Perfectly said. Couldn't have said it better myself.

Bookmarking for posterity. I plan on revisiting this to see if his predictions come true.

*quality

Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by littledragon_79.

An alternate scenario is that rising rates would also give Dems the chance to say "well, we tried to let private insurers handle things... maybe it's time to let people buy into Medicare and provide some real competition".

I love Cenk, I really do, but I think his days as a conservative left him with a little bit of conservative brain damage.

He's basically got two common conservative beliefs tripping him up here:

1. Over time, government will make things better for corporations and worse for people, so don't let the government do anything, ever.
   
2. He's uncomfortable with government setting prices
   

NetRunner, sorry but it's not that he thinks government can't get it to ever work. He thinks that THIS government, or more broadly, the very DNA of the current political system in the US today that would fail to do it rightly.

He frequently talks about how the system is bought and paid for by corporate interests, yes. And it is, both sides. But he's definitely not against the profit motive, I have to stress that. For example in fact he spoke against Michael Moore on his desire to get rid of capitalism, and he sees that the profit motive is what drives medical research in the US to be second to none. What he wants to see is that the rules are enforced and that regulation is obeyed. It's not capitalism we have now, it's corporate cronyism that sets its own boundaries by buying politicians.

The big thing he pushes for is campaign finance reform, for until the floodgates from big money are closed, government will NOT be for the people.

>>^NetRunner:
He's basically got two common conservative beliefs tripping him up here:

1. Over time, government will make things better for corporations and worse for people, so don't let the government do anything, ever.
   
2. He's uncomfortable with government setting prices

@BoneyD and @Psychologic, let me see if I can clarify what I mean.

I'm also suspicious of what corporations will be able to get politicians to do, and worry that another conservative President will wash through and basically put all the regulators on paid vacations again.

I don't see how a public option or single payer would serve as protection against that. If a conservative intent on making government look bad gets to run it, they're going to try to run it into the ground. They'll try to outsource functions of the public option or Medicare (like they did with, you know, Medicare). If it's a public option competing against private insurance in the exchange, they'll hamstring the public option with all kinds of stupid requirements like pre-paying retiree health benefits (a poison pill they rammed down the throat of the Post Office, BTW) to make it look on paper like it's a huge fiscal mess. Or if they're feeling particularly ornery, they may try to abolish or privatize it outright.

I'm not so sure that campaign finance reform is a silver bullet for fixing that.

I tend to think that being a shill for a big industry gets Democrats mad (see our treatment of Lieberman, Lincoln, and Landrieu), while standing up to them makes you a hero (see Sherrod Brown, Alan Grayson, and to a large degree Nancy Pelosi). For Republicans it seems like as long as their corporatism sounds conservative (tax cuts....for just oil companies, and the top .05%), their base rallies around them.

It's hard to establish accountability on issues of corporate influence when conservatives can't ever be caught dead saying anything bad about big business. Ever.

Wow, I've never heard the Young Turks guy sound intelligent before. I mean, I usually agree with him, but he also usually sounds like a moron.

Good stuff