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Comment by tokai | Hacker News Reader

Its not even Obamas economy. A lot of people unironically thought they would get another stimulus check if Trump won.

Some people still do. There's a mass Republican delusion that what DOGE is doing is somehow going to result in a literal check being mailed to them.

Its crazy that Dems don't run on policies like these.

Imagine if instead of an 80+ geezer or the most corporate woman in the world, they had someone credibly promising stimulus checks !! They'd win in a landslide.

Obama won huge on promising universal healthcare and then every dem after that decided to promise nothing.

It doesn’t work for Democrats. They were punished hard for that healthcare bill

> According to a report from the National Conference of State Legislatures, the Democratic Party has lost a net total of 13 Governorships and 816 state legislative seats since President Obama entered office, the most of any president since Dwight Eisenhower.

https://www.quorum.us/data-driven-insights/under-obama-democ...

Kamala had a good platform - voters still think she “didnt promise anything” https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx924r4d5yno

Republicans understand the power of appealing to emotion and "othering." They have spent decades training their voters to vote against their own interest because it will hurt people that Republicans say are preventing their great success. Trump said he had "concepts of a plan" on healthcare and voters think he had more of a platform than Harris because his main points were about getting even with the world. Make the world pay what it owes us and get these immigrants out of YOUR country.

Democrats get punished for trying that too blatantly. Republicans and Democrats are playing different games when it comes to campaigning and propaganda.

Democrats want universal healthcare and nobody besides Obama has come close to delivering it. And Obama still failed with a supermajority thanks to the filibuster, and even if that passed it would have sucked compared to what voters wanted or what other countries have.

Democrats want universal healthcare but Republicans will cry socialism which will turn moderates against it. I saw this happen in 08 and again in 16 with Bernie Sanders.

Democrats (the politicians) voted with Republicans to force schools to teach the evils of Communism in every class.

They are both funded by big buisiness and are on the same side against Socialism.

Democrats (the voters) are broadly on board in my experience.

Democrats(the voters) are not a monolith. Like I said, moderate and centrist Democrats are not entirely on board with universal healthcare. The more liberal left wing of Democrats are.

Her website's section on Climate Change was six paragraphs devoid of meaning.

I donated to her campaign! But as someone following fairly closely it really didn't seem like she promised anything.

For someone like me who isn't very well versed with US politics, could someone explain like I'm a layperson what Obama's universal healthcare is like and what it was meant to do.

Was it anything like the universal free healthcare of Canada, UK, European countries? Or was it still paid healthcare but Obama wanted to integrate all of the healthcare in a universal system? Did it get implemented or is still in the works?

It wasn't anything like any of those. It was based on a right wing think tank plan and the one bonus is that now insurance companies can't reject you for already having a "pre existing condition"

It was based on Mitt Romney's healthcare plan that he created for Massachusetts when he was governor.

Yeah, and Mitt Romney is a Republican which is the right wing of American politics.

He’s certainly a Republican and he was their presidential candidate against Obama. But, it is also the most conservative plan he could get by the very-Democratic-leaning Massachusetts populace and legislature.

From this layman’s point of view:

It was a requirement for everybody to get insurance, along with some protections (I forget exactly the mechanism) to prevent insurance companies from excluding people who had preexisting conditions (this is a big deal in the US, private insurance companies don’t want to insure you if they think you’ll be expensive), and a marketplace website thingy that made it easy to sign up for insurance.

There was a concern that if insurance companies can’t consider preexisting conditions, people might just wait until they get sick, and then sign up for insurance. So, there was a fine levied if you don’t get insurance.

There are also some subsidies for people who can’t afford insurance, but anecdotally the definition of “subsidy” and “can’t afford” vary from state to state.

Some states sued to try to get the uninsured fine removed. While the case was going through, the fine was set to $0. Ultimately, the fine was found to be allowed (IIRC), but by the time that happened political leadership had changed a couple times and fines are unpopular anyway, so it wasn’t reimplemented (some states do have their own implementation of the fine, though).

The system was implemented and remains. You can go to a government run portal and buy insurance in the US. Whether or not it is a good deal depends on what your state decided to do around subsidies and all that.

In conclusion, it was a market-driven compromise plan which still exists and is, in fact, highly compromised.

What happens if both parties just start running on bribing the populace?

Republicans would win and Democrat voters would stay home. Republicans spend tons of time trying to convince you whatever Dem they are running against is corrupt while their voters ignore the blatant corruption in their own party.

The democrats would never allow something so broadly popular.

They wanted another stimulus check but didn't want other people to get a stimulus check. They love stimulus checks and the highly effective policies the US used to mitigate an unemployment spike and avoid a recession that did hit other countries but not the US, and then they turn around and blame the government for causing some temporary and modest inflation (modest in a historic context compared to other periods of much higher inflation in recent memory). The median voter is someone who cannot be pleased. And so much of our political decisionmaking is driven to incoherence by trying to please these swing voters who do not understand anything.

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