For today’s JusJoJan prompt, Linda has given us the word “despair,” as suggested by Carol Anne, who resides here.
It’s after 11:00 pm on Thursday night, January 18 and I almost forgot that I hadn’t gotten around to publishing my JusJoJan post for January 18 and thought that I was going to miss a day.
But don’t despair folks, I remembered at the last minute and here it is!
Yay! Just in the nick of time!
Image credit: Bing Image Creator.
For this week’s Thursday Inspiration prompt, Jim Adams has asked us to respond to this challenge by using the prompt word “mine.” The first thought that came into my head was that age old tale of the guy who had a girl and lost her. One minute he proudly says to himself, “She’s mine.” Then the next thing he knows, she’s gone, and he’d better learn how to face it.
Among the many thorny questions debated by the delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention, one of the hardest to resolve was how to elect the president. The Founding Fathers debated for months, with some arguing that Congress should pick the president and others insistent on a democratic popular vote.
Out of those drawn-out debates came a compromise based on the idea of electoral intermediaries. These intermediaries wouldn’t be picked by Congress or elected by the people. Instead, the states would each appoint independent “electors” who would cast the actual ballots for the presidency. Their compromise is known as the Electoral College.
The Electoral College calls for the creation, every four years, of a temporary group of electors equal to the total number of representatives in Congress. Technically, it is these electors, and not the American people, who vote for the president. In modern elections, the first candidate to get 270 of the 538 total electoral votes wins the White House.
One important aspect of the Electoral College compromise was that it served as a political workaround for the persistence of slavery in the United States. In 1787, roughly 40 percent of people living in the Southern states were slaves who couldn’t vote. This created a divide between slave-owning and non-slave-owning states. It was the same issue that plagued the distribution of seats in the House of Representatives: should or shouldn’t the Founding Fathers include slaves in counting a state’s population? James Madison from Virginia, where slaves accounted for 60 percent of the population, knew that either a direct presidential election or one with electors divvied up according to free white residents only, wouldn’t fly in the South.
The result was the controversial “three-fifths compromise,” in which three-fifths of the enslaved black population would be counted toward allocating representatives and electors and calculating federal taxes. The compromise ensured that the Southern slave states would ratify the Constitution.
Incidentally, the three-fifths compromise was explicitly repealed in Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment (1868), which provided that “representatives shall be apportioned…counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians.”
Due to the Electoral College, two “modern times” candidates who received fewer popular votes but won the Electoral College votes, became president: George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Fucking Trump in 2016.
It’s time to “un-invent” (repeal) the Electoral College.
Our host for the weekly provocative question challenge is Jewish Young Professional, aka JYP.
So what is her provocative question for this week? JYP asks us…
Bernie Sanders has been talking about it for years. Barack Obama tried to get it included in his 2009 health care reform initiative, the Affordable Care Act, (aka Obamacare). It’s called a “single-payer” healthcare system.
In that system, rather than multiple, competing, for-profit health insurance companies, a single public or quasi-public agency takes responsibility for financing healthcare for all residents. That is, everyone has health insurance under a one health insurance plan, and has access to necessary services — including doctors, hospitals, long-term care, prescription drugs, dentists and vision care.
However, individuals may still choose where they receive care. It’s a lot like the U.S. medical program for seniors, Medicare. Hence a U.S. single-payer approach has been nickname “Medicare-for-all.”
Unfortunately, Obama’s single-payer provision in Obamacare was removed from the proposed bill in order to get it passed in the Senate. It passed with all Democrats and two independents voting for it, and all Republicans, of course, voting against it.
Ask any current Medicare recipient if they think Medicare-for-all is a good idea and the answer will universally be yes. Well, except maybe from Republicans, who think the broken, for profit healthcare system in the United States is just peachy.
The biggest obstacles to adopting a Medicare-for-all/single-payer healthcare delivery system in the U.S. are political. Stakeholders who stand to lose — such as health insurers, organized medicine, and pharmaceutical companies — represent a powerful opposition lobby. But there are no practical problems within the single-payer structure that would prevent its implementation.
So to answer JYP’s question directly, adopting a single-payer, Medicare-for-all would go a long way to improving the healthcare system in the U.S.
Welcome to Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (aka, FOWC). I will be posting each day’s word just after midnight Pacific Time (U.S.).
Today’s word is “rude.”
Write a post using that word. It can be prose, poetry, fiction, non-fiction. It can be any length. It can be just a picture or a drawing if you want. No holds barred, so to speak.
Once you are done, tag your post with #FOWC and create a pingback to this post if you are on WordPress. Please check to confirm that your pingback is there. If not, ÿplease manually add your link in the comments.
And be sure to read the posts of other bloggers who respond to this prompt. Show them some love.
This, That, and the Other 