Republicans Increasingly Worried About Obamacare Repeal Without A Ready Replacement. Duh.
"Let's Just Say It: The Republicans Are The Problem"
Conservative Scholar, Norm Ornstein
My Facebook Comment Re: The Republican Party's Non-Existent Alternative To Obamacare
My Facebook Comment Re: The Republican Party's Non-Existent Alternative To Obamacare
Poll: More Americans Now Support Obamacare Than Oppose It
Donald Trump Promises ‘Insurance for Everybody’ With Obamacare Replacement Plan
Canadian Letter To The Editor: "You Americans Have No Idea How Good Obama Is"
http://paxonbothhouses. blogspot.com/2014/11/canadian- letter-to-editor-you- americans.html
The Real Story of Obamacare's Birth
One reason for the continued resistance to the Affordable Care Act is a badly distorted narrative of how it became law.
Norm Ornstein, July 6, 2015
The U.S. Supreme Court’s remarkable 6-3 decision in King v. Burwell saves the Affordable Care Act from evisceration, although Obamacare will undoubtedly face a continuing pattern of guerrilla attacks from Congress, the courts, and Republican governors and state legislatures. Still, as many observers have pointed out, the core elements of the plan, including the exchanges, the subsidies, the individual mandate, the expansion of coverage in family plans to children 26 and under, and the elimination of lifetime limits and of preexisting conditions as bars to coverage, are almost certainly here to stay.This is, of course, a huge victory for President Obama. But the passage, implementation, and ratification of Obamacare continue to be plagued by a widespread belief that it was tarnished by the way it was proposed and debated. A raft of reporters, commentators, and politicians argue that the president made a huge mistake in taking up healthcare at the beginning of his term, before building relationships of trust with Republicans, and then compounded that error by jamming it through quickly without any Republican input or efforts to find common ground.
In the aftermath of King v. Burwell, it is worth going back and recounting what actually happened leading up to the enactment of Obamacare, and reflect a little bit on what might, and what should, happen going forward.
Did Obama Leap Rashly to Consider Healthcare Instead of Focusing on Jobs or the Economy?
There is no doubt that the president made healthcare reform a top early priority. There was good reason for doing so; past experience, including that of the Clinton health-reform plan, showed that waiting to pass a major social-policy change, in the absence of a great crisis, is a fool’s errand. A president’s momentum, his public support, and the backing of his party peak early, and major social-policy change by definition shakes up the status quo, creating losers along with potential winners and an even larger number of those unsettled by change. The longer presidents wait, the greater the likelihood that their opposition will mobilize and exploit uneasy voters. And the closer midterm elections loom, the more nervousness builds among lawmakers from the president’s party.
So to accomplish a goal that had eluded a slew of previous presidents, it was necessary to start early. (Alan: In 1912, Teddy Roosevelt became the first American president to propose universal healthcare. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/mar/05/barack-obama/Obama-goes-back-to-his-Republican-roots-on-health-/) But it is also the case that the White House and Democrats in Congress did not lead with healthcare reform. They began, instead, with a series of actions aimed at the broken economy, including the auto bailout and the major stimulus package, which included a series of programs to help financially strapped Americans, and to get more back to work.
The Facts Are In: The Republican Party Is Terrible For Prosperity But Unparalleled For Catastrophe
The Cringeworthy Truth About Bush Tax Cuts And (Non-Existent) Job Growth
The Hard, Central Truth Of Contemporary Conservatism
The hard, central "fact" of contemporary "conservatism" is its insistence on a socio-economic threshold above which people deserve government assistance, and below which people deserve to die.
The sooner the better.
Unless conservatives are showing n'er-do-wells The Door of Doom, they just don't "feel right."
To allay this chthonic anxiety, they resort to Human Sacrifice, hoping that spilled blood will placate "the angry gods," including the one they've made of themselves. http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/09/harvard-study-45000-americans-die.html
Having poked their eyes out, they fail to see that self-generated wrath creates "the gods" who hold them thrall.
The hard, central "fact" of contemporary "conservatism" is its insistence on a socio-economic threshold above which people deserve government assistance, and below which people deserve to die.
The sooner the better.
Unless conservatives are showing n'er-do-wells The Door of Doom, they just don't "feel right."
To allay this chthonic anxiety, they resort to Human Sacrifice, hoping that spilled blood will placate "the angry gods," including the one they've made of themselves. http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/09/harvard-study-45000-americans-die.html
Having poked their eyes out, they fail to see that self-generated wrath creates "the gods" who hold them thrall.
The Evangelical Persecution Complex (Projection's Finest Hour?)
http://paxonbothhouses. blogspot.com/2014/08/the- evangelical-persecution- complex.html
Almost "to a man," contemporary "conservatives" have apotheosized themselves and now -- sitting on God's usurped throne -- are rabid to pass Final Judgment.
Self-proclaimed Christians, eager to thrust "the undeserving" through The Gates of Hell, are the very people most likely to cross its threshold.
Almost "to a man," contemporary "conservatives" have apotheosized themselves and now -- sitting on God's usurped throne -- are rabid to pass Final Judgment.
Self-proclaimed Christians, eager to thrust "the undeserving" through The Gates of Hell, are the very people most likely to cross its threshold.
"The Hard, Central Truth Of Contemporary Conservatism"
Did Obama Jam Through the Affordable Care Act Without Consulting Republicans or Working With Them to Find Bipartisan Cooperation?
The Obama White House took a number of lessons from the Clinton experience with healthcare policy. First, do not rely on your own, detailed White House plan as the starting point for negotiations in Congress; let Congress work out the structure and details from your goals. Second, try from an early point to get buy-in from the major actors in the health world, including insurers, physicians, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals and other providers, to at least defuse or minimize their opposition. Third, recognize that the House and Senate are very different institutions, and let each work through its own ideas and plan before finding ways to merge the two into a single bill. Obama and his White House executed those lessons brilliantly.
In the House, that lesson was not applicable this time; Eric Cantor and House Republicans had already made it crystal clear that they were not cooperating under any circumstances. There, Democrats debated the issue for several months, but mostly amongst themselves, before introducing a detailed bill that emerged from committees in July 2009 and passing it through the House later in the year with just one Republican vote.
"Let's Just Say It: The Republicans Are The Problem"
Conservative Scholar, Norm Ornstein
What became clear before September, when the talks fell apart, is that Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell had warned both Grassley and Enzi that their futures in the Senate would be much dimmer if they moved toward a deal with the Democrats that would produce legislation to be signed by Barack Obama.
"Let's Just Say It: The Republicans Are The Problem"
Conservative Scholar, Norm Ornstein
Obama could have moved earlier to blow the whistle on the faux negotiations; he did not, as he held out hope that a plan that was fundamentally built on Republican ideas would still, in the end, garner at least some Republican support. (Alan: Emphasis mine.) Obama and Senate Democratic leaders held their fire even as Grassley and Enzi, in the negotiations, fought for some serious changes in a plan that neither would ever consider supporting in the end. If Obama had, as conventional wisdom holds, jammed health reform through at the earliest opportunity, there would have been votes in the Senate Finance Committee in June or July of 2009, as there were in the House. Instead, the votes came significantly later. (Alan: If Obama had jammed "Obamacare" down the throat of the American people in 2009, he would have lost to Mitt Romney in 2012 and his plan would have been repealed without so much as a replacement in waiting.)
To be sure, the extended negotiations via the Gang of Six made a big difference in the ultimate success of the reform, but for other reasons. When Republicans like Hatch and Grassley began to write op-eds and trash the individual mandate, which they had earlier championed, as unconstitutional and abominable, it convinced conservative Democrats in the Senate that every honest effort to engage Republicans in the reform effort had been tried and cynically rebuffed.
Trump Will Go Full-Throttle Fascist Following The 1st Major Terror Attack On American Soil. Putin Knows This And Is Both Able And Eager To Make It Happen
The delays engendered in large part by the extended negotiations with Republicans in the Gang of Six, meant in the end that the normal legislative process—in which separate bills passed by House and Senate would be reconciled in a conference committee—was not going to work in this case. When the vacancy caused by the death of Senator Edward M. Kennedy was filled via a January 2010 special election by Republican Scott Brown, Democrats lost their 60th vote—and the McConnell strategy meant that there was no way, no matter what changes Democrats were willing to make in the final package, that there would be a single Republican vote to get them past the filibuster hurdle. Hence, the fallback to using reconciliation to bypass the filibuster in the Senate, and the inability to smooth out the rough edges and awkward language in the final bill that was enacted.At the same time, the overheated rhetoric, reinforced by conservative talk radio, cable television, blogs, and social media, has created a visceral backlash. It has kept every Republican presidential candidate calling for “root and branch” repeal of every element of Obamacare, prevented many states from expanding insurance to millions of people who need it via Medicaid, and erased any hope for the foreseeable future of bipartisan efforts to revise or tweak the law to make it more effective.
The Data Prove That Pro-Life Countries Have FAR More Abortions Than Pro-Choice Countries
Abortion, Donald Trump, Conservative Christians And Marley's Chains
Head, Heart And Belly Tell Me That "Christian" "Conservatives" Are Spellbound By Essential Evil
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2017/01/head-heart-and-belly-tell-me-that.htmlInterestingly, even Obama has said that Obamacare was drawn from Romneycare, the Massachusetts plan championed by then-Governor Mitt Romney.
Thanks in part to the overheated rhetoric demonizing the plan, guerrilla efforts to undermine its implementation and disrupt the delivery of its services continue apace.
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