This is because it was the shitty compromise required to pass the 1948 NHS Act – rather, it was the shitty compromise required to get the British Medical Association on board.

And just how would Obama ‘deal with it’? What would make the conservadems support a bill that progressives support? This has yet to be made clear, by anyone. Because of the makeup of the Senate and its idiotic rules, a better and more progressive bill CANNOT pass. What evidence do you have otherwise? What procedure can get it done (outside of reconciliation, which would have a sunset provision and address only financial elements, not regulations) that will be not be tripped up by a Lieberman or a Nelson or a Landrieu or a Conrad or the Republicans?
What is the option?
If this bill does not pass, that is, I believe, it. It will not come up again for decades.
The Democrats apparently are in quite the pickle. Pass the bill and lose seats. Don’t pass the bill and lose seats. Lovely.

This. A million, million times – this.

You really aren’t supposed to make this point. Tantrums about artificial divides and who to blame for Obama and Democratic failures (the consensus here is, ironically, the DFH) will ensue.

Be a good pet and take what your betters give you and stop “whining” about it.

Else it’ll all be your fault that corporate stooges, including Obama, delivered up a crapfest.

It’ll be your fault, you see, because you noticed this fact.

It won’t rest on the shoulders of our alleged betters. The onus will belong to you.

Angry bloggers who just want a bill passed say so…

Now, make that square with this mandate.

I’d like to, I can’t. Ron Wyden can go fuck himself if this mandate stays in. I will work to Primary him and I will work for a fucking Republican because I’d rather have a known enemy than an ally like that.

I never took this thing seriously, all I ever demanded was that mandates require choice. Fuck them and fuck the idea that Halliburton named Aetna is a good thing. If you don’t get how bad an idea that is, then there is little reason to discuss shit.

The cost containment ideas are risky and unproven (both because some of them are outside of the ken of more socialized first world systems or because the size of the health care system we are talking about reforming here is unimaginably large). As such they are structured as trial balloons and therefore have no score in the CBO estimates (they’re trials used to determine CBO estimates of future legislation).

You’ve overstated it a bit. Some of the ideas are unproven and are trials, others are quite straightforward. Killing off Medicare Advantage isn’t exactly risky – it didn’t even exist most of the life of Medicare. And a lot of the other efforts are direct clones off of other national health care systems.

I mean, if all of the containment ideas were risky and not in the CBO score, how did the score come back with $650B in savings over 10 years?

The progressives who want to blow the whole bill up now hope that this forces them to either adopt an untested cost containment measure or force us into a European or Canadian type all-or-nothing freakout (either now in the form of reconciliation, since reconciliation can only be for budgetary purposes anyway, or in the future because of a crisis).

This sounds like a giant game of political chicken with 40 million people’s lives. The evidence is overwhelmingly that the thing most reconciliation will most likely result in the wrong things being cut from the bill and will definitely shift the status quo away from Universal Coverage (since it will engender a “sunset” provision on the final bill). I can’t speak to the future, but in the near term the Democratic Party is looking at a modest loss in the the midterm elections no matter what happens, and history points to a future bills being weaker, not stronger.

…

@dadanarchist:

what major piece of social legislation, regulation, reform or other act or law has been passed since LBJ that has benefitted the people over the powerful?

Your example of minimum wage is a good one—and a baffling one. I should note that to that specifically there has been a lot of movement on this done at the local level, but will agree that this is because there has been a near standstill of this nationally. Besides the obvious fact of having a pretty conservative Democratic president and very conservative Republican presidents during the years you mention, I’ll add that we also had to contend with the fall of the unions and the middle class being put on life support during those years. Not sure the causality, but it goes loads to explaining why we haven’t seen movement there.

Also you sell the Civil Rights Act short economically. Anti-discrimination laws have a huge economic impact in the short-term economic calculus we are talking here (just ask Hooters, or that wedding photographer in New Mexico who refused to shoot a wedding because the couple was gay). Sure, overall in the long term this has been great for business in the form of a much larger labor supply and more discretionary spending for families (as well as creating economic needs that were previous outside it: like needs for diswashing machines, housekeepers, day care, etc.) But by that same argument, there is no doubt that in the long term, universal health care (and any steps in that direction in the form of cost containment) will be good for business as a whole. They’re the ones really paying for these cadillac plans right now, for instance.

As for other examples, Medicare and Social Security are but two examples that have benefitted the people over the powerful. In fact, because of the way labor is inelastic, nearly your entire medical subsidy and social security tax is effectively paid by your employer no matter what the nominal law says, so there is a very large economic reason businesses should be against it.

While I’m not familiar with it, I’d probably add the disability act. I know my SDI in California is considered quite large and a lot of businesses claim that it is onerous and encouraging companies to leave the state—and yet I haven’t seen any real movement to eliminate it.

Which just repeats the old adage, it’s harder to take something away once you’ve got it, than to give it when you never had it. In fact, that adage is codified in how the institutions of the American political process.

In the end, that’s what the health care resolution is about. It’s about changing the status quo so we have it and daring a future Republican majority to take it away.

And that—making health care a right, not a luxury, is why I’m for the greatest entitlement program in over a generation, despite its flaws.

That’s how this debate is like the Iraq debate. The “liberal hawks” kept on babbling about Saddam, about how awesome it would be if Saddam were gone, about all the threats he’s made to the region. Whenever anybody said “uh, wait, this is terrible and is going to make things worse”, they would just circle back to Saddam, call the critics loonies or hippies or commies or even traitors, and get right back on Bush’s war train.

Well, Bush’s little adventure in the middle east did get rid of Saddam. Eventually. He’s no longer going to threaten anybody. But few people are so feverish these days as to think that, because of that one thing, the other horrible things that came from the Iraq war are somehow not worth discussion.

The medicaid expansion, increased health insurance regulation, and subsidies (though they won’t last) are good things. No doubt. But if the rest of this thing is terrible, then it’s terrible. And if you’re honest with yourself, and admit that there’s a line that you wouldn’t cross, then perhaps you could find a way to stop hurling profanity when someone else reaches theirs.

Tell me about it. WalMart will stop hiring $7 an hour workers and only pay employees $60K or more so they won’t qualify for subsidies. The outrage! We’re liberals and we won’t stand for this!

We are so fucked.

But instead, progressives get this sort of condescending bullshit thrown in their faces.

Sorry, John, but this is pathetic. What progressives are (belated, finally) realizing is that power is always held by the guy who is willing to walk away from the table. That’s why Joe had power in the first place.

That’s also why opposing this makes sense. This is bad legislation. Period. It “insures everybody” by forcing everybody to buy terrible insurance, taxes one-fifth of employer plans as “cadillacs”, provides enormous incentives to build regional monopolies and cartels, signals that regulation and oversight will be a joke, and doesn’t even prevent rescission, thanks to that monster “fraud” loophole. It doesn’t “let the insurance companies win” because they have new customers, it “lets the insurance companies win” because it turns them into rentiers.

And because it IS so terrible, it’s a red line. If progressives let this abomination pass, they’ll let everything and anything pass. They will have shown the Dems and the world that there is literally nothing you could do to get them to walk. You can take them for granted, completely, forever.

Progressives were tired of being powerless under the Republicans, so they worked their asses off to get the Dems into power. If they’re powerless under the Dems, too, they aren’t going to suck it up, and they sure as hell aren’t going to “Deal with it.” Tell them to piss off, they’ll piss off.

YOU deal with it.

The bill is massive. Until Lieberman stuck his dick in this, the Democrats really had no incentive to talk about the bill much at all – get it passed and then talk about it. Now the left have allowed themselves to be played by Lieberman, the Dems may talk about it more, but the guts of the bill is really fucking boring. It’s not radical or sexy, it’s very progressive and very pragmatic.

The left apparently doesn’t care about that – they’re clearly MUCH more interested in fucking over the insurance companies (understandable, but at the same time somewhat counterproductive) and waving their foam finger and so they just gloss over the practical bits. Honestly, the left has been functionally worthless in this effort because they dumped so much energy into something that was so easy for the right to kill off, and the left responded with the predictable outrage against the wrong target because they had all their energy devoted to this one little thing, and ignored the rest of the bill.

“The provision requires employers who hire people who receive government subsidies for buying individual insurance to pay substantial penalties. This would encourage employers to avoid hiring low and medium income people who qualify for subsidies and particularly discourage them from hiring people with children, since those people would get subsidies at higher income levels.”

So, in other words, you want the government to continue allowing Wal-Mart to dump their low-paid employees into the Medicaid system instead of requiring them to provide their employees with affordable insurance. You prefer to continue to have taxpayers fund health insurance for Wal-Mart employees rather than have Wal-Mart pay for the healthcare of its own employees.

I’m realizing that a huge number of people using scare tactics have absolutely no fucking idea what they’re talking about and have no clue why certain provisions—like “let’s not let Wal-Mart duck their responsibilities to their employees anymore”—are in the bill. So they see scary, scary things in the bill that they don’t understand and they freak the hell out because they have no clue what they’re talking about.

Geez, I think I’m going to have to step away soon, myself. The rank ignorance and fearmongering is really starting to get to me.