Maybe because none of those were scandals beyond the fevered imaginations of the Right Wing?
I doesn’t say anything about the Bowling Green Massacre either.
Such bias.
Or the attack on Jussie Smollett . Although that could be in the CSIS data…we don’t know. They admit that they include hoaxes as part of their “attacks”.
In 2008 they were running against a historically unpopular Republican incumbency that was widely blamed for an economic meltdown and an unpopular war. There was no way to lose the election if they tried, which is why the primary became such a bare-knuckle brawl - whoever won the D nomination was going to win the election, period. The Democrats then completely squandered this goodwill and lost the 2010 midterms by enormous margins because of two factors that have plagued them for the past 30 years, namely:
*No practical get-out-the-vote strategy and an overreliance on voters who are deeply uninformed about how the political process works. Say what you will about Republicans’ overall intelligence regarding science and history, they do understand that there are other elections besides the Presidency. Getting marginal Democrats to vote in off-years has always been a futile exercise in pulling teeth and has resulted in control of Congress reverting back to Republicans almost immediately, time and time again, whenever Democrats seem to be having some success at the federal level.
*Being ensconced in their own marketing material and refusing to see reality about what is and isn’t popular with voters. Obamacare was, electorally, a disaster. It didn’t shift any support among people who rely on Medicaid and other entitlements for their health care, since those people already vote for Democrats when they vote at all, which is rarely in comparison to other groups. It massively increased health care costs across the board for people on employer and individual insurance plans. This is where you are going to want to tell me that the goal of the “Affordable Care Act” was never to provide “Affordable Care” but rather to get as many people on the health insurance rolls as possible even as the average middle-class family saw their health care expenses quintuple since Obama took office. This where you are going to want to tell me that I am a horrible person who wants babies to die because I don’t support the Obamacare changes. This is where you are going to want to tell me that looking to how people vote as an indication of their political preferences is wrong and I need to listen to what Jonathan Gruber says is morally right and ignore the reality of who actually wins elections. But it doesn’t change the fact that as a political move ACA was perhaps the dumbest thing any party has ever done with its political power in American history - what the people who actually changed their votes as a result did was see their good-enough health care become an immense financial burden, a series of related disasters such as the healthcare.gov meltdown, and a Republican Party that vowed to fix it. Democrats lost the Obama advantage immediately and have spent a decade doubling down on their mistake. In a sense, every evil committed by Trump or McConnell goes back to the decision to make ACA the centerpiece of Obama’s first term - there’s no way we would have a Republican-controlled government without it.
So no, don’t tell me how wonderfully competent the Democrats are at politics - that’s not what anyone who has been paying attention sees.
Interesting POV and I don’t disagree. But I am curious to hear your take on what could have been done differently. If we stipulate that the health insurance situation circa 2008 did in fact need fixing, should Obama have …
- Proposed a different plan?
- Proposed the same or similar plan, but waited until after the midterms?
- Proposed the same or similar plan, but packaged and sold it differently?
- Ignored the problem entirely?
Of course, if you believe the health insurance situation circa 2008 was just hunky-dory, there’s no point pursuing this conversation.
For the people who changed their votes as a result of ACA, the health insurance situation in 2008 was massively better than it is now and there’s no way to argue otherwise. I didn’t change my vote because I can’t stomach voting for some of the things Trump has done even though I massively dislike ACA and certain other parts of the Democratic platform, but personally I pay more for health insurance now than I paid for housing in 2008, and I haven’t had any major events changing my insurability other than aging within a generally low-risk bracket. The idea that people were just going to stand for that when they are seeing no real benefit from the program is politically absurd. ACA has been a massive wealth transfer from middle class people who support themselves with work income, to insurance companies, all in the name of supposedly helping the uninsured poor who were already eligible for a wide variety of publicly financed health programs (many of which had their budgets CUT as part of the ACA deal!). The idea that you win elections on that or retain credibility as the populist candidate can only be the product of anti-reality thinking.
Either going to a Canada-like system of universal care, or rethinking health insurance as being more akin to auto insurance (where you insure against a sudden, outrageous expense and are expected to pay for routine maintenance out of pocket) so that the market adjusts its pricing, would have been fine with me. So would keeping things exactly as they were in 2008. The system we got is basically the worst possible world of the four options - and even if you disagree on some moral level with that notion, the idea that it was politically a good idea is literally indefensible.
Thanks – I appreciate the perspective and can’t say I drastically disagree.
Many on the left found major fault with the ACA precisely because it didn’t go far enough. IMHO, it was a big Xmas gift to the private (for-profit) health care industry.
We need to join the other advanced economies with some sort of single payer/public option scheme.
The problem that the ACA was allegedly going to address is pretty well illustrated by this chart:
https://images.app.goo.gl/Jnif284c2Cc5HQHCA
Health care is about 18% of our GDP. It’s another chapter of “American Exceptionalism” where … we’re basically getting ripped off. On the whole, we pay more and get less than every other advanced economy in terms of health care.
Which is only partially off-topic. Both sides serve comparable corporate masters – The Money In Politics. How they market the interests of those interests to their respective bases is a study in wildly different demographics and tactics.
But the left still mines the Whole Foods crowd pretty heavily, and you don’t market to them in the same way you market to the rural red state denizens.
Maybe. I can’t say it would be any worse than what we have now. As I said above it would most likely be much better. But from a personal perspective, what we had before Obama worked great for me; what he did was cost me thousands of dollars more per year for the same doctor and same care I was receiving before. What an M4A system would do is increase my wait times, reduce my current standard of care that I am willing to pay for to the Medicare subsistence level along with the free riders, and eliminate most of the preventative care that I currently receive (despite the talking point that people have worse outcomes under private health care because they avoid paying for preventative care that they can’t afford, studies have shown that the actual amount of savings that could be realized with more preventative care is far lower than generally perceived, and most US peer countries with universal systems strictly ration preventative screenings as their very first cost-cutting measure - look up the minimum age to get a mammogram or a prostate cancer screening in Canada, France or the UK and be shocked at what you find).
At some point you can’t keep telling people to “vote based on their economic interests” and then be surprised when people who make around the median income realize that the #1 harm done to their economic interests in the last decade, by far, was Obamacare and vote accordingly.
Yes we’ve already covered that. That is where they admit this:
"We coded threats of violence as attacks rather than plots, even if the threat turned out to be a hoax"
But still no data. Why do they refuse to provide the data?. I think I know why.
Did you have any serious health issue or an expensive pre-existing condition? Cheap health insurance is the best if you never use it. Similarly, I don’t know why I waste all this money for fire insurance. I pay tons of money each month and I never had one fire.
Yes there will be longer wait times, because there will be a whole lot more people covered, but a long wait is better than never, (which is what many people had before). I’m sure that after Rosa Parks many people were upset about how much harder it was to get a seat at the front of the bus.
Is this a parody? You can’t argue your way out of “Obamacare has been a political disaster because it has done nothing for swing voters but cost them money” by shouting “racist!” at people. If nothing else the last ten years have proven that over and over again. But it seems you’re damn well going to keep trying.
This is not meant to be an accusation of racism.
My point was that just because a policy that opens up access to a wider group of people necessarily results inconvenience for those who have been enjoying exclusive access, is not a good reason not to open it up to that wider group. The clearest example of such exclusion was the civil rights movement.
If an additional 30 million women being able to get mammograms who weren’t able to before means that the wait for a mammogram goes up, then so be it.
While I’m not going to disagree with your general premise ( and I was never a big Ocare fan ), remember that insurance cost and availability could vary widely from state to state.
I lived in New York back then and I worked for myself. It was impossible to find an affordable individual policy if you didn’t have insurance through an employer or qualify for a government subsidy.
I had association policies for awhile, where you joined some business organization that offered group insurance. They weren’t real associations, just insurance brokers and you had to prove you worked.
But those got worse and worse until they were phased out. I went without for a while.
I priced an individual policy and I was quoted $21,000 a year if I was single. Family policies were $63,000 a year.
The first year of the ACA I got a platinum policy for around $600 a month (single). No deductible and low copays. I got physical and psychological therapy for $15 a session.
The prices went up after the first year and once it hit $800 I dropped to a lower deductible policy.
It’s ridiculous, but my health care was even more ridiculous pre-ACA. I realize that a lot of people had it better before ACA, but that was at the expense of others, whether you recognized it or not.
Private insurers can cherry-pick healthy patients, give them low rates and dump everyone else off on the government or leave them to fend for themselves. Many people didn’t even realize how vulnerable they were. You got thrown off your work policy if you were too sick to work. Then you got a year of Cobra if you could afford it. And the insurance company would audit payrolls and make sure everyone they covered was working.
I realize that this isn’t a problem for the individuals that won the “I get a cheap policy” lottery. But sometimes you have to look towards the greater good, even if it sets you back a little bit personally.
Although that’s a concept that’s antithetical to Republicans and it’s at the heart of…everything.
That is all the data that is expected. That is a peer reviewed study, footnoted and they explain their methodology.
Despite what you might imagine, they didnt make it up. It has been cited and covered in the media.
No one else thinks the study is weak as they didnt show their in house proprietary data. No one would expect them to. You are thrashing about in denial as cite after cite shows what we have said. No study says otherwise.
Jussie Smollett was also “cited and covered in the media”.
No it’s not peer reviewed. It hasn’t been published in any journal and no journal would accept a study without the data.
Who shouted racist?
It’s not a problem with just internal politics but external too. Leading by example is a tough row to hoe. You cannot expect reciprocity and the only hope you have is that others will notice your commitment and your goals. USA tried it with China for a long time, and it looked like China would play ball. But they won’t, and as it is slowly becoming clear, they haven’t been. They don’t care about the USA ideals of freedom, democracy, and human rights. They are a far greater problem to the USA than the republicans are. And I’m not even sure how they (CCP) should be handled…