Discussion for article #227355
I must disagree with the author about how few predicted the Republicans would warm up to the law.
Plenty of us saw it coming when we heard that KY citizen say how glad his KY Kynnect plan wasn’t Obamacare!
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It’s not working. It will ONLY work when Dems stand up and say with justifiable pride. “I voted for this”. It helps you and your family. Here’s how."
Then contrast their vote with that of the GOTP, who clearly did NOT want you, the voter, to have affordable health insurance.
Looks Dems, having the spine of a chocolate Ă©clair does not win elections. Stand up for what you believe in, stop letting the tea-clowns of the GOP shame you.
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Uhhhh, I don’t know how to break this to you, but EVERY Democrat who begged Obama not to do immigration reform through executive order – Pryor, Landrieu, Hagen, Begich – is running HARD on Obamacare, and getting major results. There’s no doubt there are Dem spines that need stiffening on other issues, but Obamacare ain’t one of them!
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“…It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests…”
Unlike the Republican Party which protects the interests of the upper class, which borrows for wars and shovels taxpayer dollars to bankers, and which smirks about safety and freedom as it regulates legal women’s health care clinics out of business.
Yeah. Obamacare may put a lil dent in that.
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Seeing James Carville in the photo, I could’ve sworn it was he who said, “The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it.” The internet seems to attribute P.J. O’Rourke with the quote, thus ruining what would’ve been a snappy photobomb comment.
Either way, Kristol’s disloyal opposition strategy is so entrenched in Republican thought that I’d take O’Rourke a step further: the extent to which the government sucks at life is a direct measure of conservatives’ influence on it.
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Obamacare has provided a lifeline by providing coverage to 8 million people on the exchanges, 7 million under Medicaid expansion and 5 million people who bought insurance outside the exchanges but benefit from new regulations for heath insurance like banning coverage to those with preexisting conditions.
Obamacare provides consumer protection benefits to every insured American, not just the 20M newly insured,
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He was probably referring to washington insiders, who never get anything right. And when their wrong, they just move on.
do you remember that Trillion dollar deficits were going to turn us into Greece, not extending the Bush Tax cuts was going to cause an economic collapse that would make 2008 look like a walk in the park, and QEII (The fed money printing policy) was going to make U.S currency into monopoly money?
Neither do they…
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You go, America! Obama seems to be clearing the boards on the domestic agenda. Some of the 2007 financial crater has been refilled, with unemployment down and the stock markets up. The share of GDP going to healthcare is below 18% and the funding horizon of Social Security has been moved out six years. Even the energy picture, which just months ago seemed to suggest Obama had gone carbon-crazy, is brightening further with new grid stabilization that will make the electric economy possible. And the billionaires and all that wealth disparity of this second Gilded Age? They too seem about to be bypassed by the emerging Sharing Economy (Near Zero Marginal Cost Economy in Rifkin parlance). Napster was just 15 years ago, letting mostly kids violate copyright rules en masse (partly in response to the unfairness of undeveloped digital IP rules). Today you can share specific models of protein structures for vaccine design before pharmaceutical companies lock them down, again circumventing rules that impose unnecessary costs on end-users.
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Kristol needn’t worry too much. A good many Dems will find a way of letting the Republicans claim credit. Alison Grimes in Kentucky practically already has. Repeat after me, Alison, Kynect=Obamacare+Kentucky Democrats, and Mitch voted to repeal it and unlike Mitch I’ll stand with the people who had the resolve to do it in the first place. You’ve got about a week before it gets so close to the election that it starts to look like a deathbed conversion.
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Mark Pryor, one guy who would probably have a good excuse to run against it is running harding touting it. As is Beglich (sp) and several others. So not sure statement is 100% true.
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For Democrats, the dream scenario was that Obamacare would eventually join Social Security and Medicare as an unassailable feature of the American safety net.
No, Sahil. The dream scenario was single payer with affordable healthcare for all. The present law is just a stopgap measure, a resting stop on that road.
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Wait… Are you kidding me?!
Bill Kristol actually wrote a sentence I agree with?
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Indeed, many predicted that it wouldn’t be long before Republicans were taking credit for it, just as Republicans took credit for stimulus funds that came to their area even though they voted against the stimulus bill.
And Republicans’ worst nightmare came true when the law was passed. The rest has just been the inevitable and inexorable result of that event. And the Republicans knew this twenty years ago.
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It’s such a nightmare for the GOP that Dems like Grimes and Hochul either refuse to campaign on the success of the ACA or actively boast about their opposition to it.
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Yes, but for the wrong reason. Kristol was pointing out what a disaster for the GOP it would be to let Democrats pass healthcare reform. He wasn’t arguing in favor of it. It’s much like Scalia pointing out that the Court’s reasoning would lead to the conclusion that same-sex marriage bans were unconstitutional. Right conclusion, wrong reason
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Bravo! Bravo! Bravo!
It would be nice if the people who were predicting that this would “kill jobs”, create death panels and that the government would be donning rubber gloves to get all up in your private parts would be called to the carpet and made to explain why they lied the way they did. Would also be nice if this story got the same wall ceiling to to wall news coverage that the initial healthcare.gov website got upon rollout.
But if anyone believes the GOP will embrace the ACA or give up on repealing it, think again. They are still working, behind the scenes, to destroy it. Look at the issue of abortion, 40+ years later and they are still insisting women not be allowed to choose. These people are just getting warmed up.
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The ACA will be Obama’s lasting legacy. He’s made a million other mistakes to be sure, but Obamacare is not going anywhere and with his name attached to it, people will always remember who gave them healthcare. It’s really remarkable.
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Maybe this is quibbling at this point, but it still bugs me when we refer to the website rollout as a “disaster.” A disaster is an earthquake or a tsunami. The fact that a highly complex new web application had growing pains and glitches was highly predictable and completely normal. It was a “disaster” only because the media, including the Dem-friendly media, decided to call it that. The website was mostly fixed in a matter of weeks with no noticeable harm to anyone - that’s not a disaster in my book.
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