#would tend to agree with the general consensus that it would (probably?) be bobby

[seddair]

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[twdbegins]

LISTEN UP

my homie @birdieofloxley wants to know good ol’ #9 (tbh this was like the main one I wanted someone to ask, BUT KEEP SENDING ME QUESTIONS TO MY INBOX) AND I HAD TO DEDICATE A WHOLE POST TO THIS. SO.

Simon’s backstory. I’ve thought a lot about this. Like A LOT. We know very little about everyone’s favorite right-hand man. He know his name is Simon (ofc), he likes gin, he was at one time in charge of the Sanctuary (before Negan), and that he’s maybe slightly psycho because he wiped out all of Oceanside (but we don’t talk about that). Unfortunately, none of these details really give any insight to what Simon was like pre-apocalypse (we don’t even know how OLD HE IS). I’ve spent years dwelling on this and I think I have a few agreeable theories. Feel free to agree or disagree or let me know your ideas! Before I begin, I would like to say that NONE OF THESE THEORIES ARE PROVEN. It’s just simply what I have come up with based on his personality and things of that nature.

Let’s start with his occupation. What the hell did Simon do for a living before running the show with Negan? So, APPARENTLY Simon was a sketchy mortgage broker (whatever the HELL that means) pre-apocalypse. I don’t think that’s been confirmed but FOR SOME REASON THAT SEEMS TO BE THE GENERAL CONSENSUS. But allow me to completely ignore that detail and allow my own thoughts to come forth. He’s a very muscular guy and very much more in touch with his masculine then his feminine side. I highly doubt he was working in an office space or in a desk work environment. I think we can agree that his job was more than likely very hands on and work-you-to-the-bone sort of labor. I originally had the idea of some sort of medical background, perhaps a surgeon or a paramedic. But I scratched that theory because nowhere in the show is that mentioned (and as we all know medical based characters are usually very crucial to the show and is always mentioned). I ended up settling between 2 different job ideas. A car mechanic and a fire fighter. NOW. I have a feeling I’ve caused some brows to raise here. Think about it. Car mechanics definitely get their hands dirty and is very much a male dominated field of work (as is being a fire fighter). Both require strength, agility, intelligence, and a dedication for hard work. While fire fighters have medical training of sorts, it’s nowhere on the level of say an ER doctor. To wrap that section up, I like to think that he was either working on cars or putting out fires.

Moving on. Relationship status. Do I think that Simon had a lover pre-apocalypse? Simple answer. Yes. I tend to think that while he probably wasn’t married, I bet he had a steady girlfriend or possibly a fiancée who was lost sometime after the world fell. I think it definitely hurt him and left him heartbroken. Which is what probably contributed to some of the things he did and his strive for power towards the end of his run. He did the things that he felt would make her proud of him or admire him more than she already did. He was ever so slightly dependent on her, which he would’ve never admitted because, if anything, he’d want it to be the other way around.

Next course. Family life. As sad and dark as it may seem, I feel as if Simon didn’t have any family left. I feel like he had an older sister and a younger brother (Simon SO gives off middle child energy). He understands women (or at least we make it canon that he does) and this is due to the fact that he got to see a lot of the things his sister liked. He often heard her talk about the things that boys did that made her upset or made her happy. To which Simon didn’t realize he took note of and applied to when he started dating. Simon was definitely closer to his younger brother. It was his little guy that he got to teach things to. His ultimate buddy to play in the backyard with. If their sister was having one of her “bad days”, then the dynamics bros would just go off and do something else until she was better. His dad left when he was young and Si never saw him again. This would make him try his absolute hardest to be the best son/boyfriend/husband he could be. Because of this, Simon was a HUGE momma’s boy. Like would do anything for his mom. Which is why he took it so hard when she died. She died when he was in his mid-thirties and just a few years before the apocalypse. He had watched her get sicker and sicker and there was absolutely nothing he could do. That was the hardest part. Not being able to help her or make her feel better. He was an ultimate family man. It was a shame he lost it all so quickly.

On a happier note, let’s talk about Simon’s hobbies! I def think Simon could hold his own in the kitchen. Maybe not on a Bobby Flay level, but Simon could make a mean steak or cheeseburger. He enjoyed thumbing through cookbooks and recipe catalogs to see what new things he could attempt to try and possibly perfect down the line. I also like to think that he could draw. I don’t know why, but I feel as if Simon had some visual art skills that he discovered as a kid. In school, he would often pick up his pencil and doodle little sketches on the corners of his notebook. I don’t think he ever really put a lot of time and effort into it, simply because art wasn’t something he wanted to make a career out of. However, he had 2 or 3 sketch pads that he kept in case inspiration struck.

Education wise, Simon acted like he didn’t care about school, but he actually would freak out if he made below a B. He enjoyed the sciences and math based subjects more than English or literature. He never could quite get the hang of outside-of-the-box thinking that was usually important for literature classes. As far as classroom behavior, it was about a 50/50. Some days he would come in and do his work quietly and be respectful. Other days he would come in talking to his friends and get absolutely nothing done. He was a hit with teachers, so he usually escaped detention. I don’t see him as a high school football player. I’m willing to bet he was a soccer or baseball player. While school was important, I feel as if college wasn’t in the cards for him. He was one of those “college isn’t for me” people (this also ties back to my firefighter theory, considering most of the time a college degree isn’t required to be one).

That’s really all I’ve got and all I’ve ever spent time thinking about. If anybody’s got other ideas, hit me with them because, again, I’m up for debate and possible change of mind.

[theconservativebrief]

Health care carried House Democrats to victory on Election Day. But what now?

In interviews this fall with a half-dozen senior House Democratic aides, health care lobbyists, and progressive wonks, it became clear the party is only in the nascent stages of figuring out its next steps on health care.

The new House Democratic majority knows what it opposes. They want to stop any further efforts by Republicans or the Trump administration to roll back and undermine the Affordable Care Act or overhaul Medicaid and Medicare.

But Democrats are less certain about an affirmative health care agenda. Most Democrats campaigned on protecting preexisting conditions, but the ACA has already done that. Medicare-for-all is energizing the party’s left wing, but nobody expects a single-payer bill to start moving through the House. Drug prices offer the rare opportunity for bipartisan work with Senate Republicans and the Trump White House, but it is also a difficult problem with few easy policy solutions — certainly not any silver bullet that Democrats could pull out of the box and pass on Day One, or even Month One, of the next Congress.

Winning a House majority to ensure Obamacare’s safety is an important turning point, after so many years in which health care hurt Democrats much more than it helped.

But the path forward for Democrats on their signature issue is surprisingly undefined.

Democrats do have some ideas, of course. Democratic aides emphasized the various investigations they could launch into Trump’s health department, not only looking into any efforts by the White House to sabotage Obamacare, but also focusing on more obscure issues like Medicare payment rates.

But wonky oversight inquires probably aren’t the big-ticket item that new Democratic members and their voters are looking for, especially heading into the 2020 presidential election.

After campaigning in defense of Obamacare, warning about Republicans rolling back preexisting conditions protections and the Trump administration’s sabotage of the health care law, a bill to stabilize the Obamacare insurance markets would be the obvious first item for the new Democratic majority’s agenda.

Several sources pointed to a bill by Democratic Reps. Richard Neal (MA), Frank Pallone (NJ), and Bobby Scott (VA) — who have been serving as the top Democrats on leading health care-related committees — as the likely starting point. The plan is designed to build off Obamacare’s infrastructure to expand federal assistance while reversing the recent Republican efforts to undermine the law.

That bill would expand Obamacare’s premium subsidies, both by extending federal assistance to more people in lifting the current eligibility cutoff and increasing the size of the tax credits people receive. It would also bolster the cost-sharing reduction subsidies that people with lower incomes receive to reduce their out-of-pocket costs, while extending eligibility for those subsidies to people with higher incomes.

The Pallone-Neal-Scott bill would reverse the Trump administration’s recent regulations intended to funnel more people to insurance plans that are not required to meet all of Obamacare’s rules for preexisting conditions. It would also pump more money back into enrollment outreach, cut by the Trump administration, and establish a new program to compensate insurers for high-cost patients, with the hope of keeping premiums down.

Two things stick out about this bill: It would be the most robust expansion of Obamacare since the law first passed and it is just narrow enough that, with a few sweeteners for the Senate Republicans, it could conceivably have a chance to pass. Democrats are waiting to see how the GOP majority in the upper chamber reacts to losing the House.

“Undoing sabotage and bringing stabilization to the ACA markets, that’s something we should really be thinking about,” one House Democratic aide told me. “It depends on what kind of mood the Republicans are in. Maybe they’ll say that actually now that the tables are turned we should probably sit down.”

Senate Republicans and Democrats did come very close to a narrow, bipartisan deal — it wasn’t even as robust as the Pallone-Neal-Scott bill — to stabilize Obamacare in 2017. It fell apart, ostensibly after a tiff over abortion-related provisions, but that near-miss would be the reason for any optimism about a bipartisan deal on the divisive health care law.

The Pallone-Neal-Scott bill might be a nice starting point — no Democrat really disagrees about whether they should help the law work better in the short term — but it still lacks any truly ambitious provisions. It is just about as narrowly tailored as an Obamacare stabilization bill offered by Democrats could be, a fact that aides and activists will privately concede.

Missing are any of the bolder policy proposals animating the left. Not even a hint of Medicare-for-all single-payer health care, which is or isn’t a surprise, depending on how you look at it.

Medicare-for-all is quickly becoming orthodoxy among many in the party’s progressive grassroots, and a single-payer bill proposed this Congress in the House (similar to the one offered by Bernie Sanders over in the Senate) has 123 sponsors.

But House Democratic leaders probably don’t want to take up such a potentially explosive issue too soon after finally clawing back a modicum of power in Trump’s Washington.

Still, the current stabilization bill doesn’t even include a Medicare or Medicaid buy-in, the rebranded public option that never made it into Obamacare but would allow Americans to voluntarily join one of the major government insurance programs. It is an idea that even the more moderate Democratic members tend to support, and polls have found three-fourths of Americans think a Medicare buy-in is a good idea.

The plain truth is House Democrats haven’t reached a consensus yet about what they want to do to cover more Americans. They agree Obamacare was an important first step, and they agree the status quo is unacceptable. But the exact mechanism for achieving those goals — single-payer, a robust public option, or simply a buffed-up version of Obamacare — is still very much up for debate.

“People will want to do something, but any further action is going to be a consensus-building process,” a senior House Democratic aide told me. “Democrats have lots of different ideas on how to continue working to reduce the uninsured.”

That is all well and good, but few issues are exciting the Democratic grassroots right now like Medicare-for-all. During the midterm campaigns, Democratic candidates and even grassroots leaders were happy to let those words mean whatever voters wanted them to mean. For some people, it meant single-payer; for others; it might mean a Medicare buy-in or something more limited.

The unreservedly progressive members who were just elected to Congress will only wait so long before they start pressing Democratic leaders to take more aggressive steps to pick up one of their top campaign issues. That pressure will only intensify as the 2020 presidential campaign heats up and Democrats debate what kind of platform they should run on as they seek to take back the White House.

For now, Democrats have tried to put off a difficult debate and focus on what unites them. But the debate is still coming.

Even with Obamacare and preexisting conditions mobilizing Democratic voters this year, prescription drug prices remain a top concern for many Americans. That’s another area where Democrats know they want to act but don’t know yet exactly what they can or should do.

The issue could be an opening for serious dealmaking: Trump himself has attacked Big Pharma since his presidential campaign. His administration has actually launched some interesting initiatives to rein in drug costs — approving a record number of generic drugs, trying to even the playing field between America and foreign countries — that have some policy wonks intrigued, even if the impact is still to be determined.

Democrats have mostly stuck to slamming Trump for feigning to act on drug prices while cozying up to the drug industry. But it’s a top priority for both parties, and there could be some room for compromise. One progressive policy wonk thought a drug prices bill might actually be the first Democratic priority. It helps that drug prices are a populist issue that the new House majority might really be able to pass a bill on.

But first, Democrats have to figure out what exactly they are for — and what would actually make a difference.

The rallying cry for Democrats on drug prices has been letting Medicare directly negotiate prices with drug manufacturers, a proposal that Trump also embraced as a candidate, though he has since softened as president. But the problem is, the Congressional Budget Office doesn’t think Medicare negotiations would save any money unless the government is willing to deny seniors coverage for certain medications. But adding such a provision would surely invite attacks that Democrats are depriving people’s grandparents of the medications they need.

There are a lot of levers to pull to try to reduce drug prices: the patent protections that pharma companies receive for new drugs, the mandated discounts when the government buys drugs for Medicare and Medicaid, existing hurdles to getting generic drugs approved, the tax treatment of drug research-and-development. Pharmacy benefits managers, the mysterious middle man between health insurers and drug makers, are viewed skeptically by lawmakers and the public.

But none of those are silver bullets to lower prices, and they will certainly invite pushback from the politically potent pharmaceutical lobby, focused on the concerns about how much cracking down on drug companies to discourage them from developing new drugs. Democrats also don’t know yet what specific policies could win support from Senate Republicans or the Trump White House.

“How do you take this gargantuan Chinese menu of things and figure out how things fit together in a way that stem some of the abuses?” is how one Democratic aide summarized the dilemma.

It is a problem bedeviling Democrats on more than just drug prices. Health care was a winner on election night this year, and it has always been a priority for Democrats. Now they just need to figure out what to do.

Original Source -> What the new Democratic House majority might actually pass on health care

via The Conservative Brief