies and criminals, to be rattled and intimidated?Report
This debate is how literally every debate with Donald Trump should have gone, because Donald Trump is a giant gift to the debating trick of ‘answer the question you want instead of the one you were asked’.
Because with Trump, you not only can answer the question you want, you can make him answer the question that he now wants (aka, is psychologically incapable of refusing) to answer, instead of the one that he should be answering.
For example, as someone who plans to vote for Harris (obviously), I do think it is a valid point that she is refusing to answer the question of why the administration that she is part of hasn’t done the things she said she will do.
For the record, I think there are a couple of good answers for that, I’m not really attacking her on that point, but she has managed to not have to answer that question, which is good because those answers would bog down her campaign and not work for everyone.
So she is just ignored it, and that’s, I guess, how politics and the media works now. Well, I’ve known that because that’s how Trump has always functioned, but I’m glad that the Democrats have finally realized they don’t really have to address anything ever… I mean, I guess I’m not glad about that, actually, but it’s better than Democrats trying to address it, thus losing, and someone who I think we all need to admit at this point is an outright fascist getting into office.
It is not the Democrats fault that the media has been utterly destroyed and turned into gibberish, so much so that candidates can get away with not ever addressing things that they should be addressing.
And it has been a really, really long time that I thought a Democrat has run a good campaign, one that actually understands things. Whoever is running hers is astonishing.Report
Against my will, I ended up watching the debate. I had two separate chat threads going on.
It was a squash. He came across as mostly incoherent, irritable-to-angry, and scattered. She was focused and relaxed and sometimes witty (it helps to have a straight man feeding you openings). She displayed calm, other-centered leadership that he simply isn’t capable of.Report
And obviously I want to admit to my biases: I’d vote for a limp dishrag to keep wish.com Mussolini out of the White House.Report
As an unabashed partisan I’m pretty chuffed with Harris’ performance.Report
I graded her a very solid B. She isn’t Obama, and she isn’t even Biden in 2012. However she looked completely plausible in the role and other than sounding a little nervous at the very beginning came off quite well. She also looked better and better as Trump went further off into space as the night went on. Overall a good performance that her supporters can feel happy about.
If I really had to nitpick as a political junkie I’d have liked to see her weave less and directly address her pain points more but the show wasn’t for me, it was for the low info voters who somehow are still up for grabs. In terms of the victor she took it, no contest.Report
Funny I thought she was better than Obama, but I’ve never loved the man, and I’ve always felt like Obama approached politics with a kind of disdain for the work of it that really undercut him.
My own hope is that with this win Harris’ campaign will relax a little and put her out for more coverage and exposure than they have.
I’d be surprised if Trump agrees to another debate.Report
There’s already reporting he is trying to decline the invitation to debate even on Fox.Report
I am not surprised at all. As some people I’ve read have observed- Trump didn’t turn in a bad performance for Trump, he turned in a standard performance in fact. It’s just that Trumps performance is pretty lousy and it’s unlikely he can do much better than that. So, if he always throws paper, cannot be made to throw rock or scissors and Harris has demonstrated she can throw scissors then the only rational thing for Trumps crew to do is keep him out of the game of Rock, Paper, Scissors.Report
It’s hard for me to compare because Obama is the last presidential candidate I really got excited about.
Not in a sense that he betrayed us all or anything. More like:
Here’s a guy who was a generational political talent and something of an inspirational figure, and he won, and he did an OK job all in all, but was neither amazing nor terrifying. Definitely not transformational.
Anyway, that aside he was never a great debater. Not horrible either. It just wasn’t where he was really at his best and most comfortable.Report
I feel ya, I was on team HRC in ‘7-08*, so I always took a jaundiced view of Obama’s Hope and Change themes even as I appreciated the victory. He did a fine job overall, and I was entirely happy voting for him in 2012 but he just disdained the business of politics and party building in a way that just drove me batty. I always will wonder if HRC had not been so high on her own supply of inept hangers on* in ’08 and had won that year instead, on a more cynical and jaundiced theme towards the GOP, with Obama as her Veep how history would have gone differently. Obama vs Trump would have been a blowout for us I’d think .
And, yes, Obama never loved debating and approached it with some palpable resignation. God(ess?), I still can remember the cold chill I got when he choked the first debate in ’12 when Romneybot was running on all cylinders.
*May Mark Penn die painfully and slow roast in agnostic h3ll forever.Report
This is one where I will disagree with you and pillsy, and where I think the counter intuitive takes on Obama have gone too far. And I get why. He bequeathed a very rough ride.
But the hope and change stuff delivered a trifecta and super majority. That capital was spent on the ACA, which is and remains, even in it’s somewhat trimmed, and never implemented to the full extent it should have been form, a very important achievement. I don’t think HRC could have delivered it.
I’ll also say that while Biden, who was definitely a better operator with legislation, did some good stuff, much of which needed to be done, none of that compares to the actual positive impact of the wellbeing of the citizenry, which to me is the whole point of all of this.Report
Fair enough and a good point. In HRC-verse she probably gets the trifecta (W and his party were justifiably loathed) but I grant she probably wouldn’t have gotten a 60 vote filibuster proof majority in the Senate. And then the butterfly wings get going and history goes wingdings.
And, yes, much as I like ol Uncle Joe, the ACA was historic, significant and is now popular which means it’s going to be really tough to get rid of. Nothing Joe did will compare to that though he has accomplished astonishingly much for one term.
Also, in my defense, the “counter intuitive takes” on Obama were my first takes and I’m on record on this very site grumbling about them back when everyone else was over the moon about him. *shakes his cane irritably*Report
In 2008 I was still in a state of total outrage about the Iraq War and felt betrayed by a lot of the Clintonite establishment for giving Bush some bipartisan cover. My jets have long since cooled and over time my opinion of her has become a bit more nuanced.
I also think Biden has been quite succesful especially under the constraints, and it’s a shame his career had to end the way it did. But hey, whatever happens next I think we can feel good today. And I think you’re right that Harris’ handlers should feel free to give her a longer leash and some additional exposure. The more people see her acting just like a normal, generally appealing person the better.Report
If Harris wins Biden’s single term will be lit in a very golden glow of accomplishment and victory. History will be kind.Report
A large number of people who didn’t want Obamacare didn’t want it because it was going to make things worse.
Well, we got it. It made some things worse, it made some things better, and now we’ve had it for a decade.
Get rid of it? Holy cow no! Getting rid of it will make things worse!
Ad infinitum.Report
I think the ACA is one of those weird situations where it wasn’t really what the winners wanted so the losers wrote the history. I also think Harris provided a pretty solid albeit brief articulation of why no one seriously wants to go back when the subject came up last night.Report
The problem with healthcare is that America’s is pretty darn good! It’s just too expensive and there isn’t enough of it.
“We need more of a thing and we need to make it cheaper” is a problem that requires a scalpel rather than a sledge and the government has a *LOT* of John Henrys.
But I digress.Report
Nope. Definitely sledge hammer territory. If, as Dark always intones – transparent pricing which induces competition is the solution, Congress will have to make laws.
If, as I and others believe believe it will require a shift to single payer – Medicare for all – that will require Congress to pass laws.
Both are sledge hammers. the ACA was the scalpel approach which is why it failed.Report
The ACA doubled down on the parts of the system that made it expensive. It was insurance reform, not medical reform.Report
I don’t think you’re entirely correct about that. The big lesson is that the more people who have insurance the more market opportunities you create which are then filled by enterprising providers, which leads to an increase in service access and fewer people falling through the cracks. The ACA did not solve the core transparency problem which is still an issue. However it did do the following:
-fixed the most glaring holes in the private insurance system that screw people over (no, not all, but the biggest are gone)
-halted the ever increasing leak of people falling out of the insurance system altogether, which creates its own source of massive costs
-provided for the technical investments and incentives that have spurred the increasing retailization of healthcare services
Without the ACA you would not have the rapid expansion of urgent care and minute clinic type operations that are now providing basic care and coverage, and you can see how good it is by the fact that our infrastructure kicked the European infrastructure’s ass when it came to an actual crisis, i.e. vaccine distribution during covid. Our main problem is that for reasons I will never understand one of our two political parties has completely checked out of the issue in any constructive way.
Anyway, what’s clear to me is that whether the government or the private sector pays is a lot less important than whether the system as a whole is coherent, which ours still isn’t in a whole bunch of ways (the employer sponsorship issue remains a significant complication). That’s the only actual advantage ‘single payor’ countries have, and of course ‘single payor’ means something completely different depending on which of those countries you’re in, plenty of which also involve private health insurance.
All that aside though the ACA has been an unambiguously good thing and massive improvement on the situation that preceded it. We should be spurring ahead with improvements to it, but alas, the political right ranges from ‘what if we just kicked people off insurance so we can justify a tax cut’ to ‘Bill Gates is working with the government to put microchips in my brain.’Report
1. I agree pretty much 100% with your take on the ACA.
2. I’m very interested (not in a rhetorical sense) in how Dark Matter thinks we should address the cost transparency problem.Report
I can’t speak for him but from past conversations I believe he thinks there should be a mandate for price transparency and (I assume) a prohibition on the ability to charge differently for the same procedure based on payor, which happens as a result of opaque negotiations between payor and health system, practice, network, whatever. And he isn’t wrong that it’s a problem.
What I will say is that there are a lot of state level transparency laws (Maryland has one) but they tend to be of limited utility given that healthcare doesn’t lend itself to shopping around the way many other services might. I support transparency but I think what you’re really trying to get to is economics of scale so that it all matters a lot less, and if the patient is (a) getting the service, and (b) not being put in an untenable financial situation for having gotten it, I dont really care what the payors and providers want to work out.Report
Got it. I think the area where I would probably break with you both is that I believe you actually really do need an authority setting reimbursement rates, no matter how the other arrangements shake out.
This is nigh-universal in other First World healthcare systems, and the general “no shopping around” aspect and generally extremely regulated nature of the market you wind up mean you don’t have the same kind of drawbacks you usually get from that kind of set up.
Most of my career has been supporting Pharma as a health economist, and I’ve seen more than a few of those systems up close. They are far from perfect, but also profoundly less fished than what we have here.Report
I’m open to investigating the issue. I started in house on the provider side and for the last oh 8ish years I’ve been in the provider-facing technology side. The thing I always get nervous about with it is that where we have reimbursement rates set with government programs there’s this constant threat of providers simply no longer taking government program patients. And while I understand there are also solutions to that I worry about the heavy handedness of them taking us in a counter productive direction.
But I’m also not an economist, and always try to keep an open mind. So convince-able.Report
Yeah the trick only works if the vast majority of care is purchased as those prices.
That said, I think it wouldn’t be too hard to make it so that private insurers are also paying those rates, or something close to them, since they’d almost surely be considerably lower than what they’re paying now. You could probably trade it for lower burden of paperwork for providers since there’s just a lot of crazy hoop-jumping there now.
Also, these rates are set in a structured way, and one where providers and manufacturers generally have opportunities to make their case for higher rates.
The other stuff I have very weak preferences on. Like, I think going to an NHS-style actually socialized system would be a low-key disaster, but other than that I think it’s really figuring out how to trade off between various priorities in ways that don’t easily break down between “right” and “wrong”.
I also have no illusion that this wouldn’t have winners and losers, not just in terms of payers and providers, but also between different patient populations. On aggregate I think we would end up with both better outcomes and lower costs, but that’s just on aggregate.Report
My take on it from the sort of inside legal perspective is that it’s a Rube Goldberg machine that functions at the level it does by virtue of having lots and lots of money put into it.Report
“We need to make it cheaper!”
“Quick! Pour more money into it!”
It’s going to require pouring more money into it over there, there, and way over there instead of keeping doing it into where we’ve been pouring it.Report
Reuters reports: Some undecided voters not convinced by Harris after debate with Trump
The take on this that *STUNG*:
“Only theatre kids thought Harris won.”Report
ah yes “we trust HIM more on the economy” then her, even though his signature economic accomplishment was a tax cut for corporations and rich people. Ugh. I strongly suspect such people aren’t really undecided.Report
Who knows it’s literally 10 people.Report
Where was the “theater kids” zinger? I didn’t see it in the article.Report
It was a take on the twitters explaining the article.Report
Oh.Report
Although the sample size was small, the responses suggested Harris might need to provide more detailed policy proposals to win over voters who have yet to make up their minds.
lol sureReport
Right, because TFG has been so detailed in his policy proposals. These folks are letting their misogyny and racism show . . .Report
Or these might — hear me out here — these just might not have been actually “undecided” voters.Report
I agree.Report
Voters don’t usually care about age, unless they suspect it’s an issue or are told to suspect it’s an issue. They usually don’t care about Benghazi, or the national debt, or whether a candidate can spell “potato”, unless they suspect it’s an issue or are told to suspect it’s an issue. Those responses that you’re laughing at, they’re information.Report
As long as you put the same amount of weight on this information that has 9 former Trump voters now supporting Harris (note I put the weight on specific focus groups at zero percent)
https://twitter.com/KamalaHQ/status/1833974595352735853
“I was in a focus group this morning of nine former Trump voters from swing states. All of them said they were now leaning far more towards voting for Harris”Report
The campaigns need to listen to these things, particularly the messages they don’t want to hear.Report
I’m laughing less at the article’s interpretation. As written, it’s way too good to be true.
I read most of the actual responses as, “We don’t really feel we know enough about Harris,” and, “We don’t really like Biden and want to see more daylight between him and Harris.”
There was one that I really just read as a guy looking for an excuse to vote for Trump but I have nothing to back that up but intuition.
Nothing came across as racist or sexist, pace Philip H.Report
Here’s the stuff that makes people angry at the press.
The former President repeated a baseless Internet rumor that migrant invaders were killing and eating pet dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio, and claimed that Harris “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison.”
Correction, Sept. 11
The original version of this story mischaracterized as false Donald Trump’s statement accusing Kamala Harris of supporting “transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison” As a presidential candidate in 2019, Harris filled out a questionnaire saying she supported taxpayer-funded gender transition treatment for detained immigrants.
Do you notice that “and claimed that” implies a false claim? Like, if you were going to say that Harris falsely claimed something then changed it to Harris claimed something, you’re still casting it in terms of an opponent’s claim? Like, I get that this part of the article was talking about style and impressions, but this particular sentence was addressing facts, and it got one wrong and hardly corrected it.
https://time.com/7019747/harris-trump-debate-cover/Report
So you equate “Wants to do” with “supports” in term of veracity?
Fascinating.Report
I think that “wants to do” approximates “supports”. Wouldn’t you say that Trump wants to cut taxes, even if it’s not a priority for him?
She was asked in 2019:
“As President will you use your executive authority to ensure that transgender and nonbinary people who rely on the state for medical care — including those in prison and immigration detention — will have access to comprehensive treatment associated with gender transition, including all necessary surgical care? If yes, how will you do so?”
She answered:
“It is important that transgender individuals who rely on the state for care receive the treatment they need, which includes access to treatment associated with gender transition. That’s why, as Attorney General, I pushed the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to provide gender transition surgery to state inmates. I support policies ensuring that federal prisoners and detainees are able to obtain medically necessary care for gender transition, including surgical care, while incarcerated or detained. Transition treatment is a medical necessity, and I will direct all federal agencies responsible for providing essential medical care to deliver transition treatment.”
Wants? Sure.Report
So yes, you equate them.
See, not all of us do. Its like abortion – you can support the right for any given women to have that option without trying to get any given women to have on. “She wants to do this to X” is coercive language. “She supports this being available to X” is permissive language. She supports people getting medically necessary treatments. She’s not going require or force it. Maybe not apples and ice cubes, but definitely apples and avocados.
And lets be real – Trump supports tax cuts that benefit him. Which his 2017 tax cut most certainly did.Report
It’s interesting, I think a weakness of the left side is that they equate “wants to” with “requires” too much. We all want a world without racial slurs, where the wealthy to aid the poor, but only the left tries to put it into law. The only things that have to be done with law are international relations and, well, law.
That aside, “wants to do” approximates “supports” a lot more closely than “falsely claims” approximates “truthfully cites”. Time messed up the latter.Report
We try to put it into law because history is littered with examples of humans actively opposing all those good things, and using the oppressive forces of the state to actively disrupt desirable outcomes.
And even when we put it into law, conservatives seek to dismantle the legal construct when it doesn’t serve their purposes. Roe V. Wade is but one example – the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act are others. They did great things for our nation, corrected deeply immoral wrongs, and have been all but repealed by conservative law makers who find them an obstacle to implementing their political will.Report