The last time Democrats had a filibuster -proof legislative trifecta it was for 3 months and they passed Obamacare. When they don’t have Republicans blocking them every step of the way, they actually do work to improve things. They aren’t perfect by a long shot, but Democrats are the best of two options by far.
The ACA would have passed much faster if they didn’t try “working across the aisle” with the Republicans. If I remember, the original plan was to expand medicare to encompass more people who need it but negotiated to what Mitt Romney passed in his state while governor. Then the Republicans all voted against what they wanted. So the Democrats are either a paid opposition party or so absolutely naive to the dealings of Republicans and keep stepping on that rake. As well instead of making it a stepping stone they don’t really talk about improving it either. Also in that time they could have enshrined abortion rights into law that is harder to overthrow than a supreme court ruling.
No matter how your parse things, the Democrats aren’t good.
I agree, the Democrats aren’t good, but they aren’t actively evil like the Republicans. They are naive, idealistic, and out of touch, but they are the only party that (for the most part) practices democracy.
“Not good” isn’t better than “actively evil” if it consistently shows it does nothing to put itself between the evil and it’s victims, nor does anything to break down the systems of evil when it has the advantage. The modern Democrat politicians are not some newcomer on the political scene, they’ve had their ups and downs over the decades but even when the balance of power is in their favor they mete out “progress” at a minimum only when they have to, tell their constituents “that’s the best we can do”, then applaud themselves like they’ve changed the world. They are absolutely out of touch, not just with their voters, but with the fact MAGA is not the Republican Party of Reagan and Bush that was going to play political pendulum and trade power back and forth every couple of election cycles while having a gentleman’s agreement that bureaucracy and preservation of the system for the benefit of the elite is the goal.
If you don’t think Democrats haven’t been standing in the way of Republicans, you haven’t been paying attention. Democrats blocked the SAVE act which would disenfranchise millions of American citizens, they just successfully blocked DHS funding over ICE, they just blocked $1 billion for Trump’s stupid ballroom, they are blocking the Fair Tax act which would eliminate income tax and the IRS, HR 899 which would eliminate the Department of Education, HR722 which would define life at conception, HR28 which is an anti-trans sports bill, HR129 which would abolish the ATF, and on and on and on.
Why didn’t Biden prosecute Trump for insurrection from Jan. 6th? He still believes you need a Republican party at all, like we need people further right than the Democrats. They could have prevented this entire situation by going after the organizers, of Trump stealing documents alone. But they slow walked us into this.
Because the executive branch doesn’t have the power to prosecute anyone. The legislature tried to impeach Trump over Jan6 but that was blocked by Republicans. The classified documents case was slow-walked by a Trump loyalist judge until he was reelected and became immune from prosecution. The law did go after the organizers and many were hauled only to be pardoned by Trump. Democrats did all the law allowed.
You’re getting confused by the good cop bad cop routine they got going on. The bad cop slaps you and the good cop comes in an gives you and ice pack. They both want to railroad you into confessing to a crime you didn’t commit. Twenty years later they’re going to be laughing it up retired at 55 on a taxpayer funded pension, fishing together and going to each other’s kids’ wedding while you’re still in prison for a crime you didn’t commit.
That’s what they’re doing, the good cop saying aw man he doesn’t need to be so mean, but twenty years later both parties’ politicians are incredibly wealthy and youre making less than you made in 90s in real dollars.
You and them are so out of touch with reality that you both think playing the old political game represents “standing in the way”. Blocking the SAVE act doesn’t do shit when your opponent is gerrymandering the maps in their favor. People will still be able to vote, they’ve just rigged the system so that who votes where will reliably favor them. And in places democrats control they’re playing the same game in their favor instead of fighting to eliminate the concept altogether. Blocking funding for the ballroom isn’t going to stop him from building it, it’s just going to force him to do it illegally, as he done with so many other projects, at which point they resort to grandstanding condemnation and strongly worded letters. They might have prevented abolishing the Department of Education but they have spent decades allowing it to become a tool in the dumbing down of America’s youth to the point it’s now run by a WWE exec, and frankly I’m not sure allowing it to exist in that condition is the better option. Blocking legislation that codifies anti-trans and life at conception beliefs is showmanship when you do nothing to stop the illegal enforcement of those beliefs by jackboots who deny access to healthcare. MAGA is running on action first, normalizing the violence and denial of rights illegally, then trying to make it the legal standard after and Democrats are acting like blocking the legislation somehow prevents what is currently happening from occurring.
Blocking ICE funding doesn’t block ICE. The goon squads weren’t pushed out of communities by press conferences and letters to the president. They were blocked and pushed out by citizens who put their safety and lives on the line, sometimes making the ultimate sacrifice, in defense of strangers. Meanwhile Democratic leaders postured for their next campaign run and took to trolling the regime on social media with witty memes. Your leaders have risked nothing and therefore achieve empty victories while the people they supposedly serve are arrested, beaten, disenfranchised, denied rights, dehumanized, raped, molested, and murdered by a regime that doesn’t give a fuck that what they’re doing is illegal because the legal system is in their hands and standing up to them requires more than saying “no” because they don’t respect personal boundaries. You literally have to block them with force equal to or greater than what they’re coming at you with, just ask Alex Periti.
Like I said, this isn’t the Regan or Bush regime that nominally had some sort of respect for the game of power trades, this is fascism. It’s going to walk over us all whether it has the legal justification and funding to do so or not.
So there is literally nothing that the Democrats could do that would satisfy you short of lining up Republicans and shooting them?
Following the law isn’t “playing a political game”. Giving Republicans an excuse to remove Democrats from power wouldn’t help anyone. Did you even know that there are no more US deportees in Salvadoran prisons? That is because Democrats fought for their freedom. Those people were helped and that’s not nothing. Real resistance isn’t charging in guns blazing. It is showing up every day and saving who you can. Martyrs don’t save anyone.
So there is literally nothing that the Democrats could do that would satisfy you short of lining up Republicans and shooting them?
At this point, no. We’re in the final stages of a game that started in the Nixon era. They’ve had their opportunities to thwart the rise of this and instead have played good bourgeoisie/bad bourgeoisie while making damn sure anyone left of their neoliberal centrism was isolated and neutralized. Yes, I expect our elected representatives to leave their halls of power and put themselves shoulder to shoulder with common folk protesting ICE facilities and in the whistle brigades tracking their movements. I expect them to put themselves between tear gas bombs launched at infants, to take the rubber bullets that would blind teenagers, to take down the grown men that jump out of their trucks to assault a squad of teenage girls, to take the billy club blow directed at a priest, and to eat the bullets unloaded into single moms dropping their kids off at school and off-duty nurses filming the carnage.
I don’t doubt that there’s ICE reckless and emboldened enough to shoot Gavin Newsome or someone like him in the face, but there’s still enough of a risk doing so would spin the situation out of control. Their physical presence at scenes of conflict would turn these confrontations from inconsequential brutality to “FAFO”. Instead we get rescheduled ICE facility inspections with a full camera crew documenting the staged approach, denial of entry, and arrest that is sold as “they tried!”. No they didn’t, they told them they were coming knowing full well what the outcome would be and were politely cuffed without incident. It’s the people in frog costumes that get pepper sprayed up the ass that try without knowing if today’s the day they’ll be brutalized.
There would have been no US citizens to rescue from El Salvadoran prisons in the first place if they hadn’t fucked around for the past 50yrs playing politics. Cleaning up a few drops of blood when their previous inaction is exsanguinating the most vulnerable members isn’t heroic, it’s a PR stunt. Not to mention that regardless of whether someone is a citizen or here legally, the rest of the people rounded up by ICE and shipped to foreign hell holes benefit nothing from these too little, too late “heroics”.
Nobody is going in “guns blazing”, we’re just getting blazed for standing between the day to day, street level violence of the regime. ICE doesn’t care if they’re funded or not, just like lunch mobs didn’t do it for the pay. They’re brutal for the thrill, pay is a bonus. Kill a single mom and call her a “bitch” and your fans will crowdfund you a million bucks. People wouldnt be getting martyred if our leaders hadn’t played politics with our democracy until one side called their bluff and started serving unambiguous fascism that the people in power oppose with lip service and photo op’s. They risk nothing but polling numbers while the people risk their lives and freedom.
Obamacare was the implementation of a 1989 Heritage Foundation plan to implement an individual mandated health care system.
Also by no available metric did Obamacare “improve things”. Healthcare costs rose significantly above the pre-ACA trend, bankruptcy increased, and health outcomes plummeted across nearly all metrics.
now they just deny coverage with AI generated reasons and force you to nag and beg for them to pay what they’re obligated to. much better! and before that they just paid some corrupt physician to sit on staff and make up bullshit reasons to deny coverage.
Sure, but you’re assuming that “coverage” leads to better outcomes. I remember diabetes being one of the big ones at the time and is avery maneagble disease.
So, what was the hospitalization rate before and after? Did it decrease as was promised? Is diabetes unique or does this trend hold for the majority of those “pre-existing conditions”?
Also by no available metric did Obamacare “improve things”
Wrong. The number of insured people went up. The uninsured rate dropped to a historic low of 7.7% by 2023. That is a tangible improvement in the lives of millions of Americans.
Just because you don’t have insurance doesn’t mean more people don’t have insurance. Obamacare didn’t create high insurance prices. That was happening no matter what. Also remember that Republicans tried to repeal the ACA more than 70 times and stripped several elements from the plan, so of course it isn’t working as well as we would want.
I didn’t question whether more had insurance. I questioned the quality and utility of the insurance they were forced to purchase by penalty of fine. One of the elements the republicans stripped was that fine, which existed entirely as a handout to insurance companies who swore up and down that having to cover preexisting conditions would bankrupt them unless you forced everyone to buy their “product”. (Not that the republicans did it out of any altruism or anything, they just wanted to use that as part of a ploy to repeal the ACA entirely, which failed)
Republicans stripped the fine because that hurt the ACA. Insurance depends on healthy people paying in to cover the sick. The bigger the pool of insured, the lower the costs for everyone. This all falls apart if young, healthy people just chance it and skip having insurance. If you make people pay a fine even if they don’t have insurance, this removes the incentive to skip getting insurance (which keeps prices down).
You are assuming that having insurance is correlated to physical or financial health and is therefore an improvement.
Rationally that makes sense, that’s what it’s supposed to do. Empirically the data shows an overall negative correlation between private healthcare rates and general healthcare outcomes.
It’s true that the uninsured rate went from 17% pre-ACA(2010 when it was signed) to 10%(2016 2 years after it was implemented at an uninsured local minima) which is ~18 million people. However in that same timespan average annual health expenditures, for the entire US population, doubled from $1600 per person per year to $3200. Pre-ACA trend would’ve resulted in ~$2200.
That’s a difference of ~4.87 trillion dollars stolen by “healthcare” corporations from individuals over the last 14 years.
You’re making the point for us. Obamacare is a 90s conservative proposal, it also completely killed the possibility of single payer healthcare for a generation. Republicans ratchet things right and then Democrats lock it in, great example you provided thank you.
Yup. And they did a switch to remove the public option, since they had an obvious ability with 60 votes. They had Lieberman play the rotating villain, and removed the public option so they could supposedly get GOP votes.
When they got no GOP votes, they passed it anyways, through reconciliation - but didn’t put the public option back in. They literally chose to leave it out.
Not only a 90s conservative proposal, it was written by the Heritage Foundation. Democrats have never found legislation written by them that they didn’t love.
Obamacare was a compromise because single payer didn’t have the votes. If you think single payer was happening at any point in the last generation, I have a bridge to sell you.
Those people always could have purchased health insurance. The difference after Obamacare was they would be penalized if they didn’t. That’s just an objective fact.
Obamacare subsidizes healthcare specifically for people who couldn’t afford it before. The only people it penalized were rich people who refused to get healthcare. The fee was waived for most.
The only people, huh? As someone at the lower end of middle class, my premiums doubled every year for the first 4 years of Obamacare. When it got to $800 a month I cancelled it and took the penalty instead. Fuck off with your propaganda and lies.
Why do Democrats have to compromise with Republicans but Republicans never have to compromise with Democrats?
Why must they work with the party that has shifted towards fascism? Why must they compromise on half baked laws that don’t do the things people wanted, but corporations got what they demanded?
Why do the Democrats work with fascists while refusing to stand up for the good of the country?
And then their sycophants will tell you that it’s a normal thing to give the people who want to bring back American laws from the 1950s what they want, and you’re a idealist fool if you think we should advocate for good laws.
The best to all of that is Democrats generally operate on good faith and Republicans don’t. It is easy to hold your ground if you don’t care who it hurts.
Romney may have signed it, but keep in mind Massachusetts is a blue state and the state Senate at that time had 35 Dem seats and only 5 Republican. It was a bipartisan bill, but mostly Democrat.
Continuing with the status quo would have left millions without health insurance, including many with pre-existing conditions who desperately needed it. It wasn’t perfect, but it was an improvement.
It was written by the heritage foundation, it was the best way to maximize profits for the health insurance industry.
Yeah my life is so much better now that i have to pay a copay on top of my premiums instead of not having insurance and just having a regular old pay at the end of a visit. And Oh wow, I get a free flu shot and checkup once a year for my $5,000 a year in premiums. Oh and if i have a major health emergency i van declare bankruptcy on the $15000 deductible instead of declaring bankruptcy on the full cost of the surgery. Neat!
There’s a reason republicans never repealed obamacare, because it makes the health insurance companies too much money.
Let’s say you didn’t have insurance and were just counting on paying out of pocket. You are just living your life and BAM, you have a massive heart attack. Turns out you had an undiagnosed heart defect and there is nothing that could have prevented it or predicted it. You’re taken by ambulance to the hospital where you have open heart surgery and where you stay for weeks to recover. You get a huge bill that you can’t pay. What happens?
The doctors and nurses did a lot of work to keep you alive and they deserve to get paid. The hospital has to keep the lights on. You filing for bankruptcy doesn’t change this. That is why everyone needs to have insurance. This kind of thing can happen to anyone at any time. As a society we can’t just let people die if they can’t afford treatment. Even if you take for-profit companies out of the equation, the whole system collapses with millions of people unable to pay.
That is why everyone has to pay premiums. Part of that payment is for vaccinations and check ups, but part of it is coverage in case catastrophic shit happens. Healthy people get the least back out of the system, but nobody knows if they will still be healthy tomorrow. The bigger the pool of healthy people paying into the system, the less each person needs to pay to cover the people whose luck ran out.
Oh wow well yeah if it’s literally impossible for a country to provide healthcare then yeah i guess obamacare is literally the only plan that will ever work
Which is why it’s not an accomplishment for dems. Even with that brief super majority the best they could do is copy republicans plans. Which is also why the GOP can’t make any legislation to replace it as it’s already their plan.
Which then gets back to the point of the post
Edit, because people still don’t understand they based it on Romneycare
I don’t know that Republicans have ever had a 60 vote majority in the Senate. You need 60 votes to make fundamental changes to the system that the opposition will not support. Things like constitutional amendments.
Sure. But we need to come back to the original question. Why do Democrats need 60 votes to fix something that Republicans didn’t need 60 votes to destroy?
Yes, it takes time to rehire people and rebuild institutional knowledge. But again, let’s get back to the topic at hand. What the hell does that have to do with a 60 vote threshold?
Republicans can destroy a department by zeroing out the budget and firing everyone with a simple majority. Democrats can rebuild it just by refunding it with a simple majority. Obviously it is harder to build than to destroy, but that’s an irrelevant platitude here.
The problem is Democrats often refuse to rebuild things that Republicans destroy, and then folks like you defend them saying that it’s because they never have enough votes. They just need more power, and they’ll be able to solve it, there won’t be a rotating villain of the week this time, we promise!
There is no third option until both a better option arises and one of the two existing parties is weakened enough to be supplanted. We aren’t anywhere close on either front.
We do have a better option: it’s called the Green Party. I do agree that the Democrats are nowhere near weak enough to be replaced, but that could change very rapidly depending upon how the next few years turn out.
The Green Party is not a realistic option. The best they have ever done is 2.7% of the popular vote for president and they have never held a single Senate or House seat. I think the more likely event is that the right splits into MAGA and America First parties, allowing a left supermajority that then splits into Progressive and a traditional Democrat parties.
The Green Party is not a realistic option. The best they have ever done is 2.7% of the popular vote for president and they have never held a single Senate or House seat.
…which is a lot more than any other leftist political party is doing. This is due to how difficult it is to get a party up and running, and then keep it running. Which we Greens have done for decades.
Plenty of people have thought they could do better, and where are those parties now?
It makes a lot more sense to join a party which has already done that hard work, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel.
There is a fly ramming against my window right now. That doesn’t mean it is doing more than the other flies to knock my house down. No leftist party has come anywhere close to challenging Democrat power. All the third parties combined wouldn’t even come close. Throwing a penny into a well and wishing for another party option would be just as effective as supporting the Greens.
Parties do not appear spontaneously. They require work and funding. The fact that you aren’t on board with one tells me you haven’t gotten far enough off the keyboard to do anything more than complain into the void. If you had, you would know from experience that it takes so much work that you’d want to join an existing group. We are once again in precarious times, everyone can sense that we are on the brink of something. What that is, is up to those who organize. Your defeatism hurts you more than I can, not that I want to. I think we want the same thing, and I hope we get it. Solidarity.
It’s funny because that is basically the same argument people used when Social Security was established. A functional society can’t have people just dying in the street. It costs money to fix this, so it is not unreasonable to ask people to pay for it. Everyone needs healthcare eventually whether or not they are insured. People without insurance still get care which raises the prices for everyone who does have insurance. The more people who pay in, the cheaper coverage is for everyone. Making everyone be covered is simply making people pay for what they use. It’s simple economics.
Yeah, I agree private insurance companies suck, but that’s an entirely different problem, i.e.capitslism as a whole.
Must feel weird without the bot network that would upvote your kind of ignorant takes and overall shitty attitude that existed on reddit.
Your “debate style” is very reminiscent of a MAGAts. Maybe start listening and using that brain of yours to gain a wrinkle instead of constantly sticking to your dogma that has helped create the current situation in the U.S.
They bought into fascist propaganda hook, line, and sinker. The fascist playbook has always been to divide the left with infighting so they can’t provide a unified resistance. It has happened over and over again throughout history, but they can’t put aside minor disagreements to fight a literal existential threat.
Republicans turn the wheel counter-clockwise while the Democrats don’t turn it.
The last time Democrats had a filibuster -proof legislative trifecta it was for 3 months and they passed Obamacare. When they don’t have Republicans blocking them every step of the way, they actually do work to improve things. They aren’t perfect by a long shot, but Democrats are the best of two options by far.
The ACA would have passed much faster if they didn’t try “working across the aisle” with the Republicans. If I remember, the original plan was to expand medicare to encompass more people who need it but negotiated to what Mitt Romney passed in his state while governor. Then the Republicans all voted against what they wanted. So the Democrats are either a paid opposition party or so absolutely naive to the dealings of Republicans and keep stepping on that rake. As well instead of making it a stepping stone they don’t really talk about improving it either. Also in that time they could have enshrined abortion rights into law that is harder to overthrow than a supreme court ruling.
No matter how your parse things, the Democrats aren’t good.
I agree, the Democrats aren’t good, but they aren’t actively evil like the Republicans. They are naive, idealistic, and out of touch, but they are the only party that (for the most part) practices democracy.
“Not good” isn’t better than “actively evil” if it consistently shows it does nothing to put itself between the evil and it’s victims, nor does anything to break down the systems of evil when it has the advantage. The modern Democrat politicians are not some newcomer on the political scene, they’ve had their ups and downs over the decades but even when the balance of power is in their favor they mete out “progress” at a minimum only when they have to, tell their constituents “that’s the best we can do”, then applaud themselves like they’ve changed the world. They are absolutely out of touch, not just with their voters, but with the fact MAGA is not the Republican Party of Reagan and Bush that was going to play political pendulum and trade power back and forth every couple of election cycles while having a gentleman’s agreement that bureaucracy and preservation of the system for the benefit of the elite is the goal.
If you don’t think Democrats haven’t been standing in the way of Republicans, you haven’t been paying attention. Democrats blocked the SAVE act which would disenfranchise millions of American citizens, they just successfully blocked DHS funding over ICE, they just blocked $1 billion for Trump’s stupid ballroom, they are blocking the Fair Tax act which would eliminate income tax and the IRS, HR 899 which would eliminate the Department of Education, HR722 which would define life at conception, HR28 which is an anti-trans sports bill, HR129 which would abolish the ATF, and on and on and on.
Why didn’t Biden prosecute Trump for insurrection from Jan. 6th? He still believes you need a Republican party at all, like we need people further right than the Democrats. They could have prevented this entire situation by going after the organizers, of Trump stealing documents alone. But they slow walked us into this.
Nancy Pelosi - we need a strong Republican party
Now I missed that one. Wasn’t that after her husband was attacked?
Don’t forget Obama doing the same thing now
The Pandora box. Once an American president is truly held accountable. Every president can be held accountable.
Because the executive branch doesn’t have the power to prosecute anyone. The legislature tried to impeach Trump over Jan6 but that was blocked by Republicans. The classified documents case was slow-walked by a Trump loyalist judge until he was reelected and became immune from prosecution. The law did go after the organizers and many were hauled only to be pardoned by Trump. Democrats did all the law allowed.
You’re getting confused by the good cop bad cop routine they got going on. The bad cop slaps you and the good cop comes in an gives you and ice pack. They both want to railroad you into confessing to a crime you didn’t commit. Twenty years later they’re going to be laughing it up retired at 55 on a taxpayer funded pension, fishing together and going to each other’s kids’ wedding while you’re still in prison for a crime you didn’t commit.
That’s what they’re doing, the good cop saying aw man he doesn’t need to be so mean, but twenty years later both parties’ politicians are incredibly wealthy and youre making less than you made in 90s in real dollars.
You and them are so out of touch with reality that you both think playing the old political game represents “standing in the way”. Blocking the SAVE act doesn’t do shit when your opponent is gerrymandering the maps in their favor. People will still be able to vote, they’ve just rigged the system so that who votes where will reliably favor them. And in places democrats control they’re playing the same game in their favor instead of fighting to eliminate the concept altogether. Blocking funding for the ballroom isn’t going to stop him from building it, it’s just going to force him to do it illegally, as he done with so many other projects, at which point they resort to grandstanding condemnation and strongly worded letters. They might have prevented abolishing the Department of Education but they have spent decades allowing it to become a tool in the dumbing down of America’s youth to the point it’s now run by a WWE exec, and frankly I’m not sure allowing it to exist in that condition is the better option. Blocking legislation that codifies anti-trans and life at conception beliefs is showmanship when you do nothing to stop the illegal enforcement of those beliefs by jackboots who deny access to healthcare. MAGA is running on action first, normalizing the violence and denial of rights illegally, then trying to make it the legal standard after and Democrats are acting like blocking the legislation somehow prevents what is currently happening from occurring.
Blocking ICE funding doesn’t block ICE. The goon squads weren’t pushed out of communities by press conferences and letters to the president. They were blocked and pushed out by citizens who put their safety and lives on the line, sometimes making the ultimate sacrifice, in defense of strangers. Meanwhile Democratic leaders postured for their next campaign run and took to trolling the regime on social media with witty memes. Your leaders have risked nothing and therefore achieve empty victories while the people they supposedly serve are arrested, beaten, disenfranchised, denied rights, dehumanized, raped, molested, and murdered by a regime that doesn’t give a fuck that what they’re doing is illegal because the legal system is in their hands and standing up to them requires more than saying “no” because they don’t respect personal boundaries. You literally have to block them with force equal to or greater than what they’re coming at you with, just ask Alex Periti.
Like I said, this isn’t the Regan or Bush regime that nominally had some sort of respect for the game of power trades, this is fascism. It’s going to walk over us all whether it has the legal justification and funding to do so or not.
So there is literally nothing that the Democrats could do that would satisfy you short of lining up Republicans and shooting them?
Following the law isn’t “playing a political game”. Giving Republicans an excuse to remove Democrats from power wouldn’t help anyone. Did you even know that there are no more US deportees in Salvadoran prisons? That is because Democrats fought for their freedom. Those people were helped and that’s not nothing. Real resistance isn’t charging in guns blazing. It is showing up every day and saving who you can. Martyrs don’t save anyone.
At this point, no. We’re in the final stages of a game that started in the Nixon era. They’ve had their opportunities to thwart the rise of this and instead have played good bourgeoisie/bad bourgeoisie while making damn sure anyone left of their neoliberal centrism was isolated and neutralized. Yes, I expect our elected representatives to leave their halls of power and put themselves shoulder to shoulder with common folk protesting ICE facilities and in the whistle brigades tracking their movements. I expect them to put themselves between tear gas bombs launched at infants, to take the rubber bullets that would blind teenagers, to take down the grown men that jump out of their trucks to assault a squad of teenage girls, to take the billy club blow directed at a priest, and to eat the bullets unloaded into single moms dropping their kids off at school and off-duty nurses filming the carnage.
I don’t doubt that there’s ICE reckless and emboldened enough to shoot Gavin Newsome or someone like him in the face, but there’s still enough of a risk doing so would spin the situation out of control. Their physical presence at scenes of conflict would turn these confrontations from inconsequential brutality to “FAFO”. Instead we get rescheduled ICE facility inspections with a full camera crew documenting the staged approach, denial of entry, and arrest that is sold as “they tried!”. No they didn’t, they told them they were coming knowing full well what the outcome would be and were politely cuffed without incident. It’s the people in frog costumes that get pepper sprayed up the ass that try without knowing if today’s the day they’ll be brutalized.
There would have been no US citizens to rescue from El Salvadoran prisons in the first place if they hadn’t fucked around for the past 50yrs playing politics. Cleaning up a few drops of blood when their previous inaction is exsanguinating the most vulnerable members isn’t heroic, it’s a PR stunt. Not to mention that regardless of whether someone is a citizen or here legally, the rest of the people rounded up by ICE and shipped to foreign hell holes benefit nothing from these too little, too late “heroics”.
Nobody is going in “guns blazing”, we’re just getting blazed for standing between the day to day, street level violence of the regime. ICE doesn’t care if they’re funded or not, just like lunch mobs didn’t do it for the pay. They’re brutal for the thrill, pay is a bonus. Kill a single mom and call her a “bitch” and your fans will crowdfund you a million bucks. People wouldnt be getting martyred if our leaders hadn’t played politics with our democracy until one side called their bluff and started serving unambiguous fascism that the people in power oppose with lip service and photo op’s. They risk nothing but polling numbers while the people risk their lives and freedom.
Obamacare was the implementation of a 1989 Heritage Foundation plan to implement an individual mandated health care system.
Also by no available metric did Obamacare “improve things”. Healthcare costs rose significantly above the pre-ACA trend, bankruptcy increased, and health outcomes plummeted across nearly all metrics.
Didn’t the ACA get rid of insurers denying coverage based on “pre-existing conditions”?
now they just deny coverage with AI generated reasons and force you to nag and beg for them to pay what they’re obligated to. much better! and before that they just paid some corrupt physician to sit on staff and make up bullshit reasons to deny coverage.
Hey, they were already doing that as their policy well before AI started helping them reject covering things their policy holders need
Yeah I edited in the old method after I posted. Don’t want them trying to blame this all on AI.
Yes but that was also a part of Romneycare, ie the heritage version implemented in MA under Romney being Governor
Sure, but you’re assuming that “coverage” leads to better outcomes. I remember diabetes being one of the big ones at the time and is avery maneagble disease.
So, what was the hospitalization rate before and after? Did it decrease as was promised? Is diabetes unique or does this trend hold for the majority of those “pre-existing conditions”?
Wrong. The number of insured people went up. The uninsured rate dropped to a historic low of 7.7% by 2023. That is a tangible improvement in the lives of millions of Americans.
What good is insurance with a deductible I cannot afford to pay? Mandating people buy shitty insurance is not the win you think it is.
Just because you don’t have insurance doesn’t mean more people don’t have insurance. Obamacare didn’t create high insurance prices. That was happening no matter what. Also remember that Republicans tried to repeal the ACA more than 70 times and stripped several elements from the plan, so of course it isn’t working as well as we would want.
I didn’t question whether more had insurance. I questioned the quality and utility of the insurance they were forced to purchase by penalty of fine. One of the elements the republicans stripped was that fine, which existed entirely as a handout to insurance companies who swore up and down that having to cover preexisting conditions would bankrupt them unless you forced everyone to buy their “product”. (Not that the republicans did it out of any altruism or anything, they just wanted to use that as part of a ploy to repeal the ACA entirely, which failed)
Republicans stripped the fine because that hurt the ACA. Insurance depends on healthy people paying in to cover the sick. The bigger the pool of insured, the lower the costs for everyone. This all falls apart if young, healthy people just chance it and skip having insurance. If you make people pay a fine even if they don’t have insurance, this removes the incentive to skip getting insurance (which keeps prices down).
You are assuming that having insurance is correlated to physical or financial health and is therefore an improvement.
Rationally that makes sense, that’s what it’s supposed to do. Empirically the data shows an overall negative correlation between private healthcare rates and general healthcare outcomes.
It’s true that the uninsured rate went from 17% pre-ACA(2010 when it was signed) to 10%(2016 2 years after it was implemented at an uninsured local minima) which is ~18 million people. However in that same timespan average annual health expenditures, for the entire US population, doubled from $1600 per person per year to $3200. Pre-ACA trend would’ve resulted in ~$2200.
That’s a difference of ~4.87 trillion dollars stolen by “healthcare” corporations from individuals over the last 14 years.
You’re making the point for us. Obamacare is a 90s conservative proposal, it also completely killed the possibility of single payer healthcare for a generation. Republicans ratchet things right and then Democrats lock it in, great example you provided thank you.
Yup. And they did a switch to remove the public option, since they had an obvious ability with 60 votes. They had Lieberman play the rotating villain, and removed the public option so they could supposedly get GOP votes.
When they got no GOP votes, they passed it anyways, through reconciliation - but didn’t put the public option back in. They literally chose to leave it out.
Not only a 90s conservative proposal, it was written by the Heritage Foundation. Democrats have never found legislation written by them that they didn’t love.
So keep Republicans in power and ratchet that shit down from your couch? Put a clamp on your own balls, it’s the smart thing to do.
Either way you get Republican legislation
So logically take the speed run? Ok I guess.
Yeah i guess two parties is a law of nature so we have to deal with it like we deal with thermodynamics
Obamacare was a compromise because single payer didn’t have the votes. If you think single payer was happening at any point in the last generation, I have a bridge to sell you.
Obamacare was a compromise between sucking the insurance companies dicks and fondling their balls while you suck their dicks.
Hate it all you want, but millions of people have gotten healthcare they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to. That’s just an objective fact.
Those people always could have purchased health insurance. The difference after Obamacare was they would be penalized if they didn’t. That’s just an objective fact.
Obamacare subsidizes healthcare specifically for people who couldn’t afford it before. The only people it penalized were rich people who refused to get healthcare. The fee was waived for most.
The only people, huh? As someone at the lower end of middle class, my premiums doubled every year for the first 4 years of Obamacare. When it got to $800 a month I cancelled it and took the penalty instead. Fuck off with your propaganda and lies.
Compromising with Republicans/right leaning dems on anything is a clear sign of failure, not success.
Democracy is based on compromise. You can’t always get exactly what you want. Sometimes getting a small improvement is better than stagnation.
Why do Democrats have to compromise with Republicans but Republicans never have to compromise with Democrats?
Why must they work with the party that has shifted towards fascism? Why must they compromise on half baked laws that don’t do the things people wanted, but corporations got what they demanded?
Why do the Democrats work with fascists while refusing to stand up for the good of the country?
And then their sycophants will tell you that it’s a normal thing to give the people who want to bring back American laws from the 1950s what they want, and you’re a idealist fool if you think we should advocate for good laws.
The best to all of that is Democrats generally operate on good faith and Republicans don’t. It is easy to hold your ground if you don’t care who it hurts.
Funny that right wing policies never require compromise, something you state is essential.
If they didn’t compromise, being gay or trans would be illegal, abortion would be banned nationally, and only white Christian men would vote.
Of course, the compromise is the republican solution from a decade earlier. What other choice did we have?
Romney may have signed it, but keep in mind Massachusetts is a blue state and the state Senate at that time had 35 Dem seats and only 5 Republican. It was a bipartisan bill, but mostly Democrat.
Continuing with the status quo would have left millions without health insurance, including many with pre-existing conditions who desperately needed it. It wasn’t perfect, but it was an improvement.
It was written by the heritage foundation, it was the best way to maximize profits for the health insurance industry.
Yeah my life is so much better now that i have to pay a copay on top of my premiums instead of not having insurance and just having a regular old pay at the end of a visit. And Oh wow, I get a free flu shot and checkup once a year for my $5,000 a year in premiums. Oh and if i have a major health emergency i van declare bankruptcy on the $15000 deductible instead of declaring bankruptcy on the full cost of the surgery. Neat!
There’s a reason republicans never repealed obamacare, because it makes the health insurance companies too much money.
It’s really amazing how those people who only use ACA/Obamacare as a shinying accomplishment know absolutely nothing about it
The idea that Romneycare was written by the Heritage Foundation is a myth repeated based on the Michael Moore documentary Sicko. It’s not true.
https://prospect.org/2014/01/03/no-obamacare-republican-proposal/
Let’s say you didn’t have insurance and were just counting on paying out of pocket. You are just living your life and BAM, you have a massive heart attack. Turns out you had an undiagnosed heart defect and there is nothing that could have prevented it or predicted it. You’re taken by ambulance to the hospital where you have open heart surgery and where you stay for weeks to recover. You get a huge bill that you can’t pay. What happens?
The doctors and nurses did a lot of work to keep you alive and they deserve to get paid. The hospital has to keep the lights on. You filing for bankruptcy doesn’t change this. That is why everyone needs to have insurance. This kind of thing can happen to anyone at any time. As a society we can’t just let people die if they can’t afford treatment. Even if you take for-profit companies out of the equation, the whole system collapses with millions of people unable to pay.
That is why everyone has to pay premiums. Part of that payment is for vaccinations and check ups, but part of it is coverage in case catastrophic shit happens. Healthy people get the least back out of the system, but nobody knows if they will still be healthy tomorrow. The bigger the pool of healthy people paying into the system, the less each person needs to pay to cover the people whose luck ran out.
Oh wow well yeah if it’s literally impossible for a country to provide healthcare then yeah i guess obamacare is literally the only plan that will ever work
Which is why it’s not an accomplishment for dems. Even with that brief super majority the best they could do is copy republicans plans. Which is also why the GOP can’t make any legislation to replace it as it’s already their plan.
Which then gets back to the point of the post
Edit, because people still don’t understand they based it on Romneycare
https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/romneycare-vs-obamacare-key-similarities-differences/
https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/10/23/451200436/mitt-romney-finally-takes-credit-for-obamacare
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2010/apr/01/barack-obama/obama-says-heritage-foundation-source-health-excha/
That is so wrong it is astounding. If the ACA is the GOP plan, why did they try and repeal it over 70 times?
The Republican plan is for the poor to die because they believe in social eugenics.
It’s literally Romneycare with a few minor tweaks.
They keep trying because they want to break the government and kill people.
And Romneycare was basically put together by Massachusetts Democrats. Romney just signed it.
Romneycare was also based on the heritage foundation plan for insurance. So again it’s still the dems only implementing a republican plan.
Also Romney didn’t sign it which is one reason it’s hilarious it got his name and he’s proud of it.
When was the last time Republicans had a 60-vote majority in the Senate? Why do you need 60 votes to fix that which didn’t take 60 votes to break?
The answer to that is literally 1925. That’s how much the Democrats suck.
I don’t know that Republicans have ever had a 60 vote majority in the Senate. You need 60 votes to make fundamental changes to the system that the opposition will not support. Things like constitutional amendments.
If you don’t even know the vote threshold required for a constitutional amendment, maybe don’t speculate on paths to political change…
I know you need 2/3. 60 votes isn’t the cap. It still allows wide systemic change, but 2/3 makes it more durable.
Sure. But we need to come back to the original question. Why do Democrats need 60 votes to fix something that Republicans didn’t need 60 votes to destroy?
Because it’s always easier to destroy than to build. It takes months to build a house, but one can be torn down in a day. That’s just life.
Yes, it takes time to rehire people and rebuild institutional knowledge. But again, let’s get back to the topic at hand. What the hell does that have to do with a 60 vote threshold?
Republicans can destroy a department by zeroing out the budget and firing everyone with a simple majority. Democrats can rebuild it just by refunding it with a simple majority. Obviously it is harder to build than to destroy, but that’s an irrelevant platitude here.
The problem is Democrats often refuse to rebuild things that Republicans destroy, and then folks like you defend them saying that it’s because they never have enough votes. They just need more power, and they’ll be able to solve it, there won’t be a rotating villain of the week this time, we promise!
Then its time for a third option.
There is no third option until both a better option arises and one of the two existing parties is weakened enough to be supplanted. We aren’t anywhere close on either front.
We do have a better option: it’s called the Green Party. I do agree that the Democrats are nowhere near weak enough to be replaced, but that could change very rapidly depending upon how the next few years turn out.
The Green Party is not a realistic option. The best they have ever done is 2.7% of the popular vote for president and they have never held a single Senate or House seat. I think the more likely event is that the right splits into MAGA and America First parties, allowing a left supermajority that then splits into Progressive and a traditional Democrat parties.
…which is a lot more than any other leftist political party is doing. This is due to how difficult it is to get a party up and running, and then keep it running. Which we Greens have done for decades.
Plenty of people have thought they could do better, and where are those parties now?
It makes a lot more sense to join a party which has already done that hard work, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel.
There is a fly ramming against my window right now. That doesn’t mean it is doing more than the other flies to knock my house down. No leftist party has come anywhere close to challenging Democrat power. All the third parties combined wouldn’t even come close. Throwing a penny into a well and wishing for another party option would be just as effective as supporting the Greens.
Parties do not appear spontaneously. They require work and funding. The fact that you aren’t on board with one tells me you haven’t gotten far enough off the keyboard to do anything more than complain into the void. If you had, you would know from experience that it takes so much work that you’d want to join an existing group. We are once again in precarious times, everyone can sense that we are on the brink of something. What that is, is up to those who organize. Your defeatism hurts you more than I can, not that I want to. I think we want the same thing, and I hope we get it. Solidarity.
Obamacare forced every American to purchase private health insurance. It wasn’t a victory for anyone but United and Aetna.
It’s funny because that is basically the same argument people used when Social Security was established. A functional society can’t have people just dying in the street. It costs money to fix this, so it is not unreasonable to ask people to pay for it. Everyone needs healthcare eventually whether or not they are insured. People without insurance still get care which raises the prices for everyone who does have insurance. The more people who pay in, the cheaper coverage is for everyone. Making everyone be covered is simply making people pay for what they use. It’s simple economics.
Yeah, I agree private insurance companies suck, but that’s an entirely different problem, i.e.capitslism as a whole.
Social security doesn’t force people to purchase a product from an independent, for profit company.
It’s a simple gift to the insurance industry.
So then argue against a for-profit healthcare system. Don’t get pissed at the government for trying to fix a problem.
I will always get pissed at a government that pretends to be fixing a problem by forcing me to buy a product from a for-profit company.
You can just pay the fee for not having insurance (which hasn’t existed in 7 years) so you aren’t forced to buy from a for-profit company anyway.
That’s what I ended up doing, around 2014 when my premiums rose to $800 a month.
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Must feel weird without the bot network that would upvote your kind of ignorant takes and overall shitty attitude that existed on reddit.
Your “debate style” is very reminiscent of a MAGAts. Maybe start listening and using that brain of yours to gain a wrinkle instead of constantly sticking to your dogma that has helped create the current situation in the U.S.
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Democrats are fascists. Nazis did5 think they were the bad guys either
Thank you for proving my point :D
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lol
Democrats are fascist
They bought into fascist propaganda hook, line, and sinker. The fascist playbook has always been to divide the left with infighting so they can’t provide a unified resistance. It has happened over and over again throughout history, but they can’t put aside minor disagreements to fight a literal existential threat.
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The Ratchet Effect.
Can you make this into a trolley problem or horseshoe diagram for us? Many people here can only think with that model.