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Comment by pueblito | Hacker News Reader

Factually incorrect. Obama was elected in 2008 with a supermajority in Congress and mandate to fix healthcare. He made it worse.

Californias State Assembly has tried to get UHC, it was blocked by Newsom. If it cannot be done in California then it’s clear the Democrats aren’t going to fix it and have no political solution.

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I don't think the Affordable Care Act made things worse overall. People without jobs can get health insurance (how they afford it, nobody knows), and people with preexisting conditions can get coverage, which is actually a really big deal. (As an aside, there is an interesting Vice documentary about how people in red states hate Obamacare but love the Affordable Care Act. Many people getting medical attention for the first time in their lives. That's a win. We just need to get over the "us vs them" mentality around healthcare.)

Being extremely selfish for a moment, I can see the argument for how it got worse. For ultra-rich software engineers like us, yup, it got worse. There are basically the same number of doctors as there was before the ACA, but now more people can see them. This means you have to wait for appointments. I also think that medicine got ultra-industrialized What insurance covers and how much also decreased for us ("Cadillac tax" or something). I don't have many medical needs but I can tell you my insurance company tends to deny everything and you have to file 300 appeals if you even walk past a medical complex. It didn't used to be like that. But in the end, it doesn't really matter. You get paid a shit ton of money, sometimes you spend it on medical treatment.

Technically correct, the democrats were in power a few weeks before Sen. Kennedy, the vote that gave dems a supermajority, got brain cancer and thus dems no longer had a supermajority. I believe they were in power a total of 11 legislative days.

So technically yes, I guess we can blame the Dems for not fixing healthcare in 11 days.

Note: Republicans later won that seat - https://www.cp24.com/democrats-scramble-after-republican-tak...

A supermajority is not required to pass a bill. If the democrats really wanted to fix healthcare they could vote to lower the Medicare age to zero tomorrow.

Could you expound on how? It's my understanding that the super majority is because the republicans are expected to filibuster (almost) literally anything the democrats put on the table.

The filibuster is not in the constitution. Currently, the senate has adopted a rule by which debate may be closed with 60 votes. So if one side has 41 votes they may, by convention, ‘filibuster’ (which entails nothing but saying ‘we filibuster’) and the bill fails. The majority doesn’t have to accept this though, and can force the other side to literally filibuster, by ‘debating’ continuously, so as to prevent a vote. It is unlikely that this could be maintained forever, especially when the issue to be voted on enjoyed popular support. As a famous example, see Strom Thurmond’s filibuster of the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strom_Thurmond_filibuster_of...

I did some research and it’s more egregious than I thought: Senate rules can be changed by a simple majority, and unlimited debate is just a rule— prior to 1806 there was limited debate. So the democrats could just completely eliminate the filibuster, in any form, and pass what they choose, so long as they have 51 votes, or 50 and the Vice President.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_option

My preferred solution is to abolish the Senate.

You do realize the reason the Democrats can’t fix it is that the Republicans block all attempts right? Like when 59 Democrat Senators, the President and a majority of the house (100% Democratic support) are attempting to pass something like Medicare for All as happened in 2009 — the fact that it was blocked because they couldn’t get a single Republican vote to break the filibuster reflects badly on the Republicans, not the Democrats.

The Franken recount and Kennedy death meant they couldn’t negotiate further and had to pass the reconciled bill for Obamacare without a Medicare buy-in option, unless they had literally any Republican cross the aisle - which they refused to do. It’s just such ignorant bad faith to claim otherwise.

And since primary taxation happens at the Federal level, the state-options are essentially impossible without the Feds giving states that provide universal healthcare the ability to not pay Medicare/Medicaid payroll taxes — again which is impossible without Republicans support.

At least they could try instead of impeaching Trump and investigating Jan 6. They should push some version of Medicare for all.

Again - ~95% of the D caucus supports it but it can’t pass without ~10% of the Republican caucus crossing the aisle. Which 9 Republican senators do you think would vote for Medicare for all? Go ahead and name them and then be as mad as you want about the Ds investigating an attempted insurrection.

Here’s the latest M4A bill with dozens of D sponsors:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/1976...

Senate rules can be changed by a simple majority, and unlimited debate is just a rule— prior to 1806 there was limited debate. So the democrats could just completely eliminate the filibuster, in any form, and pass what they choose, so long as they have 51 votes, or 50 and the Vice President.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_option

My preferred solution is to abolish the Senate.

Obama pushed the republican plan because it would get votes.

I didn’t say “vote democratic”. I said, don’t vote conservative. Two different things.

The ACA has made a big difference in my family. The rule on pre-existing conditions is huge.

It's not a helpful description of the situation when obama was elected with all that, because similar to today there were needed democrats who were against those policies. Just like today Manchin or Sinema can block anything they want even thought they are "democrats". Remember one of the required senators for obamacare was from Nebraska and he personally blocked a national health insurance plan, and he still lost office in the next election - he was using the fact he killed it as a "reason to vote for him".

So saying dems had a supermajority and they could do anything they want is wrong, just like the dems have 50 + 1 and they can do things with majority votes - no they can't.

I don't think healthcare is worse now than then. My mom was very ill when obama was president, and she couldn't get health care. She got free healthcare from the hospital. She died of cancer a few year later. Yeah, I was helping her, but she would have been better off if obama care had been available for her.

The dems cannot fix it because they don't have a sufficient number of votes in congress. Even if they got to 60 in the senate to vote over the filibuster, they'd still need a few more because of Sinema and Manchin.

The dems have a majority now, and they are going to having trouble passing a budget funding gap fix in december. Let me repeat that - they have a majority and they will struggle to avoid a govt shutdown. https://rollcall.com/2022/09/16/conservatives-ire-over-stopg...

Let

Your first claim is an opinion rather than a fact. From my OPINION there are more people covered and are benefitting from medicare and medicaid because of those improvements.

I don't have enough info to comment on your second point, but what I've heard was there were serious concerns in the bill and that's why gov. Newsom vetoed the bill.

> Your first claim is an opinion rather than a fact.

If you haven't looked it up, why would your claim that this is an opinion be anything other than noise? Find out whether its a fact or not (if you care) and come back and tell us.

> From my OPINION there are more people covered and are benefiting from medicare and medicaid because of those improvements.

This is not a matter for opinion. It's a claim fact that you can choose to verify or not.

No, when someone posts something claiming it's a verifiable fact, it's their job to support it with citation. Until they do that, it remains an opinion.

Please choose to be part of the solution instead of part of the problem. Parent comment offers you a more reasonable way to think about it; the right thing for you to do is to provide verifiable evidence against bogus claims, otherwise it's just yelling at each other on the Internet, and nothing of any value happens. This isn't what HN is for, and it sucks for everyone else having to wade through such drivel.

FWIW, I agree that the GP post you first responded to is trash.

Take a moment, breathe deeply and try to relax ;)

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