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Comment by ethbro | Hacker News Reader

A lot of the failures of the law I put on Republicans. They knew it was going to pass, and yet they decided to ignore it for political reasons instead of working to fix some of its broken provisions.

https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_...

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  A lot of the failures of the law I put on Republicans.

You mean, the Republicans who were not allowed to see the bill at all before having to vote on it?

It's hard to fix something you aren't allowed to read, let alone introduce amendments to.[0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hV-05TLiiLU

EDIT: added Pelosi quote video link

It'd be interesting to see what participation and premiums looked like if they hadn't undermined the risk corridors.

That place you get your information from. It stinks.

Look up: Gang of Six affordable care act.

The HCR bill included 6 core planks of previous Republican health care bills, and the Democrats accepted and incorporated 161 amendments to the bill from Republicans.

http://www.salon.com/2010/02/23/hcr_amendments/ http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/02/five_com...

Your manners need work.

The article you quote is from a month before the final version of the bill was even prepared (H.R. 3590), let alone submitted for vote.

Bills in progress mean nothing, especially to that Democrat leadership, who often used the gut-and-amend procedure to completely redo legislation on the fly, avoiding rules regarding which committee(s) a bill must traverse.

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/the-context-behind-nancy-pelosis-...

Interesting, so the law passed with zero Republican support but yet it is their fault for all of it's problems. Maybe the Democrats should be responsible for its failure?

Zero Republican support was baked-into it from the start. Repubs that did work with the democrats, and had their feedback incorporated (161 amendments) were threatened by House leadership (see: Chuck Grassley, Gang of Six).

Obamacare is largely a success. Even the current CBO report shows that it has been working well. The program is only a few years old and needs some tweaking. Its main shortcoming is that it is slightly underfunded, and needs more enrollments from younger people. Also pretty shitty that 19 states would rather see their constituents suffer than to allow the federal government to expand Medicaid for them.

Why would you consider it a failure? And don't forget that the stubbornness of Republicans is the reason the single payer part of the law was dropped, even though that would have had a much larger effect on the cost of healthcare. Additionally, several Republican governors _refused_ federal money for Medicaid expansion, directly making healthcare less affordable for their constituents purely for the political optics of being able to say they stood up against "Obamacare".

> Interesting, so the law passed with zero Republican support but yet it is their fault for all of it's problems.

"a lot of its failures"

And yes, I think that if you're the counterparty and rally all your members to oppose anything that is put up for a vote then you absolutely share responsibility for what comes out.

Not least because by withholding your vote you forced them to find a vote elsewhere. So instead of your opinion, they had to cater to someone else's.

I don't necessarily blame Congressional Republicans for the choice. In the political calculus of a toxic and rabid media campaign to its base and primary challenges from the right, I understand why they did what they did.

But they still don't get a pass by saying "Oh, we voted against that. Therefore we have no responsibility for it."

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