For decades the political line was ‘socialized’ healthcare ‘unamerican healthcare’, themes bought by vested interests and honed by lobbyists. And it worked really well: if external noises from overseas did creep in they were immediately drowned out and often ridiculed.
But then slowly Americans were able to bypass their usual media resources - the news I guess, political statements, occasional discussions - and consider sources beyond.
Perhaps, to begin with, some might make assertive efforts to seek information out or chance across it on boards like this. Later it became more passive as social media grew in importance, at this point a greater breadth of information became available to more and more people.
Sometimes it looked like there was a correlation between people who opposed healthcare reform - and yet would clearly benefit from it - with people who weren’t ‘connected’, but that was just my own view.
Did people need numbers - GDP percentages, life expectancy data, input from overseas? Fwiw, I remember as late as 2012 some people online finding it incomprehensible that an Olympic Opening Ceremony could celebrate a healthcare system. That happened on TV and after the ACA was passed but it fed into a still existing debate. Juxtaposing stuff like that with stories of 'death panels, etc?
And then I thought about other grassroots stuff like what’s happening in Colorado on legalization, and now elsewhere. And how about that thing that seemed impossible even a few years ago - gay marriage?
Has all this to do with the Internet bypassing traditional media, and therefore traditional opinion forming, in US society - could this grassroots driven liberalization have happened anyway. How?
Without the internet, most of the fact-free opposition would have trouble spreading their paranoid delusions of delusional paranoia, so that’s worth considering.
For whatever reason I thought this would be a thread about whether the exchanges would work pre Internet.
I think part of the change was how bad our health system has gotten. It used to be that you could blame the victim if they couldn’t get health insurance or health care. They weren’t smart enough, or talented enough, etc. But now that college educated white middle class people have trouble affording health care we realize it isn’t just non whites and then poor getting screwed. If anything that realization helped push reform forward as much as anything.
If you lean left however it is. Much much easier to find evidence that the mindless nationalistic propaganda is totally false. Our system is overpriced, inhumane and not run well. In the past people couldn’t get info to come to that conclusion.
IIRC, even with the internet up and running, the majority response was actually, we’re satisfied with our health insurance, and the ACA was passed with a reassuring if you like your plan, you can keep it, prompting folks who liked their plans to say well, okay, then. I see no reason why that couldn’t have worked pre-internet.
Kinda cuts against the ACA became possible because of the internet story, doesn’t it? If you’re arguing that folks were still naïve when the internet was around, and ACA passed anyway, then the internet seems irrelevant: they were satisfied pre-internet, naïvely or sensibly; they were satisfied post-internet, naïvely or sensibly; so why couldn’t a quick If You Like Your Plan You Can Keep It have worked before like it worked after?
I think we just have to look at the campaign to get people to accept Social Security to see that the Internet is not really relevant to the ACA issue. As part of that campaign, the President wrote letters to thousands of churches, encouraging the church leaders to recommend Social Security to the congregation. Plus, there were still newspapers and radio programs.
The Internet is certainly different from those media, but the basic mechanism of social change doesn’t rely on any particular medium.
You’ll also note that half of Europe had some kind of universal health care system long before the Internet. While there are some cultural differences between the US and Europe, I would be shocked if there wasn’t some controversy over there, too.
I don’t know if they asked people without insurance if they were happy. But people tend to like what they have, especially something like insurance with little choice. For as long as it works for them at least. When they wind up with gigantic bills they won’t like it as much, but that is a small minority.
As for gay marriage, I don’t think the internet had anything to do with it. When people discovered their friends and neighbors were gay, and didn’t have horns, bigotry became a bit more difficult. Credit the brave people who came out, and media who started showing gays as real people.
Most of the world got better healthcare systems before the internet. IIRC, NHS is thanks to German bombing of England.
Homosexuality and same sex marriage has already become more accepted than interacial marriage was when it became law. It moved a lot faster than people expected, and that’s largely because we can communicate faster.
But the ACA? Nah. The exchange depends heavily on the Internet to make it easy to shop. But the ACA was sold the old fashioned way. If anything, the echo chamber effect of the Internet and social media created more opposition.
I personally predict we won’t see opposition to the ACA really die down until the 2020s because by then we will have had enough years to see it isn’t that bad (right now we’ve really only had 2 years of it being enacted). And even then there will be resistance the same way some people are trying to gut medicare, medicaid and SS.