Re: Trump Thread
The article makes the point that the ACA as put together with myriad components lacks the political durability to be a long-term policy; the strategic implication is then that something better has to be imposed sooner or later.Originally Posted by Greyblades
However, don't forget to separate the strategic element from the policy element to some extent. The law can become moribund if its opponents go far in refusing to implement it - an area where the Trump administration is leading the way - but those states that have with determination used many of the tools the law offers them have seen the greatest outcomes. So while it is an easy law for its opponents to sabotage, from the ideal perspective in governance we like to think that laws aren't going to be sabotaged...
It's a useful step, although, and in particular served the Medicaid-eligible population very well. Unfortunately, the ideological opponents of Obamacare don't find sympathy for this demographic. The bottom line is that the overall effectiveness of Obamacare contributes to the difficulty of cleanly repealing it.
Prescient.More to the point, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated last week that partial repeal would increase the number of uninsured Americans by 23 million (other estimates are even higher). If you think blowback to the ACA's enactment was bad for Democrats, just wait for the anti-GOP firestorm that follows that sort of disruption.
Let's say the more right-wing Democrats would be comfortable staying along the outlines of Obamacare, the mainline Pelosi/Schumer wing would prefer (at least compared to a single-payer plan) universal coverage with a public option balanced by extensive private insurer participation, and as always the Sanders wing wants Medicare-for-all (with a bill pending release in the near future).When the Democrats get their next bite at the apple -- and they will, despite all the hand-wringing on the left and back-patting on the right -- they will have a chance to avoid past mistakes as they try to build a better healthcare system.
Sadly so.It may seem ironic, but Americans have traditionally preferred really big government that doesn't play favorites when compared with somewhat smaller government that does.
I see the author even includes the man's famous words:FDR understood that welfare programs work best when they are biggest.
Roosevelt also demonstrated that the best way to ensure the long-term viability of those programs is to ask people to actually pay for them. For Social Security, that meant a payroll tax.
Payroll taxes “were never a problem of economics,” Roosevelt explained to one skeptical adviser:
They are politics all the way through. We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.
On a third term for Obama, while he was more popular towards the end than Greyblades makes out, it's hard to see us breaking the 2-term tradition for Obama's sake. Then of course you realize that you would need an overwhelming movement for a Constitutional amendment or repeal (of the 22nd amendment) to even have the opportunity to elect someone to a third term, so in a circular sense if Obama had somehow managed to convince the country and Congress to take that course, and with time to spare for ratification by 2016, he would have been popular enough to run for a third term.
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