Even the people who didn't want it in the first place.
"These Americans Hated the Health Law. Until the Idea of Repeal Sank In" (NYT).
This can't be a surprise to anyone, and it's also not a surprise the Republicans have no idea what to do next. That's why Obamacare had to be stopped before it started, so people didn't become reliant on whatever it was, even though it was never good enough. But it wasn't stopped. So what are Republicans going to do? The only hope, it seems, is for them to fall short of having enough power to do anything.
"It’s very, very scary to think about not having health insurance. If the condition doesn’t kill you, the stress of having it does, in this country. The fact that people do without health insurance is a sin, in my opinion," says one woman, quoted in the NYT article.
But think what it's like for the Republicans. The stress of having political power is killing them. One way back to health is to fracture into parts that can get back to playing from the comfortable minority position.
Remember the old affirmation: I’m so glad I’m a Beta... I’m really awfully glad I’m a Beta...
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111 comments:
Fantastic quote. Very appropriate
The problem is that at this point, you can't go back to pre-Obama. Too many things have changed. At least start whittling around the edges with the worst parts.
The market is failing anyways. Status quo wont continue as an option
"Obamacare had to be stopped before it started", from people who have excellent employer provided health insurance. Why does this sound so Marie Antoinette-ish?
Thank God I got here before Laslo polluted this last, decent, pure thread of mankind.
Elizabeth C and Susan B got more legislation accomplished - verbatim - while dead than some white men will ever get accomplished in a lifetime. Like that cat in the cat-attack video, those two heauxxx-cats (spelling?) ruined more manhood than can ever be recovered.
“When something is threatened to be taken away, people start to rally around it,”
especially when they they think they are not paying for it........
Yep; Obamacare needed to be stopped before it started. And now it is not at all easy to reform it.
Which is why it has to be carefully articulated. Promising, as Trump did, to give everybody great care, universal coverage, lower premiums, lowered co-pays and co-insurance, and to never cut Medicare or Medicaid only made the problem worse. Because Trump was promising what he, and what Congress, could never ever deliver.
People talk about how Congressional incumbents will pay for any failure to "repeal" Obamacare. I kind of doubt it. For all of the terrible polling numbers that "Congress" gets, Congressional incumbents keep winning.
I think that the failure to repeal Obamacare will hurt Trump the worst. In a tough individualized race, Trump's complete failure to articulate anything about healthcare will hurt him more than anybody.
Apparently the US spends more (per capita) on "health" care than ... any other country?
"The celebrated neurosurgeon and writer [Henry Marsh] talks about 40 years inside our skulls, what’s wrong with the NHS – and the Zen of woodwork"
"O thou weed, who are so lovely fair and smell'st so sweet that the sense aches at thee. Was this most goodly book made to write 'whore' upon? Heaven stops the nose at it …" -------Othello
Another BNW quote.
Be nice if the question of health care could be framed as one of economics and scarce resources rather than 'its not fair'.
Would also be nice to not be living under a health care system created during WWII wage ceilings and made worse by subsequent legislation
It doesn't matter what the Republicans do. The Media/Democrat machine will vilify them, accuse them of killing thousands and declare the end of the world as we know it.
Under those circumstances I don't know hay they don't just kill Obamacare and take their lumps.
Under those circumstances I don't know hay they don't just kill Obamacare and take their lumps.
That's easy - they lack the integrity to do the right thing when it may cost them their jobs.
If the Republicans replace Obamacare and 90% of the citizens are either unaffected or come out ahead, we'll see the 10% hammered day and night.....meaning victim stories non-stop.
Remember the fake Romney hit pieces....something about a lady with cancer.
fNYT: "These Americans Hated the Health Law. Until the Idea of Repeal Sank In"
Well, these other Americans hated the "Health Law" and continued to hate it as the idea of repeal sank in because they were the people whose insurance premiums skyrocketed.
Maybe ending up like the Soviet Union is the best a people can hope for.
I am Laslo.
"Trump's complete failure to articulate anything about healthcare will hurt him more than anybody."
In all fairness to Trump, he did say this:
"Because you are basically saying from the moment the insurance, you’re 21 years old, you start working and you’re paying $12 a year for insurance, and by the time you’re 70, you get a nice plan."
"these Americans" are not the Americans who are paying for it.
The silent majority hate the thing.
"weed ... Was this most goodly book made to write 'whore' upon? Heaven stops the nose at it." Othello
Aye. Best way to start the day. Thank you.
And on the Loving Side, "let me see thee in thy woman's weeds." - What You Will. Only after the 'disguise' is seen as a wickedness.
And that, hope we do, before, "Our colleagues upstairs will teach them to love it [fake insurance]."
You leave out the courts. Roberts found a way to keep it going rather than strike it down on Constitutional grounds. The opportunity for the states to solve the problem was there, but now it's gone.
States not only allow us to try many things, but to more easily end those which don't succeed.
If I belonged to an organized criminal-- er political-- party, then the Republicans would be out every day with a list of the harms caused by Obamacare. We would have coordinated talking points that senators and congressmens could recite for every media outlet available. The public would soon be passively memorizing such horrors as the 10% excise tax on medical devices (and know the long list of things suddenly considered a "medical device" in the new law, the job-killing 50-person limit, the job-killing 30-hour rule, the extra-legal funding Obama used for the risk corridors, the fact that only 12 million were "uninsured" when the act was passed but over 24 million lost their coverage, the heart-rending stories of people who cannot find a provider anywhere near their homes because of the implosion of this scheme, and of course all the lies ("keep your plan" "keep your doctor" "save $2500 a year on average") and absurdity ("pass the bill to see what's in it") used to wrangle the votes of Democrats would be well-publicized and legion.
But instead, the lying linguine-spined Republicans in Congress have pretended to want to help us out of this mess for seven years. If they really cared they would organize to accomplish this goal. That they ntreat the ACA as just another political football to be booted around like the "damned wall" (in the almost ;late John McCain's famous terminology when he was pretending (running for POTUS) to bend to our will and build the wall he voted for) and "tax reform" but never to be fixed.
Most of the increase in so-called coverage is in the Medicaid expansion in states that opted for this. Medicaid generally does not give one access to the best doctors or providers. The emergency rooms are still the provider of choice for these folks, and emergency room utilization has not decreased as predicted by our clueless experts.
The individual markets are a disaster in most states, with people above the subsidy level and young people not participating as high as expected as the premium rates skyrocket. This segment doesn't get very much publicity as it is only several percentage points of the population. As fewer and fewer non-subsidized people participate, the premium death spiral causes the government to spend more on premium assistance and the insurers to lose more money and withdraw from these markets.
Republicans in Congress -- the legislative branch -- had years to craft a plan to replace Obamacare. They failed.
Well, at least Obama is a happy camper. Cashing in, livin' it up, laughing at the two-face GOP and all their plebeian voters.
And Trump, battered from keel to stern learning the ropes, he should'a attended Harvard.
So I ask: Tired of all the "winning" yet?
So I Googled "good things about the Soviet Union".
10 Positive Things The Soviet Union Did.
#5: Effective Recycling Program.
A great Reddit: Why is the Soviet Union perceived as bad? And what is the good?
"i also know there were good things like free healthcare and education and unemployment was practically at 0%"
I repeat: Maybe ending up like the Soviet Union is the best a people can hope for.
I am Laslo.
20 trillion debt.
Average of 1.3 trillion increase in debt increases these last 9 years.
What can't be changed also cannot be continued.
Two tier system. A public system and an unregulated market forces private system.
It may be a sin, but I still do not wish to have anything to do with it, regardless of what form of Obamacare they finally come up with.
On the other hand, since you guys will be paying for it, maybe I will take out "insurance" and finally get something done about that ruptured disk in my back. A lung transplant may also be nice, even if I won't live to enjoy it for long anyway. Give me something to do and an opportunity to meet people too.
You can't take it away because women vote, by the way.
There's surely plenty of behavioral economics research supporting the thesis that the magnitude of the pain of losing something is greater than the magnitude of the pleasure of gaining the same thing. Thus, experiments in which subjects are not willing to pay more than $3. for an object but, having acquired it, will not sell it for less than $10.
In any case, part of the debate here should be the meaning of "medical insurance." A so-called "catastrophic plan" protects against ruinous medical expense but provide no coverage for routine, expected expenses. A "comprehensive plan" covers just about everything, with low or zero deductibles and low or no co-pays. One could argue that one of these is not "insurance" so much as a pre-paid benefit plan, and even that such comprehensive plans lead to over-utilization that increases cost while providing little (or negative) improvement in medical outcomes.
And part of the reality is that a major benefit of having even the skimpiest of high-deductible, high co-pay plans is that one gets charged a negotiated rate instead of the insanely high list price. Would it be asking too much for legislation to set some limits on the ability of providers and organizations to gouge those who have no insurance (or who, often accidentally, find themselves with an out-of-network provider), at least for those who accept some form of federal payment for services?
Repeal it or enforce ALL of it. As it is, it's still only the nonsubsidized premium paying portion of the individual market who've felt the full negative effects of Obamacare, and they are hardly a big enough, geographically concentrated enough, nor for whatever reason sympathetic enough voting block to force a change. Too many people are simply skating, or think they are skating on the issue to care beyond virtue signaling their concern for the "uninsured." I think this was by design.
People talk about how Congressional incumbents will pay for any failure to "repeal" Obamacare. I kind of doubt it. For all of the terrible polling numbers that "Congress" gets, Congressional incumbents keep winning.
I think that the failure to repeal Obamacare will hurt Trump the worst. In a tough individualized race, Trump's complete failure to articulate anything about healthcare will hurt him more than anybody.
What conventional GOPe wishful thinking on your part! All the pantomime votes to repeal and "fix" ACA before Trump got there were, what? Sincere attempts to make our lives better? The fact they can't deliver at least a clean repeal really speaks volumes about Republican sincerity and strategic thinking doesn't it? Of course you make the traditional GOPe mistake of assuming the voters are so dumb they won't realize that Trump's promises were predicated on being supplied a bill to sign.
We all know who has failed to produce that bill. Just like we all know who voted for the original ACA. Plenty of blame to go around there before we ever get to Trump.
Tired of all the "winning" yet?
Never, Fuckhead.
As a member of that individual market and someone who ended up paying over $5000 a year more for the same plan I had before Obamacare, I'm still waiting for my "thank you" for being billed for everyone else's birth control, subsidies, and pre-existing conditions.
Sarc off.
rhhardin said... “Two tier system. A public system and an unregulated market forces private system.”
On my life, I can't figure this out. In a single payer system, Darwinian superfecundity takes care it all – everyone dies, and a few live just long enough. We’re almost Lamarckian, the way we want to save everybody. Not that I want Huxley back (the other Huxley).
May the invisible hand be with us in an “unregulated market forces private system.” If you buy-in, then watching all the invisible hands of the tentacles of East India Trading Company sucking your life dry -- your watch, is up to you. No answers here.
The larger problem is that, while everyone wants health ins, no one wants to pay for it. There's an old saying in the life ins industry which encapsulates this attitude which goes: "Everyone wants to go to Heaven, but nobody wants to die." Trying to square that circle is at the heart of our problem.
Laslo,
Stalin helped overweight Ukrainians lose weight. There was no obesity there in the 1930s.
Clarity is good. Now we know the Republicans have no good plan on healthcare. All the mutterings and votes against ObamaCare were just theatre. Now what to do? I think it is clear that Americans for good or bad want national healthcare.
Trump should enforce ObamaCare 100%. No waivers or back alley payments to the insurance companies. It will fail and there will be pain.
Also setup some kind of American Idol show or something reviewing the different national healthcare systems around the world.
Let's have a huge national discussion of what we want. Is the single payer the best system. How about French hybrid system? Or the German system?
Enough with the large bills no one reads or knows about. Let's get a Nationwide consensus and move forward.
Vrigil its like those that want European style free stuff. Those people don't want to and have no intention of paying the hugely high taxes that the middle class of Europe pays.
Just tax "the rich" to pay for free stuff.
As a member of that individual market and someone who ended up paying over $5000 a year more for the same plan I had before Obamacare, I'm still waiting for my "thank you" for being billed for everyone else's birth control, subsidies, and pre-existing conditions.
Sarc off.
Same here. My biggest issue was being forced by law to purchase an expensive Cadillac plan that covered many many things I did not want nor need. Thanks Al Franken.
Peter said...
Thus, experiments in which subjects are not willing to pay more than $3. for an object but, having acquired it, will not sell it for less than $10.
That was the first thing I thought of after seeing the goofy fNYT headline.
(PS: I sold the objects for $9 and made a killing!)
Fabi said...
Republicans in Congress -- the legislative branch -- had years to craft a plan to replace Obamacare. They failed.
And so what; you're going to vote for a Democrat for the U.S. House? That won't matter unless you are in one of the thirty or so genuine swing districts.
Vote for a Republican insurgent, to "primary" a Republican incumbent in the Senate? There are about two states like that. You might just help the Dems win back a majority.
Vote for Kamala Harris for President? Lulz.
Keep watching Sean Hannity and listening to Rush? That's the ticket.
“Stalin helped overweight Ukrainians lose weight. There was no obesity there in the 1930s.”
Beautiful moustaches kept them warm.
Single Payer is inevitable now the AGREED standard is "cannot have fewer insured".
Single payer is 100% entitled, a human right, anything less is defined as failure.
To each according to his needs, from each according to his means.
The question now is how long until single payer arrives...
At that moment only important issue will be the wrangling over the coverage of single payer, and Democrats will forever in charge because this is their winning issue.
Game over man, game over.
Of course, this has been standard prog operating procedure for a century now. Create a ratcheting effect and vest enough interests to prevent reform, so as to keep expanding the state, regulating society, and controlling citizens in conformity with the vision of the anointed.
""The fact that people do without health insurance is a sin, in my opinion," says one woman, quoted in the NYT article." The GOP hasn't even begun to address, publicly, consistently, what insurance is, how it differs from care, why it is not a "right," and so on.
"The stress of having political power is killing them." No, it's just that the GOP is actually a divided coalition. Even the supposed core is soft. The McConnells and Hatches and Grassleys aren't ideologues. To get Collins and Lee on board together for anything was always going to be hard--but much easier in fruitless opposition.
I wonder if countries with government run healthcare have the same culture war that the US is seeing.
We will have our healthcare used as a weapon to go after those the party in power does not like.
"Trump should enforce ObamaCare 100%. No waivers or back alley payments to the insurance companies. It will fail and there will be pain."
-- I've been saying this since it was passed. Instead of carve outs and exceptions and pens and telephones protecting people from the bad of the law and propping up the good, let it pass. #ItsTheLaw after all.
"As a member of that individual market and someone who ended up paying over $5000 a year more for the same plan I had before Obamacare."
-- Man. That price cut of $2,500 sure seems like it is not bending the cost curve down as intended.
The Democrats are broke and going nowhere. People are woke to the losers. Maxine Waters is now their new face.
I haven't followed the debate since i have no idea what's going on.
Its obvious that both the Repubs and Dems are deliberately obscuring what's in the Bill - just like they did with the obamacare bill - and its possible effects on everyone.
And, as usual, the primary goal seems to make sure the Drug and Health insurance companies, and all the other rich people involved in Health care don't get hurt in anyway.
Providing the average person with decent health care at an affordable price seems to be last on the list.
Give people a bucket of dirty water and a dirty rag--Cuban Health Care. The Dems were always bragging about it.
Several European countries don't have "single payer" systems but in fact mix health entitlements, regulation, and forms of private insurance.
The big difference between the US and Europe is that many Euro leftists are honest: solidarity means not just that everyone gets, but that everyone pays--including the poor and lower middle class that mostly get in the US--via high VAT, high tax rates, high premiums, and taxes on transfer payments often exempt here. (Of course, they also have their own public finance issues.)
The US left will use something-for-nothing to game the process for electoral gain. All US politicians, reflecting the something-for-nothing mentality of many voters, have exploited the country's exceptional position to load up on debt to fund current consumption, including of health care.
"Its obvious that both the Repubs and Dems are deliberately obscuring what's in the Bill - just like they did with the obamacare bill - and its possible effects on everyone."
-- That's why I'd rather repeal first. Start with a clean slate, and hash out the debate in public. As long as the ACA is there, the urgency is gone.
A spending program doesn't have to be good for the country to be politically untouchable. It only has to be good for someone.
I have said it before:
Obamacare killed the Democrats, and now it is coming for the Republicans.
US political parties, RIP. There is no majority in either house.
Chuck said...
"I think that the failure to repeal Obamacare will hurt Trump the worst. In a tough individualized race, Trump's complete failure to articulate anything about healthcare will hurt him more than anybody."
The only person in Washington DC that isn't to blame for Obamacare failing is Trump. You have to be absolutely warped and twisted to think it is his fault or that it should hurt him.
When Obamacare fails Chuck and his Media friends will try to convince voters that it is Trump's fault. When trump destroys them it will be glorious.
Sebastian, that was my point also. Those that want European style free-stuff don't want European style taxes. For that matter Republicans who keep saying "I'm going to cut taxes" are wrong also if they think we can keep spending.
A spending program doesn't have to be good for the country to be politically untouchable. It only has to be good for someone.
That is why you can never start a new entitlement. And the opposition will find a "victim".
Re: rcocean:
And, as usual, the primary goal seems to make sure the Drug and Health insurance companies, and all the other rich people involved in Health care don't get hurt in anyway.
Providing the average person with decent health care at an affordable price seems to be last on the list.
I think that is the political problem, yes -- and it was the problem with Obamacare too. People (rightly) do not trust their political leaders, and they recognise (correctly) that any time you introduce large structural change, it's an opportunity for the people who were in the strongest position before the change to strengthen their position even further, at the expense of the weak.
Unless they really trust the people making those changes, people aren't going to support them. You can call it an endowment effect, but it seems quite rational to me. They didn't trust Obama and the Democrats in 2009, and their mistrust was proven justified. And they don't trust Trump and the Republicans in 2017. Trump and the Republicans have failed to appreciate that it's not enough to navigate the legislative process in the Imperial Capital. They have a massive sales job to accomplish out in the country before they can pass substantive health care reform, even if their reform is mostly focused on rolling back a dumb law that was rammed through by exploiting loopholes in the legislative process. And that's the way it ought to be!
If they can't sell the reform to the voters, they shouldn't do it -- this is a democracy after all. Just because the Democrats did it in 2009 doesn't mean Republicans should do it in 2017. Voters punished the Democrats mercilessly for their betrayal, which is why Republicans (nominally) control the Presidency and both houses of Congress. If Republicans fail to learn from the Democrats' mistakes, they'll be punished in exactly the same way.
"So I ask: Tired of all the "winning" yet?"
I am not a coward so no.
Do you know what a blue falcon is? You are being one.
The Cuban health care system works by strengthening the immune system.
Sebastian, VAT is the height of taxing dishonesty. Consumers don't see it. It's just a rake, like casinos use at gambling tables.
As for Europe, they get taken all the time. The imposition of the Euro was a huge redistribution, and Germans are mostly sadly unaware of how it happened.
That's why American leftist politicians are quietly enthusiastic about imposing a VAT. There's a lot of money out there left to steal.
It takes a special kind of stupid to watch both Clinton and Obama kill their presidencies with fights over nationalizing the health-care system, and then spend the first six months of the Trump presidency doing the same thing.
Those GOP folks in Congress don't think too good. How about regulatory and tax reform to stimulate economic growth, and then deal with Obamacare if there is gas left in the tank? Nah...we couldn't do that...it would be too smart.
Unfortunately human nature is against the GOP. The simple rule here is that once an entitlement is in place it can never be removed, no matter how bad it actually is, even if it only benefits a small minority.
There's this inevitability to single payer, socialized healthcare in the USA. It started long ago. The enactment of Obamacare just increased the gravitational attraction towards it by an order of magnitude. From day one the ACA was a system set up to fail and be replaced. The assumption on the part of its authors was that there would be a permanent Democrat majority in both houses and the presidency, so it would be easy to replace it with a full single payer system. But they also knew that even if they lost their majorities, they'd still be able to easily vilify the Republicans for doing anything other push us further down the path to socialized healthcare.
Ultimately the only thing the GOP will be able to do will be to essentially rename Obamacare and expand its coverage, and behave as though that was the plan all along. Anything else will be destroy their political ambitions by getting them voted out. More and more of the electorate are viewing healthcare as some sort of inalienable right. The Socialists, the Progressives have won this war. And the slow erosion of America continues.
I'll also say that Paul Ryan has mismanaged this process in a surprisingly horrible way. It's appalling that the bill was originally drafted in secret, and they then tried to push it through before people (not just legislators -- the public) had a chance to read and digest it.
Here's one point for the Democrats: when they were trying their various versions of Obamacare, at least we had the draft language well in advance of the votes, so we could all see the problems. The Republican leadership seems to have learned the wrong lesson from the Democrats' Obamacare disaster here, namely -- I guess -- that if you don't let anyone see the bill before they vote, they can't figure out why it's a bad for them.
Democrats are willing -- eager! -- to govern, but not responsibly. The Republican members of the House and Senate are irresponsibly unwilling to govern. Worse political class ever.
Paul Ryan's and Michelle McConnell's assumption is that the people will not understand why this new policy is good for them. We can't explain it in time, and they won't be smart enough to get the explanation, so we won't even try.
It's a GOP version of we have to pass the bill so that we can see what's in it.
"Trump should enforce ObamaCare 100%. No waivers or back alley payments to the insurance companies. It will fail and there will be pain."
===================
You forget one of the fundamental rules of big government liberalism: "Government grows in response to its own failures".
Thus the failure of the ACA will result in a larger, more expensive, and more intrusive health care program.
Bullshit, Balfegor.
The US is not a democracy. Never was meant to be, never has been and never should be.
There is nothing in the constitution that gives any us citizen any say at all in govt.
That's a good thing imo.
John Henry
Blogger Nonapod said...
"Unfortunately human nature is against the GOP. The simple rule here is that once an entitlement is in place it can never be removed, no matter how bad it actually is, even if it only benefits a small minority. "
Obamacare is going to collapse. The Medicaid expansion is 6 years of benefits stacked on 10 years of taxes. A lot of people are opting out. The more people try to use Obamacare the more they learn what a sham 5 digit premiums+deductibles are.
The republicans just need to grow a pair and take the long term approach and never let the democrats and the media off the hook. We also need leadership that will force out the cowards and traitors like Murkowski and capito.
@Balfegor, very good point. Why would Paul Ryan repeat Hillary Clinton's blunder from back in the days when her husband was President? Hubris? The sad fact is that we've not had a Speaker of the House who cares about the country since Gingrich.
"Here's one point for the Democrats: when they were trying their various versions of Obamacare, at least we had the draft language well in advance of the votes, so we could all see the problems."
You are joking right?
I think Churchill said Americans always do the right thing, after they've tried everything else.
Republicans in Congress -- the legislative branch -- had years to craft a plan to replace Obamacare. They failed.
And so what; you're going to vote for a Democrat for the U.S. House? That won't matter unless you are in one of the thirty or so genuine swing districts.
Worse, they told us they HAD a replacement.
And, Chuck, the primary the rascals may have more impact than you believe. I seem to recall the #3 Republican Congress Critter a few years ago, safe in his R district. Cantor was as established a GOPe as you could get.
Re: Achilles:
No, not a joke -- we discussed the languge quite extensively in the comments of this very blog! There may have been secret codicils with pharma companies, or something, but the text was known. Democrats went ahead with it anyway even though public support was trending down as voters realised what they were trying to do.
Americans want free. So - they will sacrifice everything in the name of "free".
Quality? Access? who cares... it's freeeeeee! Someone else is paying for it.
Kim Strassel writes (use text below to get around WSJ pay wall):
"It’s time for some very public accountability.
"That rests in Mr. McConnell giving his caucus a drop-dead date to broker a compromise, after which he will proceed to bring up the House bill. And any Republican who votes against moving forward, “a motion to proceed,” will forever be known as the Republican who saved ObamaCare. The Republican who voted to throw billions more taxpayer dollars at failing entitlement programs and collapsing insurance markets. The Republican who abandoned struggling American families. The Republican who voted against a tax cut and spending reductions. The Republican who made Chuck Schumer’s year.
"And that’s only a short list of the real-world accountability."
Who can argue with this?
> Obamacare is going to collapse.
And then what?
The GOPe agrees the CBO can never project fewer entitled to health care. "Cost" of the program is uncontested.
Therefore the rachet goes but one way now...
That's a lot of strawmen, Chuckles -- I made none of those arguments.
By this logic, the Republicans can pass a crap sandwich of a healthcare law (ie: Anything they'd like) and eventually the American people will love it.
So what's the problem? Get to work!
Ach, Republicans never did want to get rid of it. First and foremost, they are government critters whose main priority is to increase their own power and privilege. Too much opportunity for graft and corruption at their fingertips to ever let it go away.
Sad, but true. What we have is a Uniparty.
Read today at Insty. Any pubbie who doesn't vote for repeal will be tarred with you kept Obamacare in place.
Good.
How quickly people forget.
Old insurance plans that we liked were taken away under Obamacare, but now it's impossible?
I won't have insurance?
The pubbies are stupid to let that stand. Park em in Medicaid until their plan is up and running.
This isn't that hard.
This is why the promise of killing Obamacare was always an incredibly foolish strategy. You say instead something like,
"We are going to set a red line for Obamacare. Democrats swear it's working; that's fine. We are going to hold them to the promise of Obamacare and we want them to be involved in reforming it if it fails. So here's my redline: If Obamacare costs keep skyrocketing and in 2018 average premiums keep increasing over 30% for a silver level plan, then average americans are being pushed to choose between food on their table or being forced to buy expensive yet low-quality health insurance. This has to stop; the promise of Obamacare has to come true or be reformed."
Both sides have accepted or promoted the false premise that total # of uninsured is somehow the most important metric; even though 2/3rds of the reduction in uninsured since 2011 have come from Medicaid.
The very first step in this process is to reset the actual goal line - which is not total # of insured.
Here's one point for the Democrats: when they were trying their various versions of Obamacare, at least we had the draft language well in advance of the votes, so we could all see the problems."
You are joking right?
Ms. "We have to pass the bill to find out what's in it?"
I enjoy reading comments by people like David Baker who want the perfect to be the enemy of every option that's not completely perfect and pretend that an option that didn't even exist would somehow be better than whatever we have.
Personally, if Trump doesn't start getting the sycophantic press treatment that Obama got, I'm going to consider him a failure. Also, I was promised a unicorn/Pegasus hybrid.
The New Your Times is misrepresenting the public's appetite for repeal and they couldn't be more wrong. https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/repeal_of_health_care_law_favoroppose-1947.html
Healthcare is a right, not a privilege...
I call B.S. The constituents have nothing to do with it. The money guys placed their bets on that horse and they're going to flog until it shows up in a bottle of Elmer's.
Uncertainty might be the most powerful force in the universe.
Blogger Anthony said...
"Ach, Republicans never did want to get rid of it. First and foremost, they are government critters whose main priority is to increase their own power and privilege. Too much opportunity for graft and corruption at their fingertips to ever let it go away.
Sad, but true. What we have is a Uniparty."
I agree. But the glorious part of the last few months is that the republicans who support Obamacare have been outed. We always knew there were traitors. Obamacare is going to break the uniparty one way or another.
Blogger sunsong said...
"Healthcare is a right, not a privilege..."
That means someone must be forced to provide it.
Democrats thought they should have their cotton picked for free too.
Re: Seeing Red:
Ms. "We have to pass the bill to find out what's in it?"
That's because she didn't know what was in the bill. Nor did the President. They didn't care -- they wanted to pass something they could sell as universal health care, and they didn't care about the details.
But just because they were lazy and/or incompetent didn't mean that the rest of us had to be. The whole history of the bill was rather complex -- I recall there being multiple competing versions in the House, and at least two Senate versions. After several months of public discussion, the House passed one version, the Senate, another (structured as an amendment of some random unrelated House bill, since the Constitution requires that revenue bills originate in the House), and they planned to resolve differences through conference. If everything went according to plan, that would result in a compromise bill to be passed by both chambers. Then voters had a chance to weigh in, and elected Scott Brown (R) to replace Ted Kennedy (D), dropping Democrats below a filibuster-proof majority and frustrating their plans. As a back-up plan, they then decided to use the budget reconciliation process to get the House bill through the Senate without dealing with a filibuster (Reid and Obama had not yet decided to start abolishing filibusters -- that came in 2013).
Anyhow, there was a long stretch of time -- several months -- where anyone who cared to could read the various House bills or Senate bills. The debate was partly carried out behind closed doors, but the language was public.
Who knew that "rights" we're so damned expensive!
The status quo is not an option since the exchanges are collapsing as we write this morning.
What we are going to end up with in a year or two is basically the Medicaid expansion, and not much more. Eventually all of the insurers in every part of the country will bail out of the exchanges- it is literally inevitable at this point.
Elective abortion (i.e. denying life deemed unworthy) is a right, not a privilege.
The Pro-Choice Church does not recognize intrinsic value of human life and denies evolution of human life. There are clearly ulterior motives that defend the conservation of Obamacare. It may be the environment. It is likely redistribution of capital and control (a la Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming scheme) and exploiting Democratic leverage.
The key seems to be that a "right" is forced through, then people will go along to get along. When that doesn't happen, then a special interest in a black robe, or black hoodies, will override the Democratic consensus. Followed by activists parading to project responsibility in a coverup.
The evidence indicates that progressive medical costs are caused by anti-capitalist practices and an underperforming education system. Obamacare was designed to secure the redistribution of capital and control. A single-payer system would be able to force pricing, and consolidate control (e.g. abortion panels), but it would still be a suboptimal solution to restoring functional markets and moral imperatives.
Essentially, Obamacare is an experimental vaccine (i.e. a product which mitigates but does not prevent disease) administered to the whole population without consideration of need or risk.
"Democrats thought they should have their cotton picked for free too."
You mean the Democrats whose progeny are Republicans today?
It's always nice when a guy sunsong comes along and says his right to swing his extend well past the end of my nose.
Personally, I'm pretty sure that when your claimed right gives you the privilege of telling me how to spend my life paying for your right, I am well within my rights to decline.
It's fun to watch people who claim to be on the side of angels tell others how they must live.
Robert Cook,
If you want to start with the old canard that the south turned to the Republican Party after the passage of the Civil Rights Acts, you'll have to explain why the turn from Democrats took more than two generations.
The easiest answer is that it took two generations of Democrats to die and that their party affiliations stayed stable until their deaths. It was voters who weren't even born when the VRAs were passed who flipped the Georgia legislature in 2008.
But it's nice to make yourself feel smugly superior to a whole group of people you've barely met. It's what you have, beyond your hope to some day reeducate people you don't prefer.
Also, it's fun to watch atheists claim the sins of the fathers will be visited on the sons.
One wonders if Robert Cook thinks the genetic blame will last seven generations.
@Birkel,
Cookie is right, though not exactly as he means it.
There always were conservatives in the South, and when "The Lost Cause" was finally lost, obvious to even the most diehard Confederates, they shed a tear, swallowed hard, and voted Republican.
That the Southern Democrats and the Northern Republicans could act in a "collegiate" and "bi-partisan" fashion was because they largely agreed on "conservative" vs. "liberal" issues.
and OTOH, the Southern and Northern Democrats could, and did, cooperate because they were all Democrats.
"Healthcare is a right, not a privilege..."
RE: my comments at 9:03AM and 8:55AM. Where's my "thank you" sunsong? What skin in the game do YOU have?
I will let you guess whether I can be brought about to agreeing.
The first thing you'll have to convince me is that the 40+ years it took the south to flip from solidly Democrat to solidly Republican can be explained with relation to the CRAs.
You can't. Nobody can. Everybody who has tried practices argument by assertion, namely, "LBJ said an apocryphal thing that proves everything I want it to prove".
Beaten like a yard dog, Spicer exits the octagon.
CWJ:
sunsong thinks his right to swing his fist stops well past the end of your nose. He thinks you owe him an apology.
I know you deserve more respect than the Left will ever offer.
David Baker still has not delivered my flying unicorn.
And he posts on the wrong threads sometimes.
Fridays? Right!
Or--I know, I've already said this several times--we could get affluent "liberals" (and by that I mean of course "tax-happy, coercion-addicted, power-tripping State fellators") to pay for poor people's health care. They've got the bucks, and we know they've got the compassion and generosity because they're always telling us they do.
"I remember when 'liberal' meant being generous with your own money."--Will Rogers
You want to know why the south votes Republican today? First, as stated above, all the old racists are dead. And they voted Democrat until the day they died.
I listen to a station from Tupelo Mississippi. A pop-country station. They finish their morning program with a Bible verse. Do you think people like this want to be part of the party that has declared war on the Little Sisters of the Poor?
No, the younger people of the south (say anyone born after 1955) saw the modern Democrat party of being either goofy old racists (who are now all dead) and Atheists from the coasts who were obsessed with gays and abortion. They saw the modern Republican party as being similar to the old Democrat party minus the racism.
Robert Cook said...
"Democrats thought they should have their cotton picked for free too."
You mean the Democrats whose progeny are Republicans today?
Rather than deal with the obvious and repeatedly debunked lie leftists tell themselves to attempt to absolve their guilt in the deed of slavery I am going to point out what Robert wants with healthcare.
Robert wants us to go and work and make money. Then he wants the government to take most of it.
The he wants to create a 2 tiered health system. A shitty system for the people he wants to take money from and a better quality system for the elites who take peoples money.
Like Cuba.
ObamaCare is popular.
Well, that certainly is the narrative. And that's what's important. The story must follow the narrative. The people you interview and quote in the paper must conform to the narrative.
It's like when they kept saying how widely popular Bill Clinton was -- even though he never got a majority vote.
Here's a man after Cookie's own heart, Achilles:
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2013/08/06/the-pro-slavery-roots-of-the-modern-left/
And see, especially, the paragraphs in the section "Writings":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Fitzhugh
I've heard that in later years Fitzhugh took his premises to their logical conclusion and just became an outright socialist. Those guys from GAME OF THRONES who are getting flak from the Left about their new idea for a show about the Confederacy (and we all know how devoted to individual liberty the Left is) should just tell their critics, "Hey, it's the kind of society Fitzhugh would have wanted!"
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