re: OT: Alabama Coronavirus Thread (see link in OP for case numbers and death totals in AL)

Fine, I'll take their system over ours. Ours is a system that masquerades as one that listens to the people but continues to pass half ### measures that produce adverse outcomes.

A direct democracy is what Switzerland has as well. Most power in America resides with bureaucrats who Americans don't vote for.

It works in small country, especially if the family is of good bloodline. There's a reason why smaller countries are put together than empires/large countries.

Prolly works real well til you get a bad or unprepared monarch . History is littered with them

The point is everything you have a problem with in democracy is magnified with a direct democracy and especially with a monarchy. Could you imagine if Alabama broke away and was a direct democracy? Or if some career politician like Jeff Secessions became a king?

I can kind of a get a direct democracy but a monarchy is everything you hate times 10

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Plus, Sessions would def. not be monarch material. I would prefer Jim Rogers or Dave Beito.

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Well you don’t get to vote on it so...

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A region being small(er) negates that

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Not really. It still applies. The average American, including Southern or Central or whatever Alabamians still are pretty clueless. And you want the to vote on every single thing.

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And we'll live with the consequences, then we'll vote to fix it.

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With a monarchy that doesn’t happen.

The whole thing just seems like an even larger waste of time and money if you’re going to use a trial and error approach. That’s also assuming people will realize what doesn’t work and won’t continue to vote that way. Just like now except in this scenario they can do it on every law and policy.

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Get rid of party identification on the ballot, and it's even better.

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Agree on this

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and we pretend we have so much choice in our healthcare.



This is my problem with the "but muh freedoms" nonsense. You don't have any fricking freedom over your health coverage as it is.

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We had complete freedom to chose our healthcare plans before the government got involved. As a result costs have skyrocketed, quantity and quality have fallen off.

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especially in states with only a small number of carriers present

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We agree on very little politically but this is spot on. Every insurance type except health can compete nationally. Auto, home, life. Many national companies, lots of competition, consumer wins.

Heath care? Nope. State restricted fiefdoms with title to no competition. Higher costs, poorer products, and all the other problems that go with monopolies.

Allowing health insurers to cross state lines would lower costs and improve coverage literally overnight. It would be easy to get too. All congress would have to do is mandate that getting Medicaid matching funds requires allowing cross state insurance. Done deal.

Only lots of lobbyist dollars going to both R and D Congress critters keeps it from happening.

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It funneled even more money to the insurance companies, but that's because it was originally a Republican plan

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Go read the 1200+ pages of the act and see who wrote the thing. The democrats at the time held the majority and there was not a thing the republicans could do. They went behind closed doors and paid the health insurance companies basically a consulting fee to help write it. Of course they agreed to help as it helped, as you say, funnel more money in. They did not need any republican votes to get it passed.

The ACA might be one of the worst pieces of legislation ever passed in the history of this country and it was done with only one party supporting it.