Va Form 119: Fill & Download for Free

89 attempts. Score: 231. My guess 80 correct and 9 wrong. Overall percentile : 99.90.Sectional: attempted 45 and 44 in quant and va respectively. Normalized score: 119 & 112. Percentiles: 99.40 & 99.85 respectively.

Let’s start with the “bluest” states and work our way down (forecasted vote shares from 538 as of the time of this answer:DC (90%): 3, total 3MA (67%) 11, total 14HI (67%) 4, total 18VT (66%) 3, total 21MD (65%), 10, total 31CA (64%), 55, total 86NY (64%), 29, total 115RI (63%), 4, total 119DE (62%), 3, total 122WA (61%), 12, total 134ME-1st CD (61%), 1, total 135CT (61%), 7, total 142NJ (59%), 14, total 156IL (59%), 20, total 176OR (58%) 7, total 183NM (56%), 5, total 188VA (56%), 13, total 201ME (55%), 2, total 203CO (55%), 9, total 212NH (55%), 4, total 216MN (54%), 10, total 226MI (54%), 16, total 242NV (53%), 6, total 248WI (53%), 10, total 258PA (53%), 20, total 278That does it. They’re also predicting Biden to take NE-1st CD, FL, AZ, and NC at the moment.

Some myths, off the top of my head, include:1.Universal healthcare has to be single payer: Germany started its universal healthcare policies in the nineteenth century and it is multiplayer, with over 1300 different insurance providers. Switzerland also has a private insurance based system. Even in “single payer” systems, a substantial amount of funding often comes from private sources. In Canada, almost thirty percent of healthcare money comes from private funds, for example. A corollary of this myth is that universal healthcare will get rid of private insurance. Fortunately, there is no basis for this because if it were true then US voters would not go along with the plan.2. Universal healthcare saves money: this is a tricky one because countries with universal healthcare do spend less for it than Americans do for our system. But there is nothing inherent in making sure that everyone has health insurance that automatically saves money. After the ACA covered half of the uninsured Americans, the healthcare industry continued to grow at a healthy pace, and that was during the recession. US Medicare has been a driver of healthcare spending in the US. And here is a graph of Canadian healthcare spending:Total Health Expenditure in Constant 1997 Dollars secure.cihi.ca (pdf). Canadian Institute for Health Information 119. Healthcare in Canada - WikipediaCanada started national universal healthcare in 1984. That graph doesn’t look much different around 1984 than any other time. And I couldn’t get my graph of costs as percentage of GDP (a better measure), but it looks pretty similar. Costs still rose at about the same rate, and are still going up. But, like I said, it is tricky. Canada has medical inflation, but it is lower than in the US, and that is true around the world. The lesson is that universal healthcare _might_ lower our costs over ten or twenty years, but we don’t really know that. It depends on what cost control measures, if any, are implemented. The ACA didn’t do much cost control, it was bargained away to get the votes needed to pass, and didn’t save money.3. Universal healthcare has to be run by the federal government as a national program. I am not sure where this idea comes from, but it flies in the face of both domestic and international experience. Europe does not have universal healthcare. Each European country, about the sizes of US states, have their own, separately financed and administered, very different universal healthcare system with compacts with other countries to cover Europeans reciprocally. Canada, which has the population and economy of a large US state, has universal healthcare administered by the individual provinces. Germany’s universal healthcare is administered by local governments. The UK’s NHS system is likewise administered by its regions. Here in the US Massachusetts has come in striking distance of universal healthcare, and other states are following suit. Sure, the federal government has been indispensable in this accomplishment, but they aren’t calling all the shots or providing all the money. This is good news because the most successful program for expanding healthcare insurance coverage in the US over the past quarter century, hands down, has been state administered Medicaid. Now we could _conceivably_ have a federally run system, but insisting that it is the only way is both simply false, and restricts us from using one of our best and most successful healthcare coverage systems, and the one with the broadest political support.4. Universal healthcare means long lines. It might, but it needn’t. It depends on the details, and the financing. Lots of countries (UK, Spain, Italy) find that keeping private insurance cuts down on those line complaints.5. Universal healthcare means we will all be stuck in a VA system like hell. I hate this myth for so many reasons. First of all, no one is seriously talking of a nationalized healthcare system like the UK with government running the facilities, so it is a baseless argument. Second of all, the VA is a great healthcare system that performs better than peer private hospitals despite a poorer and sicker population. This didn’t used to be true in decades past, but it is today. We could do a lot worse than the VA as a model, and a lot of Americans do. This myth is just a scaremongering canardPlenty of more myths out there, but this is a good start.Edit: Chris Shultis pointed out that I made an error in my choice of graphs for Canadian healthcare expenditures. Universal healthcare was implemented in Canada effectively in 1966 with the Medical Care Act. It does not change the point, health care costs continued grow after 1966, but it was a sloppy use of data, in a debate that has far too much of that already. I regret the error.