ACA is Great Society all over again. Taxes and regulatory burden for people who work. Subsidies and anti-employment for the jobless.
Aggregate, I think you're a smart guy. But your continuous characterizations of the ACA as a Great Society plan is just repetition of partisan-manufactured nonsense. First of all, though I know these links have been posted many times on this forum, I have to post them again. Except for the differences between Medicaid expansion, extended coverage for dependents and tort reform provisions, ACA, including the mandate, state exchanges, purchasing subsidies for poors, preventive care regulations and Medicaid Advantage plan subsidy cuts, copied extensive amounts from the '93 Senate Bill drafted by Chafee and co-sponsored by 19 Pubs, and defended in the linked interview by former Minnesota Pub Durenberger. Is it your contention that the '93 Senate Republican caucus was on a Lyndon Johnson trip?
http://kaiserhealthnews.org/022310-bill-comparison/http://kaiserhealthnews.org/durenberger-1993-gop-bill-q-and-a/The vast majority of ACA's provisions were Republican boilerplate from the late '80's/early '90's all the way till Romney put his weight behind the Mass. bill, which was itself designed by the same consulted he hired to construct it who ended up working on ACA. ACA was a compromise bill, and Pubs throwing all these ridiculous names at it just masks both how much their own fingerprints are all over it and how, unless they get 110% of what they want at the time and only that, they pan any comprehensive health insurance bill any Dem puts forward as being socialist. Medicare for everyone who opts in--that's a Great Society program, and it's the one Obama
blew off so he could put ACA forward. More than that, he had to be pushed into endorsing ACA, because at the beginning he opposed a mandate for all and preferred a mandate to cover children only. More than that, the "public option," an additional subsidy for poors that had an income cap attached, that was endorsed by Obama got axed by
Senate Dems--was that another LBJ tactic? Apart from the Medicaid expansion, the ACA effectively lands boatloads of new customers into the waiting ships of private insurers in exchange for some coverage regulations. FDR and LBJ wouldn't have done that kind of thing--they were into creating social insurance programs directly and thoroughly financed by taxation and run by government boards.
Just because damning labels catch on with a public that doesn't bother to study legislation doesn't make the labels accurate. And, every once in a while, because this issue ticks me off, I'm going to continue to say so in my usual long-winded way. I don't like ACA; it did get fractured into an incoherent and inadequately financed mess by the time it became law, and in the long run, it won't work. But by the time it fails, and the country is drowning even more desparately in red ink than it is now as uncontrolled health care cost inflation meets the perfect demographic storm, the only ways to fix it will be through reforms that will make you and the rest of the blue avatars here wish you could dial the clock back to 1993, or 2009. Playing "gotcha" might be fun now, and it might even win you some elections along the way, but the long run consequences of all our failures, Dem and Pub, to strike a reasonable compromise when we had the chance will not be pretty.
