Nancy Pelosi Says House Will Pass Coronavirus Bill with Free Testing for All

Re:Nancy Pelosi Says House Will Pass Coronavirus Bill with F... by tomp on Thursday March 12, 2020 @01:12PM (#22559086)

If that was the point of the bill, all measures would have well-defined time limits (e.g. 3 months, after which they need to be renewed). That's how Switzerland does it (even the constitution has time limit!)

Edit: I mean limiting the amount of time these bills remain valid, not just limiting the amount of paid leave.

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Re:Nancy Pelosi Says House Will Pass Coronavirus Bill with F... by Goronmon on Thursday March 12, 2020 @01:15PM (#22559151)

14 days of paid sick leave and up to three months of paid family and medical leave

Those seem like pretty specific limits.

What other limits do you feel are missing from the bill?

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Re:Nancy Pelosi Says House Will Pass Coronavirus Bill with F... by ApolloFortyNine on Thursday March 12, 2020 @01:24PM (#22559270)

Obviously the OP here means on how long 14 days of paid sick leave and three months of paid family and medical leave will remain the case. If it's indefinitely, then this is clearly Democrats trying to attach what they've campaigned for to a Coronavirus bill, in an attempt to make it seem like Republicans are the ones holding up Coronavirus support.

If it's the rest of this year, then it likely should be passed.

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Re:Nancy Pelosi Says House Will Pass Coronavirus Bill with F... by crooked-v on Thursday March 12, 2020 @01:28PM (#22559323)

If those provisions go away, then they just become a problem again within a few years when the next novel coronavirus strain appears, and in the meantime all the money spent on setting up the necessary bureaucracy has been wasted by just chucking all it out the window.

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Re:Nancy Pelosi Says House Will Pass Coronavirus Bill with F... by ApolloFortyNine on Thursday March 12, 2020 @01:33PM (#22559395)

Like it or not, guaranteed medical leave and guaranteed sick leave has been a political issue for decades.

It makes sense in times like these of course. But it's been 50 years since there's been a panic similar to this over a virus.

Attaching something permanent to a disaster relief bill is a scummy political move.

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Re:Nancy Pelosi Says House Will Pass Coronavirus Bill with F... by crooked-v on Thursday March 12, 2020 @01:46PM (#22559570)

I see nothing scummy about it. It's a low cost (several billion dollars per year, compared to $3 trillion in tax revenues) way to nationally, permanently reduce the impact of this and all future outbreaks.

If it's worth doing at all, it's worth doing right instead of just throwing something out there that will only help in this specific situation.

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Re:Nancy Pelosi Says House Will Pass Coronavirus Bill with F... by ApolloFortyNine on Thursday March 12, 2020 @01:55PM (#22559672)

I haven't run the numbers on giving every employee 2 weeks of paid sick leave and 3 months of paid medical leave.

But I find it really hard to believe this adds up to only several billion dollars, given there are over 150 million employees in this country.

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Re:Nancy Pelosi Says House Will Pass Coronavirus Bill with F... by crooked-v on Thursday March 12, 2020 @02:03PM (#22559766)

So, bump that up to $50 billion a year. What does it matter? The Iraq War cost $157 billion per year with no impact on the day to day lives of US citizens, so we can obviously afford that much without needing to stress about it.

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Re:Nancy Pelosi Says House Will Pass Coronavirus Bill with F... by pmiller2 on Thursday March 12, 2020 @04:34PM (#22561425)

The real disaster is that every American worker doesn't already have these benefits.

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Re:Nancy Pelosi Says House Will Pass Coronavirus Bill with F... by vonmoltke on Thursday March 12, 2020 @01:19PM (#22559207)

I think tomp is talking about a time limit on the validity of the legislation itself, not the provisions in it.

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Re:Nancy Pelosi Says House Will Pass Coronavirus Bill with F... by jayd16 on Thursday March 12, 2020 @01:20PM (#22559217)

The crisis doesn't have a well-defined time limit. They could add some automatic vote mechanism but thinking about the ins and outs of the timing seems a lot more politically charged then not having a limit.

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Re:Nancy Pelosi Says House Will Pass Coronavirus Bill with F... by crooked-v on Thursday March 12, 2020 @01:18PM (#22559184)

If you undo all the social support afterwards, that just means it becomes a problem again with the next SARS/MERS/COVID strain.

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