I’m trying to find a way to parse this so it’s a rational argument, and I just can’t do it.
How many Republican amendments are in the final ACA bill? Hint: its a lot!
“Senate Dems adopted 161 amendments and key GOP planks while … Only 49 Republican amendments were rejected out of 210 considered.” - Redirect Notice
But even after all of those concessions, not one voted for it. Principles or politics? Which do you think?
Also, if the Democrats could have passed whatever they wanted, why didn’t they? Do you think the final plan was exactly the same as the plan the Democrats initially proposed? If what you say was true we’d have single payer now rather than the Heritage foundations plan which we ended up with. Your premises do not match up with observed reality.
Where do you get your information on this kind of stuff?
Since every person who voted for Obamacare was a Democrat, that means they didn’t need any Republican votes to pass it. Correct? Thus, they didn’t need to accommodate ANY Republican wishes in the bill in order to pass it. Simple logic.
Why couldn’t they? Would it be because Republicans wouldn’t vote for it? Republicans didn’t, and it still passed. So that’s not the reason. Or maybe it was because not enough Democrats would vote for it?
And yet they watered the shit out of it anyway, mostly to please Olympia Snowe.
161 Republican amendments in the final bill Terr. 161. Out of 210 total brought up. How can you just hand wave that away. 161 out of 210. What percentage would you need to see to change your mind? 100%? Can we at least try to have a serious conversation about this?
Everyone was there when this happened, we all remember, you can’t just rewrite history this way and think noone is going to notice.
So you’re blaming Republicans for Democrats being idiots?
Why? Why did Democrats accept any Republican amendments at all? Why didn’t they throw them out of the final bill they voted on? If they did, do you think fewer Republicans would have voted for it?
Of course not. But it’s pretty fucking ridiculous that Republicans are now claiming Democrats refused to compromise on the bill.
What if someone figures out how to use WMD’s on American soil?
Now I would call that a serious health care disaster only if you didn’t have health care that is.
I can see it now the nurse at the window saying, “I’m sorry sir you will have to wait outside like the rest of the patients that don’t have health care coverage”
No room left in the waiting room for sure. Sure hope this scenario never happens.
Why would they have to compromise if they didn’t need Republicans to pass the bill. In fact, when they knew, for sure, that no Republicans would vote for the bill, why did they leave the “compromises” in? Could it have been because of Democrat votes possibly?
The idea that Obama tried to create a single-payer health care system and the Republicans blocked it is simply wrong. In 2008, Obama ran against that sort of system. Here’s an ad where he labeled government-run health care as “extreme” and “wrong”.
(And for comic relief, sort of, here’s one that says John McCain has an evil plan to raise health care costs and force people to leave their plans.)
Are you unfamiliar with the history of the passage of the ACA?
A quibble, sir. Perhaps a minor point, but that’s the trouble with quibbles.
One of my beefs with the whole shebang is that “single payer” was never even considered, there were no hearings on its feasibility, no witnesses allowed to testify. The rationale behind that is that it was a futile endeavor, it would be (and was!) tough enough to get what they got.
Of course, its not a matter of the perfect being the enemy of the good, but being the enemy of the marginally lame. But I take their point, they never would have got there. We had to pay the insurance companie’s danegeld, single payer would have effectively put them out of business. To a large degree, I think that is precisely what they deserved. Perhaps there were some innocent, perhaps there were those who labored primarily to provide a public good and were willing to forgo some profit in order to keep the conscience clear. I have not heard of such, but am always willing to be astonished.
The profit margin for the insurance “providers” is a built-in inefficiency, but if they were willing to accept a modest but secure profit, it could all work out comparatively well, or at least provide them with a graceful exit from the market with a minimum of bloodshed. And perhaps this can yet be achieved. Perhaps their civic virtue and patriotic desire to be of service to their fellow Americans will overcome their avarice.
Perhaps I really am the Queen of Romania…
I am quite familiar. There were several votes. In none of those votes did Republicans vote for it, so in none of those votes did the Democrats need to leave the “compromises” in.
I also remember, quite clearly, that if anything more radical than what was passed would have been suggested, Democrats wouldn’t have had enough Democrat votes to pass the bill. So trying to blame Republicans for it is, at best, disingenuous.
Even hypocrisy, sir, is a relative thing. The Geico gecko and Godzilla are both lizards, to be sure, but beyond that any comparison is laughable.
I think the bill looks more or less how Ben Nelson wanted it to look. You won’t get much argument from me on that front.
But I think you’re selectively remembering the vote history. Everyone expected that a conference committee would resolve the differences between House and Senate bills and be an opportunity to resolve various errors or eliminate unnecessary parts. After Scott Brown, that was over, and the bill was locked into place in many ways. The passage of the modification bill through extraordinary procedures limited its content in a lot of ways, mostly indirectly through the politics of changing it at all, and directly through the rules on what could be changed.
Terr, you are pretending that the Democrats are a unified and homogenous group of hive minders. Such is not the case. Many of them, many in senior positions, are from the Clintonista, menshevik, Republican Lite takeover of leadership. This dynamic has altered somewhat, since the inmates took over the Republican asylum, but there are many under the (D) banner who are just to the left of Rockefeller, and that just barely.
Again, the “compromises” were there because Democrats wouldn’t have voted for the bill otherwise. Not because of the Republicans.
I am not. But a big group of Democrats wanted the bill the way it was in the end, otherwise they wouldn’t have voted for it. True or false? And they voted for it, in the end, because those compromises were in it. So Democrats were compromising with each other. Not with Republicans, like you’re claiming now.