I sure hope all Republicans are staking their future on the belief that the voters will never vote against them, no matter how they fuck over the country.
That Democrats won’t control 60 seats in the Senate again? That’s a gimme. There aren’t 30 blue states and there won’t be 30 blue states in any of our lifetimes. Even if you do get to 60, it’s with red staters who will never support single payer or even a public option.
But I do agree with you that ACA is universal enough for American purposes. Universal access. I also believe that the President is right on both of his statements. ACA is here to stay, and it will be our health care system for the next 100 years, for better or worse.
Oh goody gumdrops, more **adaher **predictions! They’re so delicious.
Now, about how your guys are going to hold onto seats on the near-sole basis of *opposing *ACA … how’s that gonna work again?
Simple logic. If ACA is popular, voters will want to keep what they have. They aren’t going to give up insurance they like for universal Medicaid. If ACA is unpopular, Democrats won’t be trusted to take another bite at the health care apple. “We screwed up health care the first time, but this time we’ve got a plan! See, first, we take away your insurance… Wait! It gets better! We promise!”
If the ACA gets popular, but there are still big problems, then UHC could be sold as an improvement.
Sweeping long-term predictions (like “we’ll never get UHC”) are just silly and pointless. There’s no way you could possibly know where this is true or not.
If it is cheaper, or with better benefits, they will drop private insurance like like it had herpes. And it will be more like expanded Medicare, not Medicaid.
Medicare and Medicaid are the same program, essentially, Just different reimbursement rates for providers and a different population served. The reason I said it would be Medicaid for all is because a) that’s already the model ACA is using for something like half it’s beneficiaries and b) if we go universal, we’ll be using the lower payment rates, not Medicare payment rates.
So they’ll vote for the party that wants to take it away. 
The opposite is factual.
Maybe you need to think this over some more.
We didn’t have 30 blue states in 2008, either. Yet we got 60 Dems Senators who all voted for Obamacare - which is going to near-universal health care from a system where, with a few exceptions, the private sector decided whether you could afford health care if you were under 65.
That’s a much heavier lift, politically, than going from Obamacare to single-payer will be 20 years from now. Because that would just be going from one system of near-universal health care to another, less Rube Goldbergish, system of near-universal health care.
My, my, hey hey,
No telling. We really don’t know what the world of 2065 will look like, let alone the world of 2115.
But even without jumping forward into the unknown of 50 years from now, who knows?
Remember that Social Security is just 80 years old, and in the winter and spring of 2005, ten years ago, its survival in its present form was very much touch-and-go. And today’s GOP would love to voucherize Medicare, not to mention repeal Obamacare. If they win the White House next year and hold onto the Senate, both will happen.
That’s a big ‘if,’ but hardly out of the question. Say there’s a 25% chance that the GOP picks up the White House and holds the Senate: that’s a 25% chance that Obamacare won’t be around in 2018.
Ummm, no. They are very different programs.
Medicare is a strictly Federal program, and it works the same no matter where in the U.S. you live.
Medicaid is a Federal/state program. The Feds provide most of the money (but not all, IIRC), but the states actually run it, and have a fair amount of latitude on how they do so. So Medicaid in Virginia isn’t going to be the same as Medicaid in Kansas, and neither are the same as Medicare.
<nitpick> There were 58 Democratic Senators and two Independents who voted for the PPACA. The bill passed the Senate 60-39. The earlier cloture vote was also 60-39, with the same 58+2 voting for it.
</nitpick>
Oh, I didn’t think you’d be seriously offering that we should keep the funding but remove all the services.
I’d suggest the idiots you vote for should change their mantra from, “Repeal Obamacare” to “Repeal all the services and benefits, but keep all the taxes and funding.”
Congress? The House, perhaps, (although even with state level gerrymandering, issues and opinions could change that would allow Democrats to re-take the House).
However, 2016 provides another opportunity for Democrats to re-take the Senate and I have seen no evidence that they cannot do it. (This is not a prediction that the Democrats will re-take the Senate, only an observation that enough Republican seats are up for election as to give the Democrats a shot.)
adaher did not post about re-taking the senate. His exact post was “You won’t see more Democrats in Congress than you saw in 2008 for the rest of your lifetime”. Which means 60 senators and a majority in the House.
We don’t need more than that.
You do to get single payer. It actually takes more than getting 60 seats too. You need to actually have a base of 30 blue states. Red state Democrats will never support single payer.
And the nature of red and blue states may change in the next few decades. We have a progressive Democrat like Sherrod Brown from the swing state of Ohio.
You can get a few here and there. We’ve got a hard right conservative in Pennsylvania. The point is that in order to do single payer, you’d have to have a better election than you had in 2008. And of course be willing to lose it all again in the very next election for that dream. I suspect that even Sherrod Brown would not be willing to fall on his sword when push came to shove.
What you forget is that the country is a better place thanks to the ACA. And because of the lies the RW media feeds people, it’s unpopular. But it’s actually working pretty well. And with each passing year, more and more people will realize what utter cockholes the GOP have been.
There is no reason that lies will necessarily carry the day a few years down the line. At some point, the old gullible coots that currently make up the base of the GOP will be dead.
ACA exists, yet it isn’t getting any more popular. The Democrats have had every opportunity to make their case on ACA. THe public just believes the Republicans. You sound like a sore loser.