False Republican Assumptions about Medicaid

It's remarkable to hear Republicans talk about work requirements for Medicaid recipients.

They either assume that 1) being employed automatically means having access to affordable healthcare, and thus no need for Medicaid coverage... or that 2) simply having access to affordable healthcare is itself somehow "waste, fraud, or abuse" of a system designed to cover low income individuals.

Healthcare coverage should never have been tied to employment or the expectation that employers would provide it. The job market and employer-employee relations are far too unstable, volatile, and exploitative for this proposition to be effective - and it shows in terms of poorer healthcare outcomes in America relative to most developed countries.

Medicare for All would much more effectively solve this problem (as other countries have already done), but for-profit health insurers would be much more limited in the population to which they target their rent-seeking, predatory business model.

Twitter ("X") thinks LGBTQ inclusion is "Hateful Conduct"

 

It's almost impossible to talk about this subject without being flagged for 'Hateful Conduct' on Elon Musk's hate-infested website.

Moments later, the bad AI running the shoddy site was corrected.

Trump Tariffs Mattel

Now Donald Trump is targeting individual US companies who move production to any country other than USA (due to tariffs Trump has imposed on goods imported from other countries) with corporation-specific, targeted tariffs.

I've never believed that most profit-driven corporations are willing to take the massive losses due to much higher production costs by reshoring factories in the USA, no matter what punitive tariffs the Trump administration imposes.

Trump's trade war is a failure, and that's in part because his trade war tactics are totally ineffective. And very likely, these unilateral tariff declarations by the president are illegal absent a compelling national emergency (never established).

source: NBC News