A couple of months ago Sen. Elizabeth Warren was on TV to talk about health care. She pointed to Massachusetts, her home state, which passed Romney care, and then got additional tools and funding through the ACA.
She said MA now boasts an uninsured rate of about two percent, but despite that success, the state continues to monitor, refine and tweak their program to ensure optimal outcomes. You can’t just pass a bill on such a complex and changing sector of our society and expect to be done once and for all.
Your energies would be better spent lecturing the Republican Congressmen on their refusal to consider improvements to the ACA, and the governors and state legislatures of Republican-led states on their failures to fully implement the ACA.
The price for getting Ds to give the Rs anything of a victory is an open admission (not just a tacit one) that the Rs were wrong all along on healthcare and only blasted Obamacare (and even gave it that name) to gain political advantage. They had nothing better to offer but it’s just to tempting to blame the other side.
This is their comeuppance and it’s likely that the Ds can push through a public option once they regain the Congress and Trump is out of the White House (unless he folds in 2019).
First, that’s a more accurate way of stating it…even if it assumes some things…but I think you’re missing the irony of your insistence on highlighting THAT as your message in response to me saying that liberals/Dems message poorly. I really can’t think of a better way to highlight it than to point at this kind of crap. The backbiting from ideologues who insist things can and should just magically be a certain way, because that way is the “right” way, is our gift to conservatism. You guys have spent more effort and energy attacking the ACA for not being a unicorn than you have attacking the GOP/Teatrolls for wanting everyone who gets sick or old to die quickly.
Second, the ACA doesn’t need to leave 27M people uninsured. You might as well be on the other team if you’re willing to take advantage of the damage they did to a workable (albeit imperfect) plan in order to argue that it’s a failure and immutably so.
How many people are employed by the insurance industry in this country? How many jobs will be lost? How many people will end up unemployed, potentially unemployable and fucked by universal healthcare? How do we shift? Do we just tell Aetna, BCBS, Humana et al to shut the lights off by X date? What happens to GDP? What happens to your precious survey results when the idea of switching is no longer a vague and insubstantial hypothetical, but a concrete reality with actual moving parts and measurable human consequences? You can “greater good” until you’re blue in the face, but that’s not going to provide any solace to the out of work 55 year old actuary who can’t get hired because of his age and whose retirement is now a fuckfest…or his kid who now has to attend community college instead of the nice private school that accepted him. Ideology is all well and good…and make no mistake, I’m all for universal health care/single-payer/Medicare for all…but there has to be SOME acknowledgment of practical reality when it comes time to decide how the ideas get implemented.
It’s good for him to call for bipartisanship. That makes it clear which is the party that refuses to work with others. They can’t even work with themselves!
I think it’s both cute and hysterically funny that you think standing up to a decade of the GOP/Teatrolls’ insanity in response to the ACA has showed no backbone…let alone having passed it in the first place KNOWING what they’d be in for.
Many +1s. The ACA is the camel’s nose in the tent, which, to mix a metaphor, had to run the gauntlet between the insurance lobby and Republican shitheadedness. Stabilize the markets, address premiums, and get more people on it, and we’ll be that much closer to single payer.
Exactly, legislation is also never truly finished because additional amendments must be added to improve it or getting rid of fluff that doesn’t work due to a changing society. That’s not exciting, but needed. It’s why routine maintenance is not as exciting as building something, but it’s still needed
That’s a misplaced potshot if I ever saw one. You’re better than that. Attack my arguments, not me.
If you want to deliberately misinterpret/mischaracterize what I’m saying as lobbying for the insurance industry, that just shows you’re either not understanding me or that you’re willing to argue dishonestly.
And 46% of that 27 million tried to get insurance but it was too expensive.
So take away 5.4 million people here illegally, and you still have 21.6 million Americans without health insurance under the ACA. That is unacceptable, so we need to advocate for Universal Healthcare now.
A lot of Blue Dogs (hell, all of them?) effectively gave up their political careers to get the ACA through. And if they dared show their face on the internet, half of the online Democratic presence would rip their ears off as a reward.
You haven’t factored in everything. It’s been reported that failure to expand Medicaid raises premiums seven to 10 percent in a state. Many Republican-led states have refused to challenge proposed rate hikes from insurers.
And a major point of the article you posted – about younger people not getting insurance – is partially due to the BS the Republicans have been spouting. They’ve even had campaigns urging people to “burn their Obamacare cards.” A lot of younger people would qualify for subsidies if they bought off their state’s exchange.
Well, that’s how you would put it if you want to sound thoughtful and smart and focused on the goal.
I’d put it this way:
Most people would freak out if a unicorn suddenly appeared. They would want it hunted down and killed. We have to engineer a unicorn bit by bit, over time, by adding “improvements” to something familiar and non-threatening.
Progressive, as in progress, as in tackling a complex problem bit by bit and getting some understanding of the repercussions of one set of actions before taking the next set, and not thinking you’re so damn clever you won’t make some mistakes. Heck, maybe you’ll even learn something along the way and identify a better end goal than the one you set out with.
Frankly, if I had to choose a word to describe loud advocates for a sweeping replacement of the current system with single payer, it’s not “progressive”. It’s “revolutionary”.
Really? That is precious coming from someone says that people who are advocating for universal healthcare are hoping for “unicorns.”
Sorry, I am not as concerned about health insurance companies and their employees as you are, particularly that 55 year old actuary who spent his career denying health insurance to people his company couldn’t profit from.
