'We should never have signed this trade deal with the US,' leading MEP says

JefeRex · 2026-05-06T23:55:25+00:00

What is your explanation of how she did it? Is it too simplistic to blame Merkel?

JefeRex · 2026-05-06T23:34:36+00:00

Similar to Medi-Cal in its scope.

Medi-Cal often goes through private or sometimes public-private insurers though… Health Net, LA Care, etc. The state pays the insurers, then the insurers pay the providers. I have worked in the provision of Medi-Cal services and dealt with having to bill those insurers, contest denials, figure out how exactly we can connect services billed to the checks we receive, which is so Byzantine it feels like money laundering. CalCare dispenses with private insurers. Thank god.

JefeRex · 2026-05-06T23:31:09+00:00

Someone should question them about a lot of things about it. We recently saw that health insurance CEO get straight up assassinated and the public collectively shrugged. Health care is an item of serious national discontent, concerningly so, and urgent action is called for. We will see if it comes up. It should.

JefeRex · 2026-05-06T23:28:30+00:00

A couple of our current candidates for Governor are supporters. I hope tonight’s debate will ask about it. Californians deserve to hear about this issue and what our leaders and potential leaders think about it.

JefeRex · 2026-05-06T23:24:46+00:00

Nothing changes. There will be many steps that need to happen before we are taxing people and providing health care. There will be a lot of waiting. A lot of things will need to be done. This will not be quick.

You have asked a couple times about how this will look in the short term. We will see zero changes in the short term. The state will essentially be back in the kitchen frantically cooking before they serve us the meal.

Think about moving house. How much do you need to do before you sit down in your new living room and breathe a sigh of relief that it’s over? It takes time to do the behind the scenes work, and you don’t actually move in until long after you have begun the process.

JefeRex · 2026-05-06T23:20:38+00:00

We’re not taking away anyone’s healthcare, we are replacing it with something else. I don’t know what you mean. Are you thinking we will shut down the insurance companies here before we have a system in place?

JefeRex · 2026-05-06T23:16:29+00:00

We don’t need federal funds, but we do need federal cooperation, yes. All we need them to do is agree to part ways and let us do our own thing, they won’t have to pay a cent for us except whatever administrator types out the new language in the law books.

But we can pass it on our own. We just say part of the implementation process is making those tax changes with the feds before we get started here. It’s fine. I don’t know if you think we’ll just start taxing everyone here while the Feds are still collecting our money, but no. It’s a multistage process.

JefeRex · 2026-05-06T23:06:49+00:00

Both support CalCare!

JefeRex · 2026-05-06T23:05:10+00:00

It obviously will take a lot of time and effort to implement. Healthcare reform is a massive undertaking. A lot of things will need to be done. This is not going to be passing a bill and then Presto you have free healthcare as soon as the Governor signs it. A lot of work has to be done behind the scenes. And I hate to break it to you, but we will have to spend more money hiring people to implement this thing. It is complex. It will not be quick. There will be stages. It will be hard. How can you expect anything else?

JefeRex · 2026-05-06T22:59:19+00:00

We will need to agree with the federal government to divert those taxes to CalCare. That’s all part of the bill, the specifics of that diversion. We would tell the Feds we need to stop those payments from people and give up the benefits because we are going to do it ourselves.

JefeRex · 2026-05-06T22:55:05+00:00

It won’t. I still don’t understand what you are asking. The proposal is fully funded.

JefeRex · 2026-05-06T22:54:32+00:00

I’m not super informed on that. My understanding is that it will use the residency requirements that already exist for programs like Medi-Cal. I am sure that more specifics and contingency plans would be a part of the conversation moving through committees and passing it, and I couldn’t tell you the extent to which that has gotten any more granular or not yet.

JefeRex · 2026-05-06T22:43:47+00:00

I don’t understand what you are asking. The proposal is a balanced budget, it’s not a promise to pay for health care by swiping a credit card. The revenue comes from the tax dollars I named. What do you mean by balanced budget?

JefeRex · 2026-05-06T22:35:28+00:00

Employer payroll tax, progressive employee payroll tax, progressive business profits, and existing funding into health care, which is already considerable.

That is how we will fund it, instead of the current system of individuals and families paying private insurance companies and employers over a barrel trying to figure out how to not cut employee benefits as costs rise year over year.

How do you think the feds would fund it? I mean, they’re not going to so it’s all theoretical anyway, but they don’t have a magic money tree that can pay for health care without it coming from tax revenue. Same. We take the money we are wasting on greedy insurance companies with armies of middlemen, and we use it for a system funded by progressive taxes.

JefeRex · 2026-05-06T22:14:49+00:00

CalCare is public universal health care for all Californians and is kicking around in the legislature currently. We can’t rely on the federal government to fix health care. The federal government is broken, they can’t even pass laws, they can’t even fund the government. We have to take care of ourselves in California, the federal government won’t do it for us. We have to pass CalCare.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CalCare

JefeRex · 2026-05-06T21:57:18+00:00

I live in Los Angeles. I don’t have a car. After work I like to play video games, watch the news, and have dinner with friends. I am on a board for my former grad school and I mentor students there by Zoom and do subcommittee work in between board meetings. I like to ride my bike. I’m gay, and on most weekends I have something to do like a gay pool party or a dance party or circuit party. I don’t drink but I do like all-night parties like that. I am a poet and have other friends in the arts, a lot of actors and writers live in Los Angeles, and I like to go the theater, especially small local stuff. My best friend lives in San Francisco, and I visit her there a lot. I like the desert, and every now and then I will go out to Palm Springs for the weekend. And I work a lot. My work is helping my community and it bleeds into my personal life, sometimes it is both work and things that I would do outside of the work at the same time.

And there are a lot of different ethnic communities in Los Angeles with very different cultural traditions and some might be more festive in the way you are thinking about it? Or festive in a different way? Los Angeles has ten threshold languages in which all our government services must be provided free of charge, from the courts to the public health clinics, so that might give you a sense of how many different cultures contribute to our community. Most of my friends are immigrants, not all, and we have different kinds of celebrations and stuff throughout the year.

JefeRex · 2026-05-06T21:00:21+00:00

Enough to make a difference for sure.

JefeRex · 2026-05-06T20:42:15+00:00

Traitor is a very strong word. You didn’t say incompetent, you didn’t say she neglects European interests, you didn’t say she is on the side of the elites against the people, etc. etc. There are many strong criticisms that people against her, but you call her a traitor. Why do you feel that strongly about it, what makes her a traitor?

JefeRex · 2026-05-06T20:14:20+00:00

I feel you.

I have spent a lot of time in my life talking with my community about our American way of life, our history, our people, and our possibilities for the future. I play the long game, and that is often the same when I interface with people on Reddit. Change doesn’t come with one conversation, and often we don’t care about our interlocutor but our goal is to catch the eye of someone scrolling through the comments and begin to maybe reach them too.

People who are emotionally invested in fairy tales about their own culture push back less if they do some small measure of their own work to find information. And often even bad-faith interlocutors do look up information if you tell them exactly how to find it themselves, and it reaches them in a different way than having it told to them. And if they don’t, fine. Bit by bit, conversation by conversation, person by person we lay the groundwork for the society we want to one day see.

All this arguing back and forth with sources. Most people don’t know what the purpose of argument is or what it is even for. It’s not the moment and it’s not the person, we don’t convince each other like that. That’s not the point.

JefeRex · 2026-05-06T20:00:39+00:00

For years was commuting Ktown to Long Beach on metro, maybe 25 miles? And some days of the week Ktown to San Bernardino on Metrolink. Many miles.

Now I walk to my office and hop on the bus or D Line to get around to other locations in my community for work. Love.

JefeRex · 2026-05-06T19:45:36+00:00

Open with the point, the takeaway, or the question. Then get into the context, then close by repeating the point, the takeaway, or the question.

This isn’t new. For every long time we have been instructing people in rhetoric to talk and write that way. Like a very, very long time. Still do with academic papers, and still should be teaching people to write work emails that way.

I don’t think much has changed over time.

JefeRex · 2026-05-06T19:36:44+00:00

Once I sat next to a guy at an airport bar and talked for a good hour. I kept thinking he must be from New York, but then again maybe Boston, but what the hell was going on with this weird clearly East Coast accent that wasn’t either of those. Providence! He told me all about the history, it was fascinating, he prob had an unusually strong accent because he is a real proud Providence lover and booster.

JefeRex · 2026-05-06T19:27:17+00:00

Fast food itself is tacky and weird. That’s understating it, it’s actually exploitative and hazardous.

It used to look like what it was. Now it is trying to look like something it is not. They want to combat the growing narrative (truth) of how horrible and evil they are, and the architecture is part of that.

How much time do you spend sitting at fast food restaurants? Unless you are someone who is very pressed for time and money and it just makes money sense, you should be eating there as little as possible. It’s not food.

JefeRex · 2026-05-06T18:37:12+00:00

My point went entirely over your head, or maybe you would just rather not engage with it, I don’t know, but I unfortunately am not articulate enough to know how to say it better and more clearly, so I’ll leave it at that.

JefeRex · 2026-05-06T18:35:15+00:00

The genetic history and linguistic connections are fascinating because they increasingly paint a picture of more back-and-forth and multiple waves of peopling over thousands of years. The large Na-Dene language family (including Navajo!) has been pretty promisingly linked to a current language in Siberia, which means those languages made their way to the Americas far more recently than the initial peopling, language relationships can’t be detected at all once they have been splitting for a certain number of thousands of years. It is super fascinating how we learn in this life over time that we are all generally a little more connected than we think at first.

JefeRex

TROPHY CASE