Well… minus epsilon, yeah.
Good critique of the deck chair arrangement, Cap’n.
True. The public thinks they can have it all, in part because they are not paying that much attention as a general rule. So politicians campaign based on promises that they will give them all, and the public votes for them. Then after the election is safely won, reality sets in.
Obama was going to pay for a lot of the HC reform by wringing vague inefficiencies out of the system. Also by going to electronic medical records (or something like that). No experts took these stuff seriously during the election, but they sounded oh so nice in Obama’s speeches. The actual bills are based on real tradeoffs, and these are not nearly as popular.
In addition, these bills contain elements that Obama specifically campaigned against. Obama harshly criticized Hillary Clinton for forcing people to buy insurance, during the primaries. And he pilloried McCain for wanting to change the tax deductibility of employer health insurance.
If Obama would have campaigned based on a promise to raise the Medicare tax and tax insurance premiums, and penalize people who don’t buy insurance etc. etc., his positions would have been a lot less popular then too. But of course, that’s exactly why he didn’t campaign on those platforms. He’s no fool.
It’s a “core values” thing.
For pubbies, the “core values” include preventing this Democratic President from signing a bill into law. The Dems’ “core values” did not include the inverse corollary for his predecessor, even though the country would have been a lot better off if they had.
I won’t quibble with you about “factually wrong” and “evil.”
But I’d really like it if their so-called “blatant incompetence” would manifest itself a bit more substanially in the legislative chambers.
ETA: Or does the “blatant incompetence” lie in the fact that they can’t even manage to successfully pull a defeat from the jaws of victory?
Another humerous example was Arlen Spector calling for Norm Coleman to take his rightful place in the Senate before realizing that he had recently switched over to the Democrat label and that his new belief was that Franken should be seated.
Hah!
Good times.
Incidentally, although nothing is actually going to happen before Brown is seated, his official platform was “Massachusetts already did this on the state level, so screw the rest of the country, we got ours.” If the rest of the country decided to use the time before he was in office to get something passed, I’d say they have a decent case for it.
Cite?
You’ve been asked for a cite already, but fortunately it’s moot, since the Speaker has already acknowledged she can’t get the votes to pass the Senate version as-is and the President and several senators have already said they won’t push the issue until Brown is seated.
In fact, since the entire subject of my thread seems a locked-in fait accompli, I’d ask that the thread be closed.
Fer cryin’ out loud … Here:
Does anyone now believe that the health care bill as passdby the Senate, as passed by the House,or some reconciliation version between the two, is alive in any meaningful sense?
Not only is it alive, it cannot be killed.
You inexorably reach the basic contours of the Senate bill even when you start from complete scratch so long as a few basic things are included. If you want required coverage for pre-existing conditions, you have to give insurance companies insurance mandates, which requires subsidies so people can afford them, which necessitates cost controls. If you start with subsidies, you still reach all the rest. Anything approaching the Democrats notion of reform will look like the Senate bill, which in broad strokes is not that far from the House bill. About the only significant variable is how to pay for the subsidies. And I challenge you to find a government policy more popular than requiring that insurance companies cover pre-existing conditions. I’d go so far as to say that a health care reform package that does not include mandated coverage for pre-existing conditions cannot pass.
To the extent there exists a conservative alternative, it exists only in broad strokes at the moment. Something like greatly expanding health savings accounts, deregulating insurance markets, and instituting medical malpractice caps. Whatever merits that approach has, it will never be as popular as the building blocks of the Senate bill. There is very strong public support for most of the bill when people understand what’s in it. And even if the Senate moved in that direction, I doubt all those changes would have much impact on the millions of uninsured and on skyrocketing health care costs.
So long as health reform remains on the table, the Senate bill remains alive. Health care costs are a time bomb. Unless we repeal Medicare or create some kind of nationalized system, the only question is whether reform will be passed before or after the effect of long-term structural deficits takes its toll or small businesses can no longer afford to hire employees, whichever comes first.
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But that is precisely what makes it, if not dead, on a DNR situation. Members in the House don’t want to vote for the Senate Bill in enough numbers to pass it.
Frankly, my real fear at this point is that we end up with “something that can be called HCR” from a political perspective, but that actually makes the whole thing worse. And I don’t think I’m the only person who feels that way. Seems like people are
- Confused about what the bill actually will do
- Very much pissed off at the process
- Starting to get fatigues about the whole situation while the economy stagnates
Its money versus people. Pretty simple math, really. Disheartening, but simple.
It sure is!
Heck, broaden it out from health-care legislation: I’ll of course defend my money against however many other people want to grab it; I’ll spend some on food, and donate some to charity, but any “people” who’d like to grab my “money” are naturally in for the best “versus” I can muster.
They’re fucking you just as much as they’re fucking the rest of us, you’re just the one shouting “Harder! Faster! More!”.
So you say. From my perspective, though, it’s the government that will fuck us harder and faster and more, if people like you get their way; I trust the government considerably less than the insurance companies, with whom I’ve only ever had good experiences.
Polls throughout have, in fact, shown that most people are satisfied with their coverage, and that most people don’t think the government plan will make things better for them. Unsurprisingly, I agree – and I believe Brown’s constituency would poll likewise.
I’m constantly being told that other countries get just as good care, for less cost, and they cover everybody. OK. If that’s true, then don’t pass something that is going to cost me more money. I already pay about $7,000/year, and I haven’t had to see a doctor since I was 12. I can’t see that the bill they are proposing is not going to cost me money.
I agree that there’s some possibility of that happening, though I actually think the chances are less than they were a few days ago now that insurance companies have even more power. The reason you can’t do a requirement of coverage of pre-existing conditions without doing all the rest is not really a policy reason as much as a political reason: insurance companies would oppose it tooth and claw (and rightfully so - if you’re going to turn insurance into something that just isn’t insurance, you need to give the insurance companies something). I think a lot of the pieces are like that. Not just policy-interdependent but politically interdependent. You can’t cut Medicare payments, for example, or institute the cost control pilot programs they want to try without the other elements.
I suppose you could subsidize low-income earners insurance purchases without doing much else if you didn’t need to make it deficit neutral, but the deficit argument is about the one solid argument the Republicans have going that isn’t based on hand-waving. I’m not sure it would even pass the House.