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Comment by yalogin | Hacker News Reader

None of these metrics will change the political stance our one majority party took. They have shut their eyes and ears and are hell bent on preserving the interests of the lobbying companies and fetishizing “free market competition”. I can bet a sizeable amount of money that nothing will change in the next 50yrs even. Today there is still a rule that a hospital cannot say no to a patient, I strongly believe that is one rule that will fall down next. It makes too much profit for the health care providers to not attack that. In fact after Roe fell I can see that as the next one.

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In the US, "free market" means that everyone is free to buy any politician they want.

I make this comment in a lot of threads, but if democrats wanted to fix this problem, they would write legislation for it and try to get it passed. Instead, all we get (from both parties) are massive 1000+ page bills that include a bunch of completely unrelated stuff. Why haven't democrats produce a 10 page bill with a tl;dr of "medical debt is hereby abolished"?

Stop pretending the clowns pretending to be politicians are doing anything to help us. This is about the rich not wanting to give up their money, and both sides are just protecting them.

Here’s Medicare for All. It’s 130 pages. But double spaced with massive margins and indentation space and geriatric sized fonts so really probably about 20 pages. You can read it pretty quickly (I have).

https://www.congress.gov/117/bills/hr1976/BILLS-117hr1976ih....

Last time I proposed this same thing in a blog comment section (Lawyers, Guns, and Money) a couple of people said "but filibuster" and the rest went straight to an absolute firehose of middle-school-level verbal abuse. I've had similar reactions from other self-proclaimed progressives. Nonetheless I stand by the idea. These big omnibus bills give every single opponent (and some "mavericks" a.k.a. turncoats in one's own party) their very own personal reason to vote against it without political consequence. A more focused bill at least has a slight chance of prying loose a few around the edges, if only because they know that their "no" vote will be used effectively against them in the next election cycle with no room for excuses. When your legislative success rate (not counting bills to name post offices) is close to zero already, might as well try something different.

It just seems like it'd be such a huge win from a PR angle, even if the bills fail. You could literally post screenshots of the bills in their entirety on twitter showing how simple they are (student debt is abolished, college is free, medicine is free, etc) and just say "here is what we tried to do for you, and here are the people who said no."

I think the most productive change we could make to our government right now would be to set a page limit on new legislation. But this might produce legislation that actually helps normal people, which is why it'll never happen.

that doesn't sound like a very good idea to me. legislation is not complex only because of pork; there are always edgecases and loopholes to be handled. I highly doubt a reasonable solution to any of the problems you listed could be described in a mere ten pages.

take student debt for instance. imo there's a decent case for erasing undergrad debt under a certain threshold, but if you took on a six figure debt to attend a fancy liberal arts college, that's on you to unfuck. similarly, people like lawyers and doctors take on a lot of education debt, but that's also priced into their respective salaries. a professional paying off an outsized debt with an outsized salary doesn't need or deserve the assistance of the median taxpayer. a naive implementation of such could potentially be net regressive.

obviously you might disagree with some of that, my point is just to show that "abolish student debt" is controversial and complex even among people that agree at a high level.

A single sentence bill might indeed be too short to address edge cases and attract support, but it can still be single topic and probably no more than ten or twenty pages. Literally no legislator actually reads all of these 1000-page entire-legislative-agenda monstrosities. At best they have their own aides do it and summarize the highlights. More often, they just follow their own party's "leadership" on what parts to use as excuses.

Short, 10-page bills, don't exist because Legalese needs to exist because otherwise people find every loophole in any perceived ambiguity in the wording.

Like, imagine a mom seeing her kid jumping on the bed, and the kid says "I'm not jumping, I'm hopping. The difference is ..." and so the parent tells them to stop hopping and leaves. They come back later and the kid is sitting down, but bouncing up and down.

Eventually, the parent says something like "You may not jump, leap, spring, bounce, hop, dance, or otherwise engage in an oscillating vertical motion using the mattress of the bed as leverage or propellant."

Bam. That's legalese, and is the reason laws are 1,000 pages long. Except in this case, the parent has left open the loophole of allowing the kid to jump from their dresser onto the bed.

As if you are reading diffs over hundreds of files, applied in one go.

1000+ page bills that include a lot of stuff is an outcome of the political negotiation needed to get enough votes. A 10 page bill is exactly the kind of law that will face stiff opposition because you have to make major concessions to get votes from both Republicans and the more conservative Democrats who are ideologically closer to Republicans on this issue.

US Democrats did write legislation for the issue and did try to get it passed. They even chose an approach originally developed by conservative representatives to try to appeal to conservatives traditionally opposed to government funded/managed healthcare. It's now known as Obamacare and it passed with the slimmest majority then Congress subsequently tried to repeal, deauthorize, defund, or otherwise destroy it like a 100 times [1].

You could just as easily say that if the majority of citizens actually wanted to fix this problem, they would vote out anyone who voted against a conclusive bill. But doesn't happen because voters actually approve of these politicians anyway. You can spend all your money on publicizing "who voted against this healthcare bill" and accomplish exactly nothing, anyone who cares can easily find out anyway.

But sure, it's always rich people's fault.

[1] https://howmanytimeshasthehousevotedtorepealobamacare.com/

Democrats have no problem getting bills passed in the House. They'd need 60 seats in the Senate to make those bills law with a Democratic president, 66 with a Republican president. Majoritarian rule is not a feature of the US political system. It's a federation. The states elect the president, and the states control the Senate. Individual states are federations of counties. Politicians aren't held to account for massively unpopular policies (or failure to enact massively popular policies) because the electoral machinery simply isn't built that way.

You got some short memory, republicans fought tooth and nail against Obama and made an effort to have the worst possible legislation passed so they could prove universal healthcare cannot succeed.

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