That’s the interesting thing. Democrats should have the incentive to work with Republicans because it’s good for the country, it results in the best possible health care system, they’ll get credit for the improvements they bring about, and their voters will thank them for it & vote to re-elect them!
Of course, the reverse should also have been true in 2010.
Republicans get a lot of flak for opposing Obama’s policies no matter how conservative, even if they earlier supported them and even if they were Republican proposals in the first place! And everybody blames the politicians but rarely do I see a good explanation for why this is so.
Well I know the explanation and it’s obvious. Their voters force them to. No links for now, but I have read many of these stories where the Republicans themselves are quoted saying the’re afraid to be primaried if they’re seen to be working with Obama.
I don’t think it’s a good thing. The Daily Kos crowd would certainly enjoy seeing the roles reversed. I’m not convinced the voter dynamics are symmetric in that way. (I’m not convinced Democratic politicians will get as much credit for resisting Trump, as Republicans got for resisting Obama.) Either way, Trump has proven to be a good propagandist and I think he’ll be able to make his plan popular regardless.
Obama could have made Obamacare a great success just by running as a Republican.
Trump actually ran as a Republican and he may yet pull it off.
Mud and leeches. Good enough for the Founders, good enough for you!
(I feel oddly compelled to ensure that you understand…by no stretch of the imagination do I lack sympathy for your predicament. May the Goddess nestle you close to Her warm and bounteous bosom all the days of your life…)
OK, rereading I now see that they seem to promise a deduction. An earlier version of the plan, at least, promised a refundable federal tax credit. A reduction on taxes owed, and if you owe less than the amount of the credit you actually get paid the difference. A huge handout. That’s what I was assuming.
Here’s one cite for an earlier version of the plan.
If this is indeed the plan and gets enacted, I can see how it can be both hugely popular and lead to more healthy people paying premiums.
It also seems very generous and very expensive for the government, but as we all know that’s not important for Republican policies (“deficits don’t matter”).
It’s true many Republican politicians themselves have been vague about their concrete Obamacare replacement plans.
Others have said explicitly they’ll work on the plan later, after Obamacare has been repealed first.
I think that was the political calculation that paid off for them at the time.
I also think that the political calculation has now changed significantly, and that they’ll do a lot better if they actually come up with a “good enough” (by American / right wing standards) concrete replacement and transition plan. And that such plans exist (e.g. the one I linked).
The devil is in the details. Plans exists, but they don’t have consolidated support from all republicans (by their own admission). Even the much vaunted Ryan plan is being opposed by Rand Paul and others.
That’s because lawyers have a 100+ year history of pretending that ordinary words mean something other than what the dictionary says they mean. Thus it takes them many, many words to say a simple concept.
I have a scrapbook that my grandma made when she was in high school. There’s a joke in there about that. It goes something like this–
If I gave you an orange, I would simply say, “I give you this orange.” But a lawyer would say, “I hereby bequeath to you and your descendants this orange, with all of its pith, seeds, and juice.”
Got a good deal on straw, did you? The law is long because it needs to be. You can’t put complex policies on a bumper sticker. The health care system is huge, the regulations required to administer it is enormous, and any laws that change so much of it must by necessity be pretty long and detailed.
Ok, this is one thing I hate about all these plans for ‘helping’ people with a low income. Offering tax credits as a way to ‘pay’ for things like health care. A tax credit comes once a year. That’s not going to help me the other 11 months of the year. Knowing that I’ll be getting most, if not all of the money I pay in premiums back at the end of the year isn’t going to make it magically possible for me to pay it in the first place. People who can’t afford healthcare now would not be able to afford it if there was a credit.
Granted, maybe I’m missing something. I don’t claim to be the best with taxes and numbers and all that but it’s just something that’s always bothered me with some of these plans.
Even a credit is a bad idea, though better than a deduction. “Sure babe, we can afford to put our entire paycheck into health premiums each month, because we’ll get a big tax return next February. Until then, who needs food or shelter?”
There’s little, if any political will to clamp down on spiraling costs like other countries do, so any plan will be swallowed up. I agree the Republicans and their media surrogates will be able to paint whatever happens as a victory and that soon the prevailing wisdom will be that Obama and Democrats ruined American healthcare which was just fine before they forced their socialist schemes down the people’s throats.
Check out the bill. There’s about ten pages of bill, the ten pages of “this word is changed to that word” and on and on. It would take several hours just to make all the edits. There’s legalese, and there’s the cow manure that is the proposed bill. I generally don’t dig into the wording of bills, and this one seems ridiculous by any standards, lawyer-speak or not.
Blah blah hibbitty hoopla, there is no Section 106 in the bill. What Section 106 are we looking for then? I’m neither a lawyer, a politician, nor a policy/bill writer, and this makes exactly zero sense. Hell, google-fu “Section 106” gives me a page from the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation about federal agencies affecting historic properties. I don’t THINK that has anything to do with health insurance, and a search of the PPACA turns up nothing about historic properties at all. WTF are we talking about?
On a side note, you may not be able to fit complex policy issues on a bumper sticker, but they definitely can be written to fit in a tweet. Actually, I did a quick word/character count, and the section repealing Obamacare would actually almost fit in one, and easily in two (230 characters).
It’s an easy example of “it’s expensive being poor”. If you can afford your premium in your budget without going without elsewhere, which I’m willing to wager is probably high-income people who don’t need the help nearly as much as the more vulnerable population in our country, it’s a good thing. Everyone else can suck a fat one, choose between health insurance and food.
The last decade has shown me our country will eventually have two choices: swallow our “FREEDOM” pride, nationalize healthcare like every other industrialized nation, and pay for it; or stick by our health by “meritocracy” and watch people who can’t afford healthcare die in the streets, bankrupted by skyrocketing costs. This quasi-caring, middle-of-the-road pussyfooting we’ve been attempting for the last how many decades isn’t working.
May I suggest you take your life and practical skills with you as you immigrate to Canada? Not being snarky at all. When abortion was more illegal in some states than in others, what did a woman who needed one do? Yes, she went where she could get one.
A country that elects a buffoon like Trump doesn’t deserve the full effort of its citizens, especially those who had the good sense to vote for any of his opponents.
They don’t either, its salesman’s schizzy, the ability to totally believe complete crap long enough to convince someone else to share that belief, then poof! Gone!