Medicare Disadvantage Plans suck money out of the system from 3 different sides.

(1) They cost the government more money per patient than real Medicare

(2) They falsely denied 18% of valid claims according to Medicare's Inspector General. They also screw customers by denying people specialists , requiring prior approvals etc.

(3) They cost providers more money by increasing the manpower they need to get their payments by throwing up hassles.

"Medicare Brokers" get gigantic commissions (not just the first year but EVERY year someone is on the same plan) to push Medicare Disadvantage Plans on people who don't know any better.

There is a also a SECOND medicare scam from the GOP for people who wisely avoid Medicare Disadvantage called "Accountable Care Organizations". The bottom line is that you cannot trust your primary doctor's advice on when to seek a specialist because they pay doctors to discourage you from seeking a specialist when you need one. They don't give you a choice about belonging to an ACO but they do have to notify you when they stick you in an ACO, so at least you know when your primary doctor has a financial incentive to discourage you from getting treatment.

https://surgerycenterok.com/blog/scam-series-pay-for-performance/

our modern species have only been around for about 50,000 years.

Homo Sapiens have been around for 300,000 years.

That’s not unusual for Americans, though. Bush, Clinton, Reagan, Nixon

All of those guys were way more respected than Trump. And of the rest, all of the others not Bush jr were way more respected than Bush jr.

The current period IS very unusual for how badly our reputation has fallen. Although you could also say America's reputation around the world was unusually high from 1945-2000.

Even people have somehow rehabilitated George W. Bush in spite of deliberate lying by his administration, and dragging the United States into a needless conflict for 23 years that cost $1 trillion.

Each new GOP president is so much worse than the last guy was that we start thinking maybe the last guy wasn't as bad as we had remembered.

We’re never going to get the old days back.

Nothing is stopping you from using a computer as a standalone machine not connected to the internet. Then you have a machine just like the ones in the 1970's and 1980's except for having much more memory/processor/diskspace etc. I would say you have a better OS also, except that Linux is basically the same OS as my SCO Xenix 386 I had in the 1980's.

That doesn’t prevent power hungry mods from modding hundreds of communities, or mods or admins from enshittifying the most popular communities (or whole instances) with absurd rules or misinformation bots,

Then you jump to a similar community on another instance. In the long term the less restrictive place will win out. When the mods on the lemmy.world politics group nuked one of my highly upvoted submissions many months ago, I stopped submitting there and now all my submissions on that topic go to usa@midwest.social instead. I carefully researched which instance/community has the most reasonable rules. Bottom line is users have much more power on Fediverse than Reddit.

Couldn’t they “convince” instance admins to include ads?

Yes. One at a time. But the cannot "buy Lemmy" which is what a CEO would want to do.

He could flee to Russia.

I actually wouldn't mind that because of the profound shame it would bring Treason Trump and the Republican Party. Plus, we can seize his assets.

And I don’t think Biden will want that optics. And I don’t think Kamala will push him to do it for the same reasons

Biden is rightly not going to give a shit about "optics". He cares about democracy. Full stop. There will be a fuck ton of military guarding the capital on Jan. 6.

I sure hope that is the case, but I pessimisticly fear a weak response to the next Jan 6 attempt because taking steps to put down a violent insurrection is “too political.”

It would not surprise me if there is a full military division guarding the capital. They aren't going to get anywhere near the place.

If Trump loses he’s 100% planning it again, this time all gas no brakes. They’ll come in with guns from the start and kill anyone that isn’t a trumpet in the capitol.

There is going to be a gigantic military force guarding the capital next time.