posted
They would be taking this election at a walk.
Face it, the Affordable Health Care Act was designed by conservatives as a "Market Based Solution to our Health Care Crisis" in the 1980s.
It was implemented first by a Republican Governor who is now running for President.
If they had not poisoned the well with fear-mongering like "Death Panels" and "Socialize Medicine" and "Government Takeover of Medicine" what it does and what it offers is supported by the voters.
The requirement to buy health insurance is a requirement for folks to pay their own way, not force the government to pay.
It could have been the Republican Health Care Plan supported by President Obama. Governor Romney would be running on its implementation, not vowing to destroy it. It would gain him votes.
Even small businesses, who see Health Care, not taxes as the larger cost of doing business and hiring new employees, would approve.
But some Republicans see working together for the country as working with the enemy. They would rather try to tear down the Democratic president than build up a Republican.
It's always easier to fight the devil than live like a saint.
Posts: 1941 | Registered: Feb 2003
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posted
Actually, I'm of the opinion that the Republicans are actually now totally fine with completely wrecking the union. No caveats there. I really believe that the Republican party, as an organization, is now fundamentally opposed to governance.
Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Darth_Mauve: The requirement to buy health insurance is a requirement for folks to pay their own way, not force the government to pay.
Regardless of how you frame it, one citizen is still being forced to subsidize the healthcare of another. That's the true purpose of the "requirement for folks to pay their own way." The heart of the issue for conservatives is the individual mandate. Republicans are calling for health care reform but not one that includes such federal over-reach and infringement on individual liberties. First it's a penalty, not a tax. Now it's a tax, therefore not part of the commerce clause. Ultimately it's the socialization of cost. And the implications of and precedent set by Obamacare ensures that this administration's circus act is far from over.
quote:Originally posted by Orincoro: Actually, I'm of the opinion that the Republicans are actually now totally fine with completely wrecking the union. No caveats there. I really believe that the Republican party, as an organization, is now fundamentally opposed to governance.
How about we all spout off some hyperbole?
Posts: 570 | Registered: Sep 2009
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posted
No, Capax, you misunderstand. I am of the earnest opinion that the Republican party, as an organization, and not as individuals, is no longer capable, for a variety of reasons, of backing *any* constructive governing policies. There have been fairly windy explanations of why this may be. In short: I believe that it is because the party now bases itself so fully upon anti-government philosophies, that to legislate for the far-term and set constructive policy initiatives would be antithetical, fundamentally, to their electoral mandate. As antithetical to the basis of their party unity as acting upon sound economic principles, which include *any* conclusions inconvenient to their narrative.
That is to say, that the Republicans campaign on a philosophy that is so broken, and so twisted, and that they are so devoted to it, that to act in the earnest best interest of the nation becomes impossible, without breaking with the culture of the party.
The 10>1 cuts v tax example is an apt one. A candidate who declares that he *cannot* and *will not* raise taxes in any way shape or form, and who also declares that he is commited to balancing the federal budget, is lying, or deluded, or possibly both. In either case, the ironclad principle, in the face of harsh reality, denies even the intention of governance in good faith.
Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
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quote:Regardless of how you frame it, one citizen is still being forced to subsidize the healthcare of another.
You're talking about the way things worked before obamacare, right? because obamacare didn't change that, it just made the method by which this invariably happens a wee bit more humanitarian and cheaper.
Unless of course you would like to insist that the CBO is wrong and Obamacare is just an introduction of larger 'being forced to subsidize care' that didn't exist before.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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quote: Regardless of how you frame it, one citizen is still being forced to subsidize the healthcare of another. That's the true purpose of the "requirement for folks to pay their own way." The heart of the issue for conservatives is the individual mandate. Republicans are calling for health care reform but not one that includes such federal over-reach and infringement on individual liberties. First it's a penalty, not a tax. Now it's a tax, therefore not part of the commerce clause. Ultimately it's the socialization of cost. And the implications of and precedent set by Obamacare ensures that this administration's circus act is far from over.
You're almost there. It is certainly the socialization of cost. Absolutely. The question is, and I do think this is an important one, in what way is this dispersal of cost *less* just than the status quo system. Because the status quo system places a very heavy burden on the middle class, and the working poor, to subsidize the treatment of the very poor and the indigent. The same burden, in fact, that was being placed on everyone in hidden systemic costs, which have been, for lack of a more refined term, astronomically high. You might be shocked to learn what the sources of some of those costs have been: the number one cause of personal bankruptcy in the US in the past decade has been medical bills, for example. How do you imagine this has effected the rates at which mortgages are offered, or at which savings and mutual funds pay out? FDIC insurance is higher because of this trend, and the costs are passed to you as a consumer. And they are passed into literally *every* product you buy, and literally *every* service you purchase. The ability of company HMO plans to outcompete and exclude private plans has kept the competitive salary for whatever positions you have ever held in any company with coverage lower. That has skimmed enormous amounts of capital from the middle class in the past 30 years. And I mean enormous. And the process is a positive loop: the more money that is locked into corporate profit and kept out of payrolls, the less money is spent in those same markets, the less business you do, the less job security you have, the lower your salary will be, forever and ever. You have payed the cost of our current system every day, in lost interest and in higher prices. You don't notice it, but it's there, and the effect is actually rather larger than you might be comfortable realizing.
So while it is the outright socialization of cost, it is also a system that is being put in place, for the first time, to make transparent, as much as possible, the structural costs that were being born anyway. The system will save money and productivity, and at the same time inject money into a system that has been fed only in a negative cycle: with mney being spent to shore it up against a crisis of uninsured people, who place a strain on the system that it is not designed to handle, and cannot handle with efficiency.
Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Orincoro: In short: I believe that it is because the party now bases itself so fully upon anti-government philosophies, that to legislate for the far-term and set constructive policy initiatives would be antithetical, fundamentally, to their electoral mandate.
quote:A government that works, some conservatives fear, is dangerous stuff. It gives people ideas. Universal health care isn't just a bad idea for their buddies in the insurance business; it's a gateway drug to broader state involvement in the economy and hence a possible doomsday scenario for conservatism itself. As two fellows of the Ethics and Public Policy Center fretted in the Weekly Standard in May, "health care is the key to public enmeshment in ballooning welfare states, and passage of ObamaCare would deal a heavy blow to the conservative enterprise in American politics."
On the other hand, government fails constantly when conservatives run it because making it work would be, for many of those conservatives, to traduce the very laws of nature. Besides, as we can now see, bungling Katrina recovery or Pentagon procurement pays conservatives huge dividends. It gives them potent ammunition to use when the liberals have returned and are proposing another one of their grand schemes to reform health care.
This is the perverse incentive that is slowly remaking the GOP into the Snafu Party. And in those commercials and those proclamations we should also discern a warning: That even if Democrats manage to set up a solid health-care program, conservatives will do their best, once they have regained power, to drop it down the same chute they did the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Maybe they will appoint a tobacco lobbyist to run the thing. Maybe they will starve it for funds. Or antagonize its work force. And as it collapses they will hand themselves their greatest propaganda victory of all. They will survey the ruins and chide, "You didn't really think government could work, did you?"
Before Obamacare, if I were sick and didn't have health insurance the hospital would take every penny they could squeeze from me, then for the remainder, usually the larger part of the bill, they would have to cover that themselves. The only way for them to cover that expense would be to raise the fees for everyone else. An Aspirin in the hospital might be $9.00 each, but $8.00 of that goes to pay for the health care of those who have no money.
Or to pay for the lawyers needed to get the money from the hands of the uninsured.
Or to pay for the collection agents needed to get the money from those who don't have it.
ObamaCares tries to limit those legal and collection expenses from our health care system by making almost everyone have insurance.
Basically, we have already socialized the risk by not allowing doctors and hospitals to refuse patients pending a credit check.
Many young and healthy people look at the $1000/month insurance bills and say "I'll risk it." Of course most of the risk is socialized, while the benefit is purely personal.
Posts: 1941 | Registered: Feb 2003
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quote:Regardless of how you frame it, one citizen is still being forced to subsidize the healthcare of another.
As others have mentioned, this is and has been the reality for generations in this country. You simply cannot speak as though Obamacare changes us to. I don't accuse you of lying about it, I mean simply that it is just totally inaccurate to speak that way.
quote:The heart of the issue for conservatives is the individual mandate.
No, it's not. I don't accuse conservative voters of lying, either-they've just been told this and it sounds good, on the surface it's a good argument. If it was truly the heart of the issue, how do you explain the presence of Romney as the Republican candidate, with his record in Massachusetts? How do you explain past Republican support for so much of Obamacare, evaporating once it became a Democratic initiative? As for conservative politicians, though, the heart of the issue is one-term Obama. It's even been stated in exactly those terms, more than once.
Now, look, I know you're a partisan American and there's simply no way you'll actually support any major non-conservative political contender for anything, even if you do (I don't actually know) support some non-conservative political positions. I know this from years of posting on politics around here, and also from how you bluntly mischaracterize this matter as described above. So I don't expect you'll ever even rise to being neutral on Obamacare, much less reject that carefully cultivated GOP fear of 'socialization', but I would be interested in the answers to the problems listed above. Namely that Americans are and have been forced to subsidize the health care costs of others for hears, so that objection is silly; that Republicans don't have a serious option for health care reform even on table, rather only knee-jerk opposition to Obamacare; that if opposition to Obamacare was honest and consistent within itself, Romney wouldn't be the candidate; and that so much of Obamacare was just fine when it was a Republican initiative, years ago.
Like I said, I don't expect you'll change your mind on this much less not vote a party line this November (and I say that as someone who voted for Dubya twice, so let's not have any 'nah-uh, what about you?', alright?), but I would be interested if you have an answer for any of these and other pretty damning problems with your opposition that don't involve major mental gymnastics.
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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posted
"How do you explain past Republican support for so much of Obamacare, evaporating once it became a Democratic initiative? "
What support are you referring to? Acknowledgement that the current system is a mess? That's hardly democratic intellectual property.
Posts: 135 | Registered: Apr 2006
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posted
When Republicans complain, as capax did, about requiring individuals subsidize the costs of others, that's a false complaint to level against Obamacare since that's the status quo. But specifically I was referring to Romneycare and the health insurance mandate (originally endorsed by Republicans, including Romney if memory serves, in the late 80s).
This is very basic stuff to this debate, too, ScottF. If you don't know about those two facts already, you're simply very badly informed on the matter-another common flaw among those most opposed to Obamacare, who polls show support most of its actual policies, but not when it's actually called Obamacare.
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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quote:Originally posted by ScottF: "How do you explain past Republican support for so much of Obamacare, evaporating once it became a Democratic initiative? "
What support are you referring to? Acknowledgement that the current system is a mess? That's hardly democratic intellectual property.
I think he's referring to the fact that a decade ago, what is now called Obamacare was a solid plank in the Republican political platform. They were in support of the individual mandate, and many other major pieces of the healthcare reform law. They only changed their minds when Obama started to support it as well.
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How about we all spout off some hyperbole?
