Discussion for article #223222
Many times I have said to my friends on the left that we can’t expect America to have the same policies as Sweden or Denmark (nice as that might be).
Actually; yes; I do expect that.
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At a minimum there is no sound reason that the US couldn’t have policies similar to Canada or Australia, countries that are geographically, historically (and, these days, even ethnically) not terribly different from the US.
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Schindler is certainly wrong about trial lawyers as a main driver of health costs. But he is not totally wrong that more could have been done in the ACA to limit costs, especially since no Republican votes were used to pass it. There could have been a cap on yearly premium increases, leaving it to the insurance companies how to squeeze providers so that they stayed within the caps.
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Maybe Dylan Scott should read this article?
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I really enjoyed this article. Quite frankly, there are many, many more examples that could also have been included in this article. Too bad he couldn’t give us a quick, one or two-sentence retort to use on those who do say it is both sides. Maybe i should just print off a few copies of this article and keep them in my purse?
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“…not least because that would upset trial lawyers (a Democratic constituency).”
That strawman always identifies the conflation problem Republicans have. This is one of the standard excuses they use, not a real reason for healthcare costs spiraling, yet they typically refer to it in any debate that tries to go to price or profit controls.
They only go there when they are looking for a way to defer away from or ignore the real problem of unchecked greed at the money end of the med industry.
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“Democrats insisting that personal firearms be banned or confiscated”
Name one. Tougher regs yes, but banned or confiscated?
As for the “both sides” bunk, I give you Driftglass:
"Dick Cheney is caught setting kittens on fire and throwing them at homeless veterans. What are the first three words out of Cokie Robert’s mouth?
“But the Democrats…”
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If Schindler is as obviously clueless as this writer points him out to be, he isn’t worth reading, much less the time it takes to write a rebuttal.
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It sounds like he blames the Democrats for not instituting single payer health care. I think he wandered off the “both sides do it” path.
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And this guy is teaching naval officers? In the first example he’s putting up a strawman (sure, you could find some leftwing types somewhere who want draconian restirctions on guns, but “more, more more” is the mainstream republican position), and in the second he seems to be arguing against himself: if the ACA is such a small step, shouldn’t a truly partisan left be united in denigrating it, rather than celebrating its limited achievements?
Of course, you can tell where he’s coming from as soon as he parrots the “at considerable taxpayer expense” line, since the ACA has been pretty much endlessly studied as roughly neutral in effect.
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“Both sides do it” is the Republicans’ favorite tu quoque ad hominem logical fallacy. It successfully changes the subject and gets them off the hook for most of the shit they pull. When they get a liberal to say this it’s a victory, because the liberal is basically giving up. The Republican who says this will keep voting Republican.
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Or just shooting the ball with a “Saturday Night Special”.
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Well, good luck with that. I want that brand of progressive enlightenment as well, but I know it won’t happen in my lifetime, because we have the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson, and hundreds of other rich oligarchs who will fight like Godzillas to pull us to the right.
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Maybe we can’t be Sweden or Denmark, but why can’t we at least be nominally sensible? I’m sick of the “both sides do it” BS. We try to govern and come up with policies that actually make the country better. They just say NO and/or try to enrich their friends, donors and themselves.
Really, the parties could not be more different.
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They could be a lot more different. Unfortunately.
But the GOTP is clearly the far greater evil.
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My impression of ACA is that the end product was developed WITH Republican participation as they watered it down to limit the impact to insurance companies and companies in general.
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We don’t have two patriotic parties, one pulling left and one pulling right. We have a pro-United States party, and a neo-Confederate party that seeks to return the status quo ante of the pre-Civil War America, or perhaps (who knows?) the Articles of Confederation. We have a party (and a political sensibility) that wants the United States government to exist (the Democrats), and a second one, the Republican tendency, that fundamentally does not want it to exist in any meaningful sense. It’s complicated, of course, but really it’s just that simple.
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If I recall, the repubs were repeatedly consulted on the ACA and offered a few suggestions that were incuded in the legislation up till the last minute where they all walked away and voted against it so they can claim it passed with no Republican vote. That was intentional.
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Regarding Tort Reform, I always -somewhat cynically- believed it to be more about attempting to limit political contributions by the trial lawyers who tend to vote and support Democrats.
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