Oh no, god forbid we try to drag ourselves into the 21st century, and get somewhere close to what every other modern democracy has offered for decades.
There needs to be some scepticism about what these bills actually achieve rather than what people would like them to attempt to achieve. And when trillions are involved there is going to be massive corruption in the political process.
I don’t know US politics, US law, economics, so I can’t possibly tell if this bill is actually good or bad for anything.
If a car is barreling towards you, taking a small step towards safety is wasting the time you could have spent jumping out of the way.
Not only do you end up just as dead as you would be if you had done nothing at all, but you've wasted the effort of making a decision and moving; effort you could have spent on more pleasant thoughts if you had just decided to die from the outset.
Even worse, a moderate decision is harder to make than a firm one. Instead of just doing what could be effective, you have to figure out what could be effective, and cut it in half. By the time you've finished your calculations, you won't even have time to make the useless step.
Uhm, no. Obamacare is basically a Republican brainchild, mostly conceptualized by the Heritage Foundation in the late 1980s. I wouldn't describe it as dragging the US into the 21st century... more like dragging it barely into the 20th century.
>And yet it turned out not to, the rhetoric is still that US healthcare is pretty bad.
US Healthcare is pretty good. But also extremely expensive at the same time, with lots of people unable to afford it, even when they have health insurance thanks to huge co-payments. You keep hearing the stories of severely injured people screaming they do NOT want to go to the hospital because they cannot afford it, and of other people who are brought to the ER, then amass huge debt in a short time that bankrupts them, and then they end up dying very prematurely anyway because the actual life-saving treatment or surgery is something they couldn't afford before, and certainly cannot afford after seeing the initial ER bill.
Waiting a few months at worst for a hip replacement surgery in Germany seems fine compared to waiting for hip replacement surgery forever and never actually getting it in the US because you cannot afford it even though you worked two jobs your entire life. All the while the US spends 17% of their GDP on health care, bout 5% points more than most other western nations.
That's the state of affairs after Obamacare. And yet, Obamacare still made things better than before for a lot of people.
That's not how it works. If you want the bill to seem like a wise decision, you name it something like WISE or SMART. If you want to make it seem like it would work, put the word "effective" somewhere in there. If polling indicates widespread support for universal programs, make sure to stick the word "universal" in there.
Everything's marketing, we can just market ourselves to death. Most of US politics is the mastery of baby boomer tone anyway: that bland assertive 80s speech pattern that makes boomers think you're a wise steward and a moderate, nuanced hand. For that matter, part of it is to repeat the words "complex" and "nuanced" a lot, especially when referring to "challenges" and "responses."
Yes, just come closer to the clusterfuck the rest of us have. In every country most people say “healthcare in this country is a mess”, and yet, my best experiences with healthcare have been in the US.