Monday, February 10, 2014
Obamacare Chuckle
The rabid Right has made much of a Congressional Budget Office analysis that upwards of 2-million Americans might give up their jobs due to Obamacare. The Right depicted it as those people somehow losing their jobs. What the CBO was actually getting at was that Obamacare made it possible for people who hated their jobs but stuck with them out of fear of being left without any healthcare to finally quit.
The Right would have been against that, too. Emancipation sounds like rebellion to them.
ReplyDeleteNot that Obamacare doesn't suck. It's originally a Republican plan that came out of a right wing "think tank" after all. They just had to disown it when a Democrat went for it. And that gave them a chance, the "Overton Window" having been moved decisively to the right by Obama, to get even more insane. So now Obamacare looks good compared to what the wingnuts have been enabled to spout since Obama redefined their previous position as the centre.
ReplyDeleteBut it's still pretty goddamn crappy, a "reform" managing to be in many ways worse than the previous status quo despite what an astounding clusterfuck the previous status quo was.
Oddly enough it was a Republican, Lincoln, who forced through emancipation. Of course Lincoln wouldn't recognize the GOP of today. He would probably even find the Dems too far rightwing for him to bear.
ReplyDeleteThere are some, PLG, who see Obamacare as a 'camel's nose' that will lead to genuine, universal (single payor) healthcare in the near to mid-future.
Wasn't Nixon in favour of universal healthcare? My how times have changed.
ReplyDeletePeople who are fooling themselves, you mean? Obamacare relies squarely on the private insurance companies. It actually increases subsidies to them. Public option was carefully taken off the table early. Obamacare increases the proportion of people who have some kind of health insurance, but mostly by forcing them to buy it from private insurers. Where's the nose of public involvement?
ReplyDeleteDon't get me wrong, there are some beneficial regulations imposed on the private sector providers by Obamacare, making it a bit harder for them to dick around with cherrypicking who they'll insure. But even that is just an attempt to make the private-dominated system more bearable, rather than to reorient away from it.
And this is only to be expected, because Obama gets major donations from the companies involved. I've never seen any indication that Obama is the type to bite the hand that feeds him.
Side note: Nixon did a number of really surprisingly left-wing things. And his legacy on the environment is really positive. But the health care thing is maybe a bit of a myth. Talking of camels' noses . . . there's tape of him talking to advisor John Ehrlichman about health care plans and bringing in HMOs. He says "You know I'm not too keen on any of these damn medical plans", but then Ehrlichman is like "This is a private enterprise one", which appeals to Nixon, and then explains how Edgar Kaiser's Permanente is run for profit and how "All the incentives are towards less medical care, because the less care they give them, the more money they make."
ReplyDeleteNixon's reaction is "Not bad."
So there may have been an appearance that Nixon was bringing in universal health care, but I think it was somewhat a mirage.
@ PLG - Nothing Nixon did was, at that time, considered particularly progressive, much less "left wing." What you are observing is simply how far to the right the political centre has shifted since Reagan. David Gergen has some fascinating reflections on the toxification of the Republican movement.
ReplyDeleteSure, fair enough. Nixon was a dick and his intentions were generally not good; I can well imagine that much of what he did was along the lines of "How little can we get away with given the general political climate?"
ReplyDeleteStill, I mean, there wasn't an EPA or a Clean Water act before his administration, and there was after.
Nixon certainly deserves credit for his legislative initiatives but, as a Republican, he'd be unelectable today. They're even turning on Reagan now. Today they're as mad as March hares in their rejection of logic and science. They will not be constrained by reality. That has a more than passing similarity to lunacy.
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