Maybe if anyone wants to debate the definition of society or the reason we have a government, we should do so in a separate thread…? Seems like a hijack of this one.
No, society is not government, but as I just finished saying, social justice and social solidarity are vital aspects of the immediate world we live in and our quality of life, and it’s the function of government to promote and protect social values. There is no one else to do it. Corporations and the Koch brothers certainly won’t do it. Government of the people, for the people, by the people is, to coin a phrase, the last best hope of preserving a beneficent democratic society.
As for your Thomas Paine quote, I can do quotes, too, and I’m rather fond of this one:
As the historian Bernard Bailyn has put it: “It is not much of an exaggeration to say that one had to be a fool or a fanatic in early January 1776 to advocate American independence.”
Fortunately there existed a man who was a little of both. He had been born Thomas Pain, though upon arrival in America he whimsically changed the spelling to Paine, and he was about as unlikely a figure to change the course of history as you could imagine. A tumbledown drunk, coarse of manner, blotchy-faced and almost wholly lacking in acquaintance with the virtues of soap and water – “so neglectful in his person that he is generally the most abominably dirty being upon the face of the earth”, in the words of one contemporary – he had been a failure at every trade he had ever attempted, and he had attempted many, from corset-making to tax collecting before finally, at the age of thirty-eight, abandoning his native shores and his second wife and coming to America.
However, Paine could write with extraordinary grace and power, and at a time of immense emotional confusion in America, he was possessed of an unusually dear and burning sense of America’s destiny. In January 1776, less than two years after he had arrived in the colonies, he anonymously published a slender pamphlet that he called (at the suggestion of his friend and mentor Benjamin Rush) Common Sense …
Common Sense was a breathtakingly pugnacious tract. Writers did not normally refer to the king as “a sottish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man” and “the royal brute of England” or accuse him of sleeping with “blood upon his soul”. Above all Paine argued forcefully and unequivocally for independence: "Everything that is right or reasonable pleads for separation. The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, ‘Tis time to part.’ " He was one of the first writers to employ “republic” with a positive connotation and helped to give “revolution” its modern sense, rather than to describe the movements of celestial spheres. And he did it all in language that anyone who could read could understand …
Benjamin Franklin believed Paine’s writing lacked dignity. Gouverneur Morris dismissed him as “a mere adventurer’s.” John Adams, never short of an acid comment, called Common Sense “a poor, ignorant, malicious, short-sighted, crapulous mass”, and likened Paine to a common criminal. But the book had the desired effect.
– Bill Bryson, Made in America
The GOP base certainly seems more racist than the population at large.
Note that I’m not saying that the average GOP voter is racist, I’m saying that they are over-represented in the base of the party. When the GOP snatched up the seething assholes who hated civil rights legislation, it seems pretty expected.
A GOP voter may have reasons to hate the ACA that aren’t fueled by racism, but the people who vote in GOP primaries, who are choosing Trump disproportionately by the way, are old, and white, and fueled with anger about a lot of stuff.
I don’t doubt they’d hate a white president named Barry O’Bannon too. But you don’t think the historical levels of obstructionism and disrespect this president has endured without reason is a bit much?
Even folks with questionable character or skill can be persuasive in the written medium. There’s hope for us all.
I think it’s politics and partisanship. Some is surely fueled by racism, but it’s a meaningless criticism and is incredibly lazy to trot it out at every turn. It increases accusations of casual racism and weakens the criticism in general, and many times is simply not accurate.
Hillarycare got shut down in 1993 - was that racist too?
Many times yes. But as a factor in the hysterical level of opposition, I’d say relevant.
No, mostly stupidity. Probably a fair amount of sexism though. I was around back then, and I saw a bunch of eye-rolls about Hilliary or comments about PMS.
That is a criticism the left has of it too. It didn’t even try to fix our broken system, it just offered mandates and subsides that encouraged people to buy into it. We still pay twice as much for inferior care compared to other nations.
However I don’t think either party has any interest in truly driving down costs right now. We are pretty much stuck.
If Hillary becomes president, there’s going to be all sorts of criticisms of her actions I’m sure. I’m personally not a fan of her politics (surprise!) but I expect the same level of casual accusations of sexism to occur there as well. Hillary will do X, and people will say, man I really don’t like X, that’s bad because reasons. Then it will be ‘that’s totally sexist!’ It will be just as lazy as accusations of racism when opposing Obama are now.
There IS objection to that, from the same people. The belief is that being involved in any insurance - auto or health - is not a proper function of the government.
That is indeed the objection. And here’s how much sense it makes.
In the case of auto liability insurance, consider the case of your son, just graduated from university, newly married and about to start a family, crossing the street and being run down by a drunken yokel without insurance, and paralyzed for life. A life ruined and lifetime of earning potential destroyed. Said yokel exhibits a toothless grin and proclaims, “so sue me – I ain’t got no money”.
The function of government is to say that we don’t want to live in that kind of society, the kind that values those priorities, and that kind of outcome.
It’s much the same with health care when the uninsured invade ERs either in desperate pursuit of health care that they can’t otherwise afford, or in desperation in their dying days which may well have been preventable with decent ongoing health care. All while the biggest insurance corporations make out like bandits. The function of government should be to say that we don’t want to live in that kind of society either.
That’s a poor example with no limiting principle. The “we don’t want to live that way” can be applied to anything and that is one of the objections to the ACA.
In the auto example we are forced to insure against damage to others. Ignoring self insurance, what is being guarded against is using the public road and causing damage to someone else. No insurance is required for driving on your own property.
Health insurance is fundamentally different. There is no damage being done to others if you go without insurance, not direct anyways. And that’s why the auto insurance comparison fails. The ACA doesnt force people to buy insurance if they use some public road, it does so if you are alive. There is no opt out. People should have the freedom to choose and with the ACA that is not possible.
And for large swathes of the population health insurance is a bad deal - we know this because without young healthy people to subsidize the rest of the population, the model is unsustainable.
You are making a case for the government to provide a safety net for those who can’t afford health insurance. That is not an argument for a government mandate that everyone carry insurance.
If you listen to the GOP contenders they deliver a uniform message:
We’re going to repeal Obamacare and replace it with something better.
I was looking forward to reading this thread becuase I’ve always wondered what the “something better” would be. (Is it just something very similar to Obamacare but called Romneycare or ¡JebCare! ?)
But if any Republican knows what the “something better” is, they’ve not posted it here. Instead we see sarcasm, and posts pointing out that insurance companies used the transition to get rid of less profitable plans. (Does anyone really think those plans are coming back when Obamacare is repealed? :rolleyes: )
There was one response that was refreshingly honest: I’ll paraphrase it:
“I don’t want gummint stealing my money to heal the poor. If the lazy good-for-nothings want money to see a doctor, let them start up a successful Internet company or something.”
OP said she got her answer and has left the thread. I didn’t see the answer. About 49% of the nation will vote for the GOP in November, in part because they want “something better” than Obamacare. Will no one tell me what that “something” is?
Isn’t that how we got here in the first place? The Clintons proposed a huge, comprehensive government healthcare plan. The conservatives went ballistic and said no, no, no – get government out of this!
All we need is more personal responsibility and let the free market solve the problems: Just require individuals to purchase insurance from private companies.
I wanted to compliment you on an excellent post.
So … do you want to repeal Obamacare? Are you going to replace it with “something better”?
But as I pointed out here before, health insurance is not fundamentally different. When some 50 million ER visits a year are by the desperate uninsured suddenly realizing that they do, in fact, need medical care, and ER physicians incur an average of $140,000 annually in EMTALA-related bad debt, it ultimately becomes everyone’s problem as the costs of an untenable situation cascade down through the system. Yes, with automobiles the insurance mandate need not apply if you never use public roads, and with health insurance the mandate need not apply if you never use public medical services, if you can guarantee you’ll never show up in an ER. Sorry, but that necessity does arise simply from being alive. Like auto liability insurance, a health insurance mandate is nothing more than the legal requirement to do something that anyone with half a brain would do anyway, because not having either type of insurance is grossly irresponsible. It’s truly strange that the party of “personal responsibility” would advocate such reckless irresponsibility.
So what is this “freedom to choose” of which you speak? Is it the “freedom” to be one of the 45,000 who die every year from lack of health insurance? It seems like very poor public policy to maintain an unworkable and excessively costly and inefficient health care system to cater to a tiny fringe of libertarian extremists who’d rather be dead than have the government tell them to do something that they need to do anyway.
That’s not actually the case I was making. I believe it, or more accurately, I believe that universal health care is a basic human right and is most efficiently financed as a basic social service and most efficiently delivered by private-sector providers. But this type of public coverage is impossible in the present US political climate, given Republican obstruction and opposition by a large segment of the population due to incessant propagandizing by lobbyists like AHIP, hospital corporations, and others. Given these political realities, a mandate to carry private insurance, along with subsidies for those who need financial help, is the only other option. It’s a very poor solution, but at present the only possible one.
So because the government forces hospitals to provide emergency medical care, that is the basis to force EVERYONE to buy insurance? The solution to the problem of uninsured creating a free rider problem could be to simply stop mandating EMTALA care. But now since this is a problem, there is no limit as to what individuals can be forced to do under the guise of reducing costs to the system. Eating broccoli, reducing fatty foods, outlawing dangerous recreational activities, anything that touches on health or public safety is a target for forcing behavior. It’s terrible public policy.
I think you’re missing my point. Auto insurance is only mandated for damage you do to others. There is no requirement to protect yourself, or your property. Lots of folks have no need for auto insurance - those who don’t drive, or self insure. Health insurance is only to protect yourself. The person benefiting from the insurance is different in these cases and that’s why the comparison fails. For me personally, yes I would buy insurance regardless if it were required. But some people wouldn’t. Single, young, healthy folks, as a whole, are very low risk and low utilizers of health services. People should be able to make the choice - this is a risk I’m willing to take. The same argument applies to seatbelts and helmets. And your same argument that the public pays for injuries as a result also applies as well. This extends to may other areas as well - smoking comes to mind. It’s a pretty risky activity, with not much upside. And the public pays for the resulting medical costs associated. Many arguments that applies to forcing insurance would apply to banning smoking. I personally hate smoking, but I would be opposed to banning it. That should be outside the power of government. But this argument that because the public pays for health care and has an interest in it that they can then force behavior is terrible policy and is unlimited.
I’ve never made the argument that the ACA is undesirable because I personally am paying more money now. I am paying more, but that’s not the point. I would be opposed even if I saved money. It should not be the role of government to force individuals to engage in behavior they have no ability to opt out of. There is nothing else like it.
I do think the government has a role to play in creating a social safety net. A more appropriate way to do this would have been to create a new entitlement. There would be no constitutional argument against that. I would be opposed on different grounds, expansion of government in general, but at least it would be consistent with the role of government.
I know that’s your position, and I understand the reasoning. I’m just saying that your post was not an argument for requiring everyone to carry insurance, which was what the post was saying that you responded to. The OP is asking what Republicans don’t like about Obamacare, and the individual mandate is one the things they dislike the most. Whether or not universal healthcare is a basic human right is another matter altogether.
There are lots of things that are basic human rights that are not provided to everyone by the government, nor forced upon the citizenry by the government. For instance, one can argue that nutritious food is a basic human right, but the government doesn’t force us to buy nutritious food.
Not a republican but my objection is that
I want the freedom to make my own mistakes.