In my opinion reform has stalled to date because Obama has failed to make a specific proposal which important constituents could form a specific opinion on. Generally, I support some type of healthcare reform but there are a lot of versions floating through Congress that could prove very detrimental to my interests, so I’m not going to expend enormous effort carrying on about the drastic need for healthcare reform before the president has presented me with a specific proposal which explains how it will work.
This lag may have been due to the fact that the White House was busy negotiating with important, organized stake-holders like insurance and pharmacy companies. I hate to say it, but even a nominal amount of money directed at a fear-mongering campaign by any one of these groups can kill the process, so it’s important that Mr. Obama avoid goring anyones ox too directly.
I doubt it will be perfect, but the broad outlines presented yesterday might be good enough for me, and its possible that Mr. Obama will be able to generate some new momentum on this issue.
Look, we had hundreds of thousands of people in the streets of DC in January or February 2003, protesting against the Iraq War, and you know what? The media practically ignored those protests. But they’ll put 40 people at one of those wingnut ‘tea parties’ on the air.
The left has realized that there’s no payoff to marching in the streets. And given that it’s a lot of work, why bother? There are other ways to make one’s voice heard.
It is not about one poor guy and his troubles. Yeah, he is getting a shit life end.
If your on the sick side, the healthy people should pay everything they have to save you. Hu huh !!!
If you are on the healthy side, you would rather feed your kids than take care of the sick side since you can’t really afford to do both.
We in this country have bought into the silly notion that any one life is worth any amount of $$$ to save. It just ain’t so.
If you all felt that way for real, you would never break a driving law again, would wear helmets in your car every time and would voluntarily have been taking a few dollars every payday for health protection over and above what others do. You don’t do that. You want for all to support you when you get unlucky or stupid.
The world is not round,
It is not fair,
It is just round.
Just looking at everything going on, I wonder how you all can be for wild spending of $$$ that does not exist. Those kids and grand kids of yours are not going to thank you for what you have left them with.
ALL of this ‘We humans deserve’ BS is just a form of greed. We deserve nothing and need to work for what we do get. But no, we have aken the road of play now and make the future try to pay for it. It can not go on and now I am beginning to fear I will be around for the crash. Was kinda wanting my grand kids to have to deal with it but we have gotten way too greedy and lazy and the hand basket is really sliding along now.
The National Council of Churchesadvocates for health care reform and has released a statement in support of President Obama’s plan. Many individual denominations and congregations are doing the same. Unfortunately, a pastor who preaches about “aborting Obama” makes for better news than churches trying to do good things in the world.
What? Go out in public in support of your government? That’s crazy talk! It’s scary out there. That’s where all the crazy people are … out there protesting!
They only polled people who watched the speech. Many people did not watch the speech (such as me) because they don’t want to spend one minute listening to a statist talk. So the poll is very biased.
The Unpersuadables who won’t even listen are maybe 25% of the population. We live in a Democracy, and nothing needs 100% approval to get done, otherwise our country would be in a constant state of paralysis.
Obama was reaching out for the center, those who are still open to persuasion, and he suceeded quite well.
Like it or not, Crafter_Man, the reaction to the speech was a good sign for the reformers. Maybe that’s why John Boehner had such a dour look on his face, and Wilson of South Carolina couldn’t contain his rage and had a temper tantrum on the House floor in the middle of the speech.
I don’t want to agree with Crafter_Man, I really don’t, but those poll results tell us nothing about how well the speech succeeded because they tell us nothing about how the sample population (which is not at all representative of the voting population at large) felt about health care reform beforehand.
Getting back to why the “people” aren’t out there portesting, it’s probably because some of them - us - don’t see the point. The administration is (more or less) on our side. The distinguished gentleman from North Carolina, on the other hand, doesn’t care what I think about it here in Southern California.
I agree that the instant-poll isn’t that useful. Though I did find them amusing last year during the various debates when the pundits were trying to spin one way and the polls were contradicting everything the pundits said.
We’ll have a better idea in a few days once a full poll has been done. That will give us a better idea how the speech has been filtered to those who didn’t watch it either by word-of-mouth or by the media.
