(03-21-2019 11:38 AM)atsKnight Wrote: Ha! I might be stupid. It's well within the realm of possibility. I meant more that I was confused about the motivation and lines of attack in the post, not which words he was using and the syntax.
Why don't you just read the words and reply to them rather than having to conjure up some motivation?
Quote:I'm not sure where we're disagreeing here. I said that Obamacare was modeled after those ideas, not that Romney sat down and wrote a 2100 page bill and Obama copy pasted it.
I'm saying that Obamacare was not modeled after those ideas. They took some words that Heritage and Romneycare may have used, but the meanings of those words were perverted beyond reason, as I explained, apparently just so they could lie and say, hey, we borrowed those ideas from republicans.
Quote:It's not the same legislation or an exact copy, but Obama used that as a model instead of something like the public option that the Democrats wanted, in order to appeal to Republicans. I don't think they rewarded him for compromising on that, IIRC...
That's my point. No, he didn't. Obamacare took some of the words and perverted their meanings, but he didn't take the ideas. The Heritage proposal, and the Bismarck system upon which it was loosely based, were more free-market than what we had before Obamacare. Obamacare used words from those approaches, so its backers could somehow dishonestly claim that it was based on something that it wasn't. It's just like the "it's not a tax, wait it is a tax, no it is not a tax" flim-flam that was played with the mandate.
And Obama didn't compromise with republicans. The democrat leaders had to make those compromises to get their OWN party onboard in sufficient numbers to pass the bill. If they had wanted republicans, they would have gone for things like interstate purchases of insurance (what the exchanges were supposed to be), malpractice reform, greater use of health spending accounts, and a meaningful tax credit for buying insurance instead of a penalty for not buying it.
Quote:Why does every government program need to be motivated by more government control over our lives on an insatiable quest for power?
I don't know. You tell me. Better yet, give me an example of a government program that isn't.
Quote:Isn't it possible that our healthcare sucks and is too expensive and people wanted to fix that?
No, because if that had been the motivation, they would have done something else. Obamacare managed to combine the worst element of our previous system (tying health insurance to employment) with the worst element of single-payer/single-provider systems (bureaucratic edicts replacing the doctor-patient relationship). If they really wanted to improve health care, there are any number of models they could have investigated and used. They didn't. So I don't think the motivation was to improve health care.
Quote:That people don't want to keep expanding the government, but the free market isn't fixing the problem and the Republicans haven't even been able to propose any small government solutions for ~ a decade?
I am totally exasperated with republican failures to lead on this and other issues. I said in 2010 that if I had been the republicans, the first day on the job after retaking the house, I would have passed French Bismarck health care to replace Obamacare and either Bowles-Simpson or Domenici-Rivlin or some combination of the best of both (which would not have been hard since they say pretty much the same things--lower and flatter income taxes across a broader definition of income, cuts to redundant or counterproductive programs, Domenici-Rivlin did include a consumption tax which Bowles-Simpson did not, therefore reducing the deficit more. That would have showed a willingness to lead on two big issues--health care and the. deficit--and would have announced to the democrats that they are going to have competition for ideas.
Quote:Politics are becoming more and more dysfunctional not because we trust our political opponents too much, but because everyone keeps attributing these malicious motivations to everything the other side is doing and the crazies take that and run with it.
I too am troubled by the nastiness that has invaded politics. But I'm sorry, when I see something that strikes me as evil, I am going to call it out as such. And right now, I see more evil coming from democrats, and being met by abject stupidity from the republicans.