 |
| Via. |
Scarborough went bonkers, of course, because it was evidence that the president really does try to cooperate with the GOP, in contradiction to his narrative of the moment, adopted from Mr. Jonah:
If Obama believed in negotiating, he would have used the Keystone pipeline as a bargaining chip. He would trade the higher taxes he (always) wants for tax reform. He would acknowledge that the GOP won an election in 2014 and that its interests matter.Of course from our point of view oy, does Obama believe in negotiating! Not well, but too wisely, or is it the normal way around?
I went bonkers, on the other hand, because, well, for quite different reasons, which I'm just starting to understand and will come to below, but in the first place because I always do: whenever anybody says online that the ACA is a Heritage Foundation idea, and Scott Lemieux is not around to tell them it isn't, I do. So I dropped a comment, which led to the following utterly futile exchange:
That annoying assertion about Obamacare being a Republican or Heritage or Romnesque idea has two completely different attitudes. When Eugene Robinson says it, as a citizen in good standing of Cokie's Village, a person of no doubt liberal and generous views but a Villager bred in the bone, it's meant to be something nice about the president: Villagers are all about getting Something done without an excessively close concern with what the Something might be, and the way to do that is to pick the Something that gets the right number of votes. I guess that's where my poor interlocutor there was coming from: she doesn't see how anything coming from the Heritage Foundation must inevitably be deadly poison (don't touch those tax-free health saving accounts, Barack! they'll make all your skin fall off!).
Whereas I'm concerned with the members of the Eeyore Caucus, who mean to say something bad: that Barack Obama is essentially indistinguishable from Willard Mitt Romney, and just as determined as Romney would have been to turn our lives over to the Masters of the Universe. Which, if it were true, I would agree with (as I'd have agreed on the subject of that ghastly Grand Bargain we were talking about throughout 2010). So that it's important to me, in my position as Marxist Obot, to see both of these—Cokie on one side and, say, Matt Stoller on the other—as wrong. I didn't vote for anybody who was going to give me a Republican health policy and I am very reluctant to think I could have been cheated to that extent.
But the Villagers are entirely wrong about the aim of negotiation, which is to get what your side needs and try not to give too much to the other, and Obama has actually been a very skilled negotiator sometimes, in particularly in the 2011 budget wars, and I think he did something even cleverer with the ACA.
The big thing that came out of this exercise for me is the way the Heritage and Obama approaches are different, which is really diametrical: the object of every Heritage health care proposal is to relieve employers as much as possible of their responsibilities, pinning them as much as possible on individuals, leaving government to take up the slack; and the object of every Democratic proposal worth the name is to give as much responsibility to employers as you can, leaving to individuals only what can't (yet) be given to government.
This is unfortunately not how the Obama administration has explained it, and they've really done such a bad job it's as if they'd been sabotaging themselves‚ and I do mean you, Mr. P. The way the Act has been sold is almost entirely negative, the line that nothing is actually going to happen: "If you like your health insurance you can keep it."
The Republicans call it a lie, but what's worse than that is that it's almost true. We're going to move heaven and earth and Max Baucus to get the end result that basically nothing is going to change?
Practically the whole of Obamacare is the two things that hardly get discussed: the requirement that every boss of a business with 50 or more workers has to buy them insurance (yes, most did already, but Walmart and Macdonalds didn't before the ACA was passed, and they were very far from alone; and they were getting stingier and stingier, too, providing less and less worthwhile insurance and making their employees pay a larger and larger percentage, a situation which is being reformed under the Act); and the expansion of Medicaid. All the attention has been focused on the five or ten percent of the population that was going to have to insure itself—who had been very difficult to insure before, because they didn't have one steady employer, and they had too much money to be taken care of by the government but too little buying power to do it on their own, who have been provided with the Exchange. Putting them into the kind of risk pool that was described in the 1989 Heritage proposal, but was meant by Heritage not just for the between-the-cracks cases that didn't fit into the more comprehensive approaches, but for every person of working age in the United States.
In demanding that employers provide their workers with health coverage, as employers throughout the civilized world do either through taxation or by buying insurance, the Obama administration was doing exactly what the Republican party and its think tanks have been fighting against since the 1930s, and what the Heritage plans of 1989 and 1993 were designed in particular to forestall.
It makes me crazy when people suggest this is not a progressive thing, just because it's not the same thing they have in England (it's not so radically different from the German or Dutch or Swiss systems, which some think are better than England's true single-payer approach anyway). Could it be improved? You bet! So could Social Security, which still doesn't provide anybody with enough money to live on. So improve it! Don't just sit in your mudpuddle weeping because you got your shorts wet, stand up and do something! And say Thanks, Obama!
 |
| Via ebaumsworld. |
No comments:
Post a Comment