So it seems “Romneycare” appears to be doing swimmingly well. In fact, if I can believe what a pundit tells me on the news radio; Massachusetts has the best health system in the country.
If Obama modeled his plan after Massachusetts; why didn’t he just sell it as such? It seems like a much easier sell then what they’ve been doing.
WHY AM I JUST NOW HEARING ABOUT THIS?!?!?
Grrr…,…
I’m not sure how much well-poisoning you’ve done there, but the merits of the Massachusetts plan were a big debating point during the Democratic primary. In fact, Obama strongly criticized Romneycare in one of the early debates because he didn’t think an individual mandate was necessary, and he supported a public option.
In the end, he caved on the mandate because insurance companies (and their supporters in Congress) wouldn’t get on board without it. And the public option was removed for largely the same reason. So in the end Obamacare ended up looking a bit more like Romneycare than was originally intended.
Duhhh… Mass is much more liberal than the country as a whole, and HCR was better received there. Obama has a large swathe of the country more or less hating him, so putting his name on something is instant doom.
John is also on point about why you don’t sell a national plan as “JUST LIKE MASS!” Trying to sell east-coast values to the entire nation is hard enough without putting a bogey-state’s name on it.
Isn’t Massachusetts Liberal one word? Similar to San Francisco Liberal.
Not sure which one is scarier.
Which pundit were you listening to? Was it a lefty?
This right leaning polling organization doesn’t exactly call it going ‘swimmingly well’, as your source seems to think
Magellan appears to be ex-RNC guys.
While they are certainly biased, that’s a big big BIG difference from what you suggest.
I thought he did an interview saying he tried to model it after MA’s health care to win GOP support in congress. But I can’t find the interview where he said that.
If that is true then Obama is an idiot. The GOP has no interest in supporting anything Obama does, esp along the lines of expanding government and social safety nets.
I hope he wasn’t that naive. Hopefully he was just making excuses for why he eliminated all the progressive aspects of his UHC bill (a public option, medicare for all, reimportation, etc) by pretending it was to get GOP support and not because we are a plutocracy.
Or he just said that to handicap Romney in 2012.
Also how is MA doing well? Medical inflation is the biggest problem in health care, and I thought the MA plan really didn’t do much to slow that down.
My understanding is that the idea to require everyone to carry medical insurance was the GOP’s response to the Clinton’s health care proposal back in the 90’s. If that’s so why didn’t he sell it as that, especially since he wanted Republicans on board with it so badly?
This is what I heard too. It was first brought to my attention by Bill Maher. I like BM but I never take him too seriously, I just like his “theatrics”. It caught my attention more when I heard it on a news program the other night on the radio.
Because the GOP of 2009 isn’t the GOP of 1993. The less ideological GOPers like Chafee and Dole who wrote that plan are gone. Both sides have become more polarized by geographics since the 90s.
The Chafee-Dole plan of 1993 and the Obama plan of 2009 are virtually identical according to this.
Well sure, that’s a fact. They’re more extreme but Obama has been Mr. Bipartisan and here he offers them their proposal and didn’t bring it up a few times? Why not make them explain why their own privatization plan wasn’t a huge compromise on his part? Hell, he sure didn’t support single payer or a medicare buy-in, so why not contrast what was areasonable conservative compromise? It was almost anti-Hilary care, not that he would couch it in those terms. But If he’d beared down hard on it he may have swayed a lot of the conservative public that were on the the fence about it. If nothing else, making the GOP explain why their own plan wasn’t good enough would have been fun to watch.
I don’t think it matters. I think Obama is so hated by the GOP that anything they think he supports they will oppose even when the people voting against it were the ones who cosponsored the bills.
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/07/11/things-republicans-were-for-and-now-are-against/
http://www.americaforpurchase.com/republicans/republicans-consistently-vote-against-own-policies/
Fairly large numbers of conservative voters, including a large % (and maybe over 51% so a majority) of the more activist, committed ones who will play a major role in primary elections believe Obama is a Kenyan born Marxist antichrist manchurian candidate who secretly wants to destroy the US economy and military so Islam can take over the country when we are weak. Anything he supports will be opposed, even if the bills were originally republican bills since people don’t want to answer to primary voters about why they are supporting the policies of a foreign born antichrist. Bipartisanship is silly in this environment. Maybe some of the new england republicans can be bipartisan, but pretty much everyone else, not so much.
Even the new england ones will pay. The tea party is going to go after Collins, Snowe and Brown in primaries. That is why Specter had to switch from R to D, because his support of Obama’s stimulus package caused the tea party to put so much energy into the PA primary in 2010 that Specter knew he’d lose. Dick Luger is going to lose in 2012 during the primary, I’d venture. The tea party primaried several GOP politicians who were seen as too bipartisan or too liberal in 2010, and I think the message hit home.
That’s the traditional upperceptive statement, goes along with Kennedy-bashing, but it is not at all well-supported factually, and certainly not to the point of “Duhhh” . :rolleyes:
If you conflate the policy and the policy maker, you get to ‘hate’ the person and not have to address the policy - it’s integral to the infantilizing of US political discourse.
I have no idea. Obama didn’t announce it himself as far as I know, but as the proposal developed, it was well known that the plans were similar in a lot of ways. But bringing up Massachusetts may not have pacified Tea Party types and I don’t think Obama was going to give the credit for the law to Mitt Romney when Romney was trying to run against him. That being said, Obama and the Democrats should have been a lot more aggressive in explaining what they were doing, and saying “they did this in Massachusetts and it didn’t kill anyone” might’ve helped.
A bit of a hijack, but it’s worth pointing out, because the concept seems to baffle a lot of people:
Even if you believe that the Massachusetts plan was an ideal solution, you may oppose it being implemented by the federal government, because the federal government is one of limited, ennumerated powers. The states, on the other hand, have plenary power and are also sovereign.
This means that the states operate from the principle of, “They have the power to do anything unless it’s forbidden for some reason.”
The federal government has the power to do only those things which are permitted to it.
Particularly if “you” = Mitt Romney, who believes he needs to make this distinction to win the Republican nomination. I can understand the argument but I’m skeptical he can convince anyone.
Sure. In Romney’s case, the argument is obviously self-serving.
But that doesn’t make it wrong.
If one believes that it’s not the role of goverment, period, to mandate the purchase of health insurance, then obviously Romney’s system is a problem. I suspect many objectors to Obamacare feel this way.
But it’s possible to be a principled federalist, embracing Romneycare while rejecting Obamacare.
I don’t speculate on what percentage of Obamacare opponents fit into this mold, expect to say it’s probably not a majority.
I agree it’s possible to take that position.
The apparent inconsistency evaporates if you emphasize that it was the Republican counteroffer to Clinton’s proposal: a lesser-of-two-evils compromise they admittedly preferred over the alternative on the table, but one that still falls way short of an even-more-ideal solution.