re: #174 freetoken

All this hubris over the predicting the supposed failure of the ACA is annoying but does demonstrate why making such complex systems are probably not good policy in the big picture.

My own take on the ACA is that it is too Rube Goldberg-esque.

I’ve played campaign audio of Harry Truman before, demonstrating that ensuring health care for the masses has long been a Democratic Party goal.

Why Nancy Pelosi and Pres. Obama decided to go with an originally GOP/Heritage idea is something that future students of PolySci might want to untangle.

This fear of “socialism” is irrational, based almost completely on religious indoctrination and the marketing of fear. As a society we have over the last 200 years increasingly approached large problems on a national level, including medicine.

What these people whining about the “government” in healthcare almost never will admit in public is that the national government has long been involved in medicine in this country, from research to health standards to paying for the training of physicians and for medical schools to the VA.

My personal wish is for President Obama to become more ideological, not less. Contrary to the 5 years of whining by the wingnut right, B. Obama is one of the least ideologically “socialist” Democrats. Compared to the likes of FDR or Truman or even LBJ President Obama is downright Reagan-esque.

A push towards a more liberal single-payer system would have turned out to be “HillaryCare 2.0”. Massively opposed even more, and nothing would have gotten off the ground at all. Leaving us with the broken pre-ACA insurance model for at least another decade.

Adopting the RomneyCare/Heritage model was a moderate step. Attempts to close gaps, apply a system that is working for a state on a national level, and also draws more political support since it co-opts a GOP backed policy and also works with the current insurance industry in a evolutionary (instead of revolutionary) step.

If the GOP was anything else than the “Party of No” regarding anything Obama espouses I would expect that this would have been much more efficiently and successfully implemented program. We don’t have a minority party acting as loyal opposition, we have one acting as an active saboteur.