How can you call LGBT rights, women's rights, police consent decrees, environmental issues, and health care, just off the top of my head, meaningless?
Basically discussed shift from discussion in politics about democracy to economics.
But it didn't go far enough. It played in to the corporate healthcare system demands by not offering a competitive public option. The so called Blue Dog democrats blocked that, which is such a shame.
Far better than anything the Republicans have put on the table. The problem is that we basically have one sane party which is backed by corporate interests, and another party backed by the same or similar corporate interests which plays off fear for support.
I believe the only fix to this is to weaken party entrenchment, and have ranked choice voting in place; but who in these two parties would actually support that?
[Edit: typo]
What you think of as meaningful differences someone else might think of as nominal differences.
> not paying attention or willfully ignorant
I love how you've left out a third choice, which is, "they just disagree with me and my own economic forecasts." You know you've really gone down an interesting road when the only way someone can disagree with you is if they're a boob (accidental or not).
You've been saying how there's a perspective where they do not meaningfully differ, but you have not actually articulated how that perspective is valid. My position is that this perspective is not valid, and recent events with the AHCA have made this very clear.
So please keep telling me how it's better.
Price is an important aspect to health-care but devoid of any other information it doesn't mean much.
Consider: http://quotes.morningstar.com/chart/fund/chart?t=VHCIX®io...
A lot of people even think that "more expensive for most" still qualifies as "better" as long as it means that people that previously could not get coverage at any cost are now able to, since none of us know when we might develop a "pre-existing condition" that pre-ACA would have made us uninsurable forever.
Whether a system is truly better or worse depends on how you account for all the different people that it helps or hurts. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2017/jan/05/... has some examples that suggest that things are better for a whole lot of people under ACA, but I'm sure other groups and analyses will paint different pictures.
> So please keep telling me how it's better.
It expanded Medicaid and gave premium discounts to lower income brackets in states that accepted it.
Speaking of the graph... what is that huge gap that opened between between "Workers Contribution to Premiums" and "Premiums" in 2010, right when the ACA was signed into law? Is that just... raw profit taking?
My income has been pretty irregular over the past few years. All but two months I've made $0. In two months I made many tens of thousands of dollars. I got denied for free coverage because of the two months I earned money. I got denied for purchasing through the exchange because my projected income was $0/mo. /me is an edge case, I guess. So, having some time off, I left the country for 8 months and didn't purchase US insurance while I was on the other side of the globe. Another edge case found...since I wasn't outside of the country for 11 months in a calendar year, I had to pay the penalty for the entire year, despite being nowhere near US health services for the entirety of the time I didn't have health coverage. I now have health coverage that I'm purchasing directly from a health insurer. It's expensive and a plan I could have bought pre-Obamacare.
As a programmer, I see Obamacare as the equivalent of rushed code that only works for the primary success case and crashes whenever you throw any abnormal situation at it. Too bad they couldn't have hired Silicon Valley engineers to fix the legislation as well as they fixed the healthcare.gov website. I've found at least 3 bugs in it that need to be fixed.
The solution would be employer-matched health savings accounts for casual care, with mandatory from 18-up catastrophic insurance at low premiums.
Don't the increased numbers of insured people contradict this statement? Being poor still sucks, and having to make this choice, still sucks. But it also expanded Medicaid coverage to more people.
They should have offered Medicare as an choice in every market, or at least every market where there are fewer than three options on the exchange.
> mandatory from 18-up catastrophic insurance at low premiums.
Isn't that what the law does? The mandatory bit is enforced with the tax penalty.
In short, the Democrats basically adopted the old Republican position on the only economic issue listed by the OP - exactly in line with my earlier point.
The AHCA failed due to a small handful of Republicans rejecting it, with one part of that handful complaining that it wasn't pulled rightward enough, and the rest actually realizing that going rightward wasn't politically-tenable as you said. Most of the party was totally fine with the AHCA.
Are you implying that the 20 million people that now have medical coverage because of Democrats pushing for Obamacare isn't worth it? Was that all "talk"?
I'm seriously trying to understand your "equivalency" position.
Let me know what the Republicans would have done for health care? Right now it seems that the only thing they've done is to actually limit universal health care, so we have less than 100% coverage.
Are the two parties the same on health care?
Right now I don't trust anybody that says the two parties are the same, since they are clearly very, very different. In fact, it seems the only people that say that are Republicans that don't have a better argument?
Are you a Republican? Or maybe you fall under the auspices of a white-male demographic that bias towards conservatism?
So my family has no long term medical insurance and no one is counting our dropping medical insurance in any statistic.
ACA marketplaces will insure about 13.1 million people in 2017 and insured 12.9 million in 2016. The rate of private insurance increased 1.2% from 2014 to 2015 and the rate of public insurance .6%.
Now, how much of this is due to ACA and how much is due to other factors is really impossible to separate. Almost anything would be pure speculation. Interestingly, premiums on the exchanges are climbing slower than private insurance [2].
Health insurance premiums had been rising for years, probably due to several issues: aging population, rising costs of equipment and pharmaceuticals, administrative overhead, tort, etc, etc. Additionally, ACA added some costs in the inclusion of pre-existing conditions. I don't disagree that something has to be done, but getting rid of ACA is not going to be a panacea.
[1]:https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2016/demo/p60-25...
[2]:http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-obamacare-premiums-201...
It's like measuring productivity in lines of code. Once a metric becomes a target it's meaningless as a metric.
"Obamacare" (formerly known as "Romneycare") is a republican healthcare plan. One of the big reasons we claim that our two major parties are approximately equivalent is the Democrats' habit of passing Republican policies.
> since they are clearly very, very different
There are differences between R & D that are significant, but they are minor compared to all the ways they are the same. You can be 100% sure that politicians will side with their establishment, monied donors.
> Are the two parties the same on health care?
No, but they're both bad. Yes, Republicans are not going to improve healthcare, but neither are the Democrats. Did you know Feinstein said a few days ago in a town hall that she has no intention to support single-payer?
> it seems the only people that say that are Republicans
Assuming things like that only makes you sound partisan or uninformed. I'm not a Republican, so now you have a counterexample.
I don't know Feinstein's motivations, nor am I knowledgeable about the internal politics of the Democratic Party, but do you think her rejection of single payer has more to do with politics than with actual belief? The "public option" was realistically the closest America ever came to a single payer system, and that proposal was largely sunk by Republicans in Congress, though some Democrats in right-leaning states also rejected it. Are Democrats just trying to compromise in a right-leaning political climate, or are they truly the same?
The only people who deserve to be compared to here are the people who voted for her.
Perhaps you can't imagine it, but I really don't care about purported "differences" between Ds and Rs. It's clear that both of those gangs are interested in exploring only a tiny portion of the universe of political possibility. (So far, that seems to be the portion that maximizes public payouts to big political donors!) I have voted and will vote for any departure from that tiny area, in any direction whatsoever. If Vladimir Lenin and David Hume both rose from the grave and ran on a ticket together, I would vote for that. Unlike everyone who votes every election for the status quo (NB: that's you!), I am not a conservative.
Because if it's the latter, do you think the 20 million additional people that receive health-care under Obamacare isn't a difference?
Because, like Joe Biden said, it's a "big fucking deal".
Also, you're not helping your cause by saying you're a Bernie-bro. Bernie-bros are generally racist, as he supports a largely xenophobic nativist trade policy.
There's a reason Bernie's base is largely white. Bernie and Trump supporters are the same.
In the end, you should never trust anyone that claims the two parties are equal. Those people have other problems they need to work out first. Maybe they just don't want 20 million Americans to have health care?
So let's hear from you, what are we supposed to do? Respectfully defer to the pundits endlessly quibbling about the differences between D and R? That is also part of the problem, in case you hadn't noticed...
You're supposed to pick a side, from the choices given to you, because that's how government works.
Government is not about getting what you want. Government is about picking from the limited choices given to you. Complaints about your limited choices go unheeded, because no one wants 300 million choices in government since everyone wants to be their own pretty princess that rules the country. So we, as a society, decided to limit you to 2 choices, and you can proceed from there.
So, which side are you on? R or D? Pick, because no one is on your side.
This speaks for itself
They would complain less, and be more appreciative of the people that actually choose to run for public office.
What really blows my mind is that all these self-described "progressives" have decided this particular monstrous warmonger is the line they won't abide crossing. Have you ever actually listened to a single thing HRC said?
Government is about what you do for others.
Government is not about what it does for you.
Why? Because you are insignificant.
Now, pick.
Given the outcome, I find this an odd talking point of failure to compromise. We dodged a separate but equal bullet..
The only article I can find discussing them are from after Bush was re-elected in 2004 when he proposed a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, but allowing states to have civil unions.
If that's what you're talking about, then I hardly think it is surprising that Democrats balked.