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Honest question: what has Trump achieved? The right wingers talk as if he singlehandedly has lifted the country out of recession where in reality he inherited a

Honest question: what has Trump achieved? The right wingers talk as if he singlehandedly has lifted the country out of recession where in reality he inherited a boom and managed to keep that going (nothing wrong with that). He certainly has achieved exactly zero in terms of health care and this is what my initial response was about.

robomartin 7y ago
One of the links I provided is a good starting point to understand what his administration has been working on for three years. https://www.promiseskept.com/ https://www.promiseskept.com/ Sorry, but you are wrong on healthcare. Please take a look at this sub-list and tell me how this equates with achieving exactly zero. I want to understand how one goes from a list of undeniable achievements in healthcare to concluding something like "He certainly has achieved exactly zero". https://www.promiseskept.com/achievement/overview/healthcare/ https://www.promiseskept.com/achievement/overview/healthcare... This article goes into a little depth on some of what they have achieved and the significance of the various achievements: https://nypost.com/2019/09/21/five-smart-ways-trump-has-improved-our-health-care-system/ https://nypost.com/2019/09/21/five-smart-ways-trump-has-impr... Again, echoing your intent, I am having trouble understanding how, in the face of clear evidence to the contrary, people can believe he has achieved nothing on healthcare. Look, we all agree that healthcare in the US is a disaster. I hope we all agree that Trump had nothing to do with that. This is the result of lies, political games and incompetence going back 50 years or more. Let's be careful not to attribute the disaster our political class has handed down decade-after-decade to a man who --as all evidence indicates-- is actively trying to fix it. The reason these things are not addressed after decades of promises is that politicians work for themselves, not for us. It should cause everyone pause that every single election in modern history puts exactly the same issues on the table as the most pressing issues of the time. The incompetence and lack of results is, at the very least, embarrassing and at some level criminal. Anyone delivering these kinds of results in the private sector would be relegated to using a hammer to turn big rocks into little rocks. Trump is a nasty SOB, but if you leave emotion out of the equation and look through the list of what his administration has achieved in three years it is very hard to argue with the results. As I said before, this is all I care about. The theatrics will be meaningless in ten years. However, the results will have long-lasting effects way past his stay in the White House. That's the part that matters, nothing else.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  I maintain that Trump has achieved zero in health care. His only achievement is undermining Obamacare (“repeal and then having no idea what to do”). So far I haven’t seen any real effort to make health insurance any better (where is the “wonderful” plan he promised coming in?) other than bringing us back to the glory days before 2008 when people with preconditions couldn’t get insurance and plans would dump you whenever you got actually sick. He also didn’t “jumpstart” the economy as claimed on the site. I have no problem with you voting for Trump. Go ahead.
  - robomartin 7y ago
    You can maintain that view if you'd like, but understand it does not align with reality at all. BTW, this isn't a discussion about who I might vote for, please don't get defensive. This is a good conversation so far, no need to go there. Let me add something about healthcare. I'd like to suggest you are focusing on the wrong thing (as are millions others). The US healthcare problem is NOT an issue of insurance. Not even close. That's the biggest fallacy and lie told by politicians for decades now. Put in very simple terms: You cannot fix the US healthcare system with insurance. Period. It is NOT an insurance problem. I don't care if we pass Medicare for All, None or the Pink Unicon Plan. Insurance is not the problem. What's the problem? Costs. Well, it's layers of issues really. In no particular order at all: The cost of medical education is ridiculous. The government needs to get out of the student loan game and allow the free market to drive education costs down. Today a doctor graduates with $300K or more in student debt. This means, in no uncertain terms, that this person cannot work for a salary lower than what's require in order to have a hope of paying back that loan and, on top of that, having a life, raising a family, owning a home, etc. BTW, my wife is a physician, so I have first-hand data on some of the internals of the business side of medicine. The next problem --and this affects everyone, not just doctors-- is that our education system loads-up degrees with a bunch of unnecessary pork clearly designed to add another year, if not more, to the process of obtaining a degree. In other countries, if you study, say, electrical engineering, you are treated to science and engineering courses, you don't have to burn months taking myriad unnecessary general education, sociology or other non-engineering courses. When a university is charging you $50K a year to keep you within their walls it is quite profitable to require you to take a bunch of other stuff with the excuse of these things being degree requirements. This adds at least $50K, if not more, to the cost of getting a degree. Moving on from there, the cost of malpractice insurance is ridiculous. Of course, there's variance from specialty to specialty. The range is from $5K to $50K per year and it also depends on where the physician might be practicing (which State). These costs are an important element of the equation that ultimately determines how much we have to pay to have a dozen people attend to us during a surgery or half a dozen people involved in emergency care, etc. Then there's tort reform. Yes, things have been getting better, with some States doing better than others. However, the consequences of our litigious society is that doctors are forced to cover their behind by sometimes ordering all kinds of unnecessary tests and medicine. This costs money and that cost is passed on to the patient one way or the other. Now you start looking at medicine at the hospital level and things get worse. The hospital employs a bunch of people with huge student loans and varying degrees of malpractice insurance and office expenses to cover. The hospital itself has to cover itself through expensive insurance. And then there's the regulatory burden of actually running a hospital. Costs pile-up and, once again, they are passed on to the patient. Then we move on to drug companies. The cost of developing drugs and obtaining regulatory approval is massive. Some drugs cost in the region of $5 billion. The FDA mandates testing that costs in the range of $300 million. Drug companies have non-trivial costs associated with dealing with the regulatory burden. In addition to this they have to worry about lawsuits as well, which means they have expensive insurance, people to manage this (entire legal teams) and the cost of occasional settlements reached in litigation. Once again, costs pile-up and patients end-up paying for them. Medical device manufacturers are subject to the same equation. I once tried to develop a relatively simple medical device that would help millions of people. The regulatory burden and FDA costs were so high I dropped the idea entirely. The reason the same drugs and devices cost less outside the US is that drug companies charge US patients for the cost of doing business in the US. This makes sense, why would a company charge the US burden in nations where they have a far lower cost existence? There's more, but I'll stop here. For example, we could talk about the truly horrific medical patient data system that adds untold cost to our healthcare system. The bottom line is that one could pass the most wonderful sounding insurance scheme and it would do absolutely nothing towards dealing with any of the above problems. Not one thing. These are basic business problems. When things cost you too much you go back and analyze the cost structure that leads to high prices. Our cost structure is horribly high. Which means our costs to deliver care are equally horrific. Insurance will not fix this at all. It's like saying that changing auto insurance policies is going to reduce the cost of buying a Tesla. No, the cost of buy a Tesla is associated with the cost of making a Tesla and not with the insurance the owner will pay to drive one.
robomartin 7y ago
BTW, I truly believe neither Obama nor Trump had anything to do with the economic recovery. The principle is easy: Once you dig a hole deep enough and reach bottom the only way is up. We hit bottom in 2008/9 or thereabouts. People lost homes, businesses, jobs, etc. After that, people and businesses rebuilt. Because that's what people do, they don't need government to tell them they have to do this. Actually, politicians are far more likely to cause damage than to fix things. Once again, the fact that exactly the same issues are put on the table in every single election in modern memory is evidence of that. They run the country. If they keep saying the same things are broken either they are incompetent, don't care or are only looking after themselves and their respective parties. In the meantime we sit in the middle and suffer the consequences. So, yeah, I agree with you, Trump isn't responsible for the entirety of the economy improving and neither was Obama. A little, maybe, but not the bulk of it. I hate it when politicians take credit for what they did not do.

robomartin 7y ago

One of the links I provided is a good starting point to understand what his administration has been working on for three years. https://www.promiseskept.com/ https://www.promiseskept.com/ Sorry, but you are wrong on healthcare. Please take a look at this sub-list and tell me how this equates with achieving exactly zero. I want to understand how one goes from a list of undeniable achievements in healthcare to concluding something like "He certainly has achieved exactly zero". https://www.promiseskept.com/achievement/overview/healthcare/ https://www.promiseskept.com/achievement/overview/healthcare... This article goes into a little depth on some of what they have achieved and the significance of the various achievements: https://nypost.com/2019/09/21/five-smart-ways-trump-has-improved-our-health-care-system/ https://nypost.com/2019/09/21/five-smart-ways-trump-has-impr... Again, echoing your intent, I am having trouble understanding how, in the face of clear evidence to the contrary, people can believe he has achieved nothing on healthcare. Look, we all agree that healthcare in the US is a disaster. I hope we all agree that Trump had nothing to do with that. This is the result of lies, political games and incompetence going back 50 years or more. Let's be careful not to attribute the disaster our political class has handed down decade-after-decade to a man who --as all evidence indicates-- is actively trying to fix it. The reason these things are not addressed after decades of promises is that politicians work for themselves, not for us. It should cause everyone pause that every single election in modern history puts exactly the same issues on the table as the most pressing issues of the time. The incompetence and lack of results is, at the very least, embarrassing and at some level criminal. Anyone delivering these kinds of results in the private sector would be relegated to using a hammer to turn big rocks into little rocks. Trump is a nasty SOB, but if you leave emotion out of the equation and look through the list of what his administration has achieved in three years it is very hard to argue with the results. As I said before, this is all I care about. The theatrics will be meaningless in ten years. However, the results will have long-lasting effects way past his stay in the White House. That's the part that matters, nothing else.

Ididntdothis 7y ago
I maintain that Trump has achieved zero in health care. His only achievement is undermining Obamacare (“repeal and then having no idea what to do”). So far I haven’t seen any real effort to make health insurance any better (where is the “wonderful” plan he promised coming in?) other than bringing us back to the glory days before 2008 when people with preconditions couldn’t get insurance and plans would dump you whenever you got actually sick. He also didn’t “jumpstart” the economy as claimed on the site. I have no problem with you voting for Trump. Go ahead.
- robomartin 7y ago
  You can maintain that view if you'd like, but understand it does not align with reality at all. BTW, this isn't a discussion about who I might vote for, please don't get defensive. This is a good conversation so far, no need to go there. Let me add something about healthcare. I'd like to suggest you are focusing on the wrong thing (as are millions others). The US healthcare problem is NOT an issue of insurance. Not even close. That's the biggest fallacy and lie told by politicians for decades now. Put in very simple terms: You cannot fix the US healthcare system with insurance. Period. It is NOT an insurance problem. I don't care if we pass Medicare for All, None or the Pink Unicon Plan. Insurance is not the problem. What's the problem? Costs. Well, it's layers of issues really. In no particular order at all: The cost of medical education is ridiculous. The government needs to get out of the student loan game and allow the free market to drive education costs down. Today a doctor graduates with $300K or more in student debt. This means, in no uncertain terms, that this person cannot work for a salary lower than what's require in order to have a hope of paying back that loan and, on top of that, having a life, raising a family, owning a home, etc. BTW, my wife is a physician, so I have first-hand data on some of the internals of the business side of medicine. The next problem --and this affects everyone, not just doctors-- is that our education system loads-up degrees with a bunch of unnecessary pork clearly designed to add another year, if not more, to the process of obtaining a degree. In other countries, if you study, say, electrical engineering, you are treated to science and engineering courses, you don't have to burn months taking myriad unnecessary general education, sociology or other non-engineering courses. When a university is charging you $50K a year to keep you within their walls it is quite profitable to require you to take a bunch of other stuff with the excuse of these things being degree requirements. This adds at least $50K, if not more, to the cost of getting a degree. Moving on from there, the cost of malpractice insurance is ridiculous. Of course, there's variance from specialty to specialty. The range is from $5K to $50K per year and it also depends on where the physician might be practicing (which State). These costs are an important element of the equation that ultimately determines how much we have to pay to have a dozen people attend to us during a surgery or half a dozen people involved in emergency care, etc. Then there's tort reform. Yes, things have been getting better, with some States doing better than others. However, the consequences of our litigious society is that doctors are forced to cover their behind by sometimes ordering all kinds of unnecessary tests and medicine. This costs money and that cost is passed on to the patient one way or the other. Now you start looking at medicine at the hospital level and things get worse. The hospital employs a bunch of people with huge student loans and varying degrees of malpractice insurance and office expenses to cover. The hospital itself has to cover itself through expensive insurance. And then there's the regulatory burden of actually running a hospital. Costs pile-up and, once again, they are passed on to the patient. Then we move on to drug companies. The cost of developing drugs and obtaining regulatory approval is massive. Some drugs cost in the region of $5 billion. The FDA mandates testing that costs in the range of $300 million. Drug companies have non-trivial costs associated with dealing with the regulatory burden. In addition to this they have to worry about lawsuits as well, which means they have expensive insurance, people to manage this (entire legal teams) and the cost of occasional settlements reached in litigation. Once again, costs pile-up and patients end-up paying for them. Medical device manufacturers are subject to the same equation. I once tried to develop a relatively simple medical device that would help millions of people. The regulatory burden and FDA costs were so high I dropped the idea entirely. The reason the same drugs and devices cost less outside the US is that drug companies charge US patients for the cost of doing business in the US. This makes sense, why would a company charge the US burden in nations where they have a far lower cost existence? There's more, but I'll stop here. For example, we could talk about the truly horrific medical patient data system that adds untold cost to our healthcare system. The bottom line is that one could pass the most wonderful sounding insurance scheme and it would do absolutely nothing towards dealing with any of the above problems. Not one thing. These are basic business problems. When things cost you too much you go back and analyze the cost structure that leads to high prices. Our cost structure is horribly high. Which means our costs to deliver care are equally horrific. Insurance will not fix this at all. It's like saying that changing auto insurance policies is going to reduce the cost of buying a Tesla. No, the cost of buy a Tesla is associated with the cost of making a Tesla and not with the insurance the owner will pay to drive one.

robomartin 7y ago

BTW, I truly believe neither Obama nor Trump had anything to do with the economic recovery. The principle is easy: Once you dig a hole deep enough and reach bottom the only way is up. We hit bottom in 2008/9 or thereabouts. People lost homes, businesses, jobs, etc. After that, people and businesses rebuilt. Because that's what people do, they don't need government to tell them they have to do this. Actually, politicians are far more likely to cause damage than to fix things. Once again, the fact that exactly the same issues are put on the table in every single election in modern memory is evidence of that. They run the country. If they keep saying the same things are broken either they are incompetent, don't care or are only looking after themselves and their respective parties. In the meantime we sit in the middle and suffer the consequences. So, yeah, I agree with you, Trump isn't responsible for the entirety of the economy improving and neither was Obama. A little, maybe, but not the bulk of it. I hate it when politicians take credit for what they did not do.