Discussion for article #230317
Well, I’m just waiting to see Jon’s reaction when the Supreme Court kills the ACA via the Halbig decision…
I thought many of you lefties watched Jon Stewart as your primary news source. Here he has characterized the way that Obamacare was sold to the American people by the Democrats as “Slimy,” and all but sounded the death-horn for Obamacare in the Supreme Court resulting from the upcoming Halbig v Burwell decision.
Nothing clever to say?
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When criticism of Democrats and their actions is due and needs to be exposed, Stewart has always been pretty vocal.
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The important thing is that Obamacare exists, it helps people, and it makes sense. Contrast this with government shut downs over raising the debt ceiling and impeachment threats over immigration reform.
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FACT. It absolutely was slimy, in the sense (among many others) that it redefined many small businesses as by ACA definition ineligible for previously held and otherwise compliant Group Insurance coverage, making “You can keep your health care coverage!” a PREMEDITATED AND PATHETIC LIE, forcing said small business employees and families onto the state exchanges, thus inflating enrollment numbers.
So if SCOTUS kills Obamacare you will be happy when millions are left once again without health insurance and thus access to affordable healthcare? You will be happy when once again the cost healthcare starts to rise to the point that it will exceed 25% of our GDP, thus becoming an economically unsustainable number? How Republican of you.
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Not really, actually. Not since he got enthusiastically taken in by James O’Keefe twice and never seemed to show any remorse for pushing doctored videos in the service of wingnuttery. He has an odd habit of getting caught with his tongue on the right-wing scrotum when a new fauxtrage comes along so that he can do the Both Sides Dance, just in time for the money shot of doctored video and other forms of ratfucking to cover his face in a sticky mess of hackishness. Nietzsche wouldn’t be surprised at all that a guy who lives to lampoon Fox News would adopt its journalistic standards, but it’s still depressing.
So here he is again, valiantly missing the forest (The Moops invaded Spain?) for the trees (another shiny video furnished by the right-wing, I must flog it!) in order to avoid discussing the actual nonexistent merits of Halbig trutherism. Which is the only remotely important angle to this story. Guess he thinks America is too stupid to understand it.
So, no, he’s not our fearless leader.
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it really is distressing to see the glee that republicans have in anticipation of the supreme’s gutting of the aca – leaving millions of americans without healthcare coverage. but i guess people like spartacus need a reason to get up in the morning – and celebrating the pain and suffering of millions of his countrymen is just the thing that gets him out the door.
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Well, he does make the point a bit at the end of his bit.
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I have no idea what you are talking about. What small businesses are no long eligible for group coverage?
Are you talking about new standards for group plans to match standards for the individual market, like the requirement to cover preventive care, and requiring standardization in how coinsurance, deductibles, and out of pocket maximums are covered?
Or are you talking about businesses dropping coverage because their low wage employees are better off in the exchanges than under their pathetic, expensive, low coverage policies?
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Was the passage of Obamacare slimy? Aside from the cynical observation that the passage of all laws is slimy, no, it was not slimy.
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The problem begins when one side, the GOP, sets out to oppose the presidents’ policies regardless of what they are. McConnell made this the party’s strategy for coming back from the dustbin of history. Just say “no” to everything unless Obama takes up a GOP policy.
Here they had a proposal that was lightly modeled on a plan that was already working MA. It was covering almost everyone. It was also lowering premiums according to AHIP (40% last I looked). But instead of working productively to make the plan better and fix problems, such as the small business issue, they demonized and demagogued it.
And they haven’t stopped until this very day. It will be interesting to see whether the originalists, who pride themselves on seeing into legislative intent, will take the stated intent of living legislators who wrote and passed the bill, not to mention the wording of the bill, or will use the YouTube remarks of a consultant, albeit a key one, to scuttle the whole thing.
To my way of thinking, it is hard to call a payment, which I ONLY make if I FAIL to have insurance, “a tax.” I pay taxes on things I buy or use and on my income. There is no tax I know of that I can avoid 100% of the time by buying something else. This is clearly a penalty.
The stupidity Gruber speaks of is the stupidity of the American voter around the word “taxes.” RR and GOP have managed to demonize this word to the point where no one notices that they regularly have raised taxes–and for good reasons–and have thrown state finances into the red by cutting them, see Kansas. Americans ARE stupid when it comes to taxes, and that’s why the framers had to go through gyrations to avoid the word “tax.”
And, in fact, it doesn’t matter what you call the payment, you still have to pay it if you don’t buy insurance. It’s called the “free rider” problem, and it’s an idea that’s been around since forever–though the American people ARE too stupid and uninformed to know it, even now–and was a centerpiece of the Heritage Foundation’s health plan. The only thing it and Obamacare have in common.
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You clearly have no clue about what you’re spouting. Crawl out from under your right-wing rock and educate yourself.
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This is satire, right???
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Why did you think that? Please cite your source for your assumption that “lefties” watch Stewart as their “primary news source”.
By the way, I don’t agree that the passage of the ACA was “slimy” but if it was, so the fuck what. With the way the GOP was acting during that period fighting and blocking the reform just for the sake of blocking I have no problem with them using whatever means to pass legislation so people who needed healthcare could get it.
GOP going around, yelling about it being “socialist”, that it would kill granny and that it would be a “job killer”, staging townhalls, showing up at places debating the bill with shotguns, bald faced LYING about everything - now THAT was what was slimy.
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Like that the ACA would kill granny, was socialist, was a job killer and that IRS would create death panels??? Those PREMEDITATED AND PATHETIC LIES…???
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Gruber is just another in the long genre of Republican deflections clustered around the “it was so dang complicated and long, nobody could understand it all!” meme.
Gruber is just a video version of this: http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/obamacare-stack.jpg
He’s a fair weather troll poster. He’ll show up whenever there’s bad news for Democrats and/or for the ACA, post a bunch of “you lefties” do X strawman bullshit in some smarmy manner, and then bails.
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Beej, Beej, Beej. Rawr has succinctly noted your typical failures of logic, but while we wait for the banhammer to fall on this latest sock of yours, let me add one thing: There’s no such thing as a “death horn,” for God’s sake. You mean “death knell.” The way to avoid such mistakes is to ask yourself if you’re right about things and then go look them up, but if you did that at all often you wouldn’t be the special snowflake you are, now would you?
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