Are you willing to apply the “no consequences” standard to what you consider to be Democratic lies? :dubious:
And that has proven to be pretty much the case, out here in the real world.
But really, all you can offer for reasons to oppose the law are based on invented dissatisfaction over the mechanics of how it got passed. Nothing you’ve said relates in any way to the public welfare, helping people, making our society better, improving the economy, or *anything *other than your own highly-idiosyncratic and reality-disconnected view of partisan advantage. Can you see how contemptible that looks?
Really? All of those who still won’t be covered, because the Republicans opposed not only single-payer (simply expanding Medicare eligibility) but their own damn proposal, aren’t going to suffer?
You complain of a “breach of political etiquette” by the Democrats. Best joke I’ve heard all week.
True. The law has achieved some milestones. But I’d disagree with Iggy that we’re even in halftime, given that the vast majority of uninsured remain uninsured. Plus the law achieved some negative milestones. Any person that is worse off today than before the health care law represents a failure of the program given the promises that were made.
If we had been warned that this was coming, perhaps the milestones would mean more. Instead, yay, you’ve achieved a few million insured who weren’t before at the cost of a few million worse off. And the employers dumping insurance is still to come, along with the full impact of the Medicare Advantage cuts. There will be a lot more losers before this is over.
He’s had this pointed out to him many times before, to no avail. He would rather believe that it’s Obama’s fault that the GOP didn’t vote for it rather than the fact that GOP wouldn’t vote for ANYTHING if Obama was for it.
I don’t think it’s Obama’s fault that the ACA didn’t get any Republican votes. It’s his fault that he lied about the law in order to get it passed. Those vulnerable Dems would never have supported the law if they’d known their jobs were forfeit if they did.
And the President didn’t even have the basic consideration to make sure the rollout went well to protect his vulnerable incumbents.
Like I said, apparently Republicans were apparently aware of all aspects of the law and how it would affect the insurance market, and were thus lying when whatever they said turned out to be wrong.
Obama, on the other hand, and Democrats in general, are blithering idiots, and so it’s not their fault if they got it wrong.
To clarify. I think the current state of affairs is half-time. But I think the roll-out was the equivalent of starting the game while you are still installing the scoreboard and mowing the field. Wasn’t ready for prime time.
And I agree that an individual may indeed see things become worse even while the group as a whole sees things get better. But trade-off is how many people are we willing to see get worse? What is an acceptable trade off?
Look, you can be ridiculously charitable to the Republican position if you want to. You can say the death panel thing wasn’t a lie, it was merely a prediction that made no sense and had no basis in reality. You can say there were sensible reasons they opposed proposals that came from conservatives in the first place. But nobody has to take that kind of thing seriously.
That’s precisely the debate we should have had before the law passed.
Contrary to the President’s arrogant line today, “The debate is over.” we are actually starting to have that debate now, and that debate will decide the fate of the law. The debate is just starting, because we couldn’t have an honest debate before the law got started. As Pelosi said, we had to find out what was in it first. So now we can debate.
And likewise, no one has to take seriously that the President and Democrats had no idea that the law would cost people their insurance.
Now the effect on costs, that’s understandable. Republicans predcted higher costs(and were right), Democrats predicted lower. But the fact that the law had to cause people to lose their insurance in order to even work was a pretty basic fact that Democrats vehemently denied.
And just why was that, hmmm? Thinkthinkthink … :rolleyes:
Speaking of Republican lies …:rolleyes:
The point she was making was that people insisting on believing your guys’ lies instead of actually reading and understanding the damn bill, some time in the year and a half it took to go through, would nevertheless come to learn the truth about it but only by experience. Which is true; now that people, including many Republican voters, are getting the benefits of the law, they are coming to know what’s in it, and not what they hear on Fox, or read on message boards. And they like it. However much it outrages you to realize it, and that you’ve spent so much time and energy looking foolish by opposing it and continuing to spread falsehoods, they like it.
Yes, in a sense the debate really is just starting. But the topics are “How can we make this program better?” and “What the hell were the Republicans thinking, and why should we trust any of those liars with so much as a burnt-out match?”
Again, it wasn’t the Republicans who said you could keep your insurance. There is no bigger lie than that, no more impactful lie. It destroyed the Democrats’ credibility on the health law. Very few of their promises came true.
Democrats were not the ones who didn’t want to hold a debate.
Ahahahahaha. It’s true that Obama saying “the debate is over” doesn’t really mean it’s over. It’s over in the sense that the law isn’t going away, but Republicans have spent several years denying that fact and they’re not going to quit until it becomes unprofitable for them to do so. There’s room for debate on how to make the law work better, but I don’t hold out much hope for that either.
They probably should have expected that insurance companies would still try to screw people and act like insurance companies. And eliminating cheap-but-crappy plans isn’t a bad thing (it’s part of the point of the law), but they could have done better there, too. Unfortunately when your opponents are screaming like an asteroid is about to hit the planet and spend years distorting, say, that Pelosi statement, it’s that much harder to explain any nuances in the law.
That’s a nice way to explain it away, but they had plenty of opportunity. Republicans said people would lose their insurance. That gave the Democrats a chance to clarify. Instead, they just flat out denied it. And said Republicans were liars for saying it.
You could be right that the law will never be repealed. I’m still skeptical that it’s sacrosanct given its polling numbers. There are a lot of red districts and red states in which Republicans would face no consequences if they went ahead with repeal, even if we assume that it would hurt them nationally. Which with the current polling, is a heck of an assumption.
As a matter of fact, I dare say that if in 2016 Republicans sweep, that would be a pretty clear message from the electorate, so long as Republicans continue to advocate repeal in 2016.
Now if the law can’t be repealed, it can still be fixed in a way conservatives prefer. Ditch the mandate, don’t require insurance to cover so much, introduce more catastrophic plans(like the six Democrats’ Copper plan idea), etc. They could also reform the subsidy system to make it less complex and create less disincentives to work more.
adaher, it’s really pretty simple. The repeal debate is over, and the replace debate never was even planned. You and your team lost. You lost because you *deserved *to lose. That’s the reality. The sooner you and your team recognize and embrace it, the sooner you can start to make a case for being trustworthy again.
You deny that it would be? Or are you just being snarky. Public opinion does change, you know, that’s why one party hasn’t dominated for 200 years straight. Sure, in 2012, the public favored the Democrats. In 2014, it’s looking pretty clear they’ll favor the Republicans. So it’s fair to find out in 2016 whether the public really hates ACA or not.
Keep it up and I’ll start calling you Needles. 2014 is favoring the GOP because it’s six years after 2008, when a number of districts experienced an atypical swing to the Democrats. Healthcare is an insignificant part of the swing back.
Yes, there was lots of room for explanation in the middle of the “the government is going to take old people off life support” debate. It’s not like such claims are designed to make it impossible for your opponent to explain his position. It’s true the Democrats could have communicated much better, but still, the law was met with an amazing barrage of lying. And I am sure you believe a repeal is still possible, but it’s not and most Republicans in Congress have given up on it at this point- they’ll vote on it if it brings in more donations, but they’re not really trying to make it happen because they understand they can neither repeal the law nor take away health care from 10 or 11 million people.
Nobody tell adaher that the Senate map in 2016 is going to favor the Democrats the way the last couple have favored the Republicans.
