8 ms·

This is a pretty great personal account, and it helps me tremendously in my goal of understanding this group of people who feel left out and overlooked by their

• msandford 10y ago
  > So why didn't they all vote for Obamacare and for the public option, subsidized by higher taxes? Did it come up for a national popular vote where you got five options and you picked the one you liked best? I don't remember it happening this way. And let's just say that it did. If everyone didn't vote for that option, well, that's not what gets enacted and you're SOL. Government isn't pick-and-choose, it's all-or-nothing.
  • aston 10y ago
    Well, in this particular case, there was no popular vote for any part of Obamacare. But there were a very large number of congressmen elected before the bill passed, during its negotiation and even now well after it's been cemented as law by the Supreme Court who had a major policy platform of reforming or completely rolling back the ACA.
    • msandford 10y ago
      Which is precisely the point. You don't get to TELL your elected officials how to vote. You just get to try and elect people who will HOPEFULLY do what's in your best interests. There are no guarantees in the system, anywhere. That makes the question you asked rather disingenuous.
      • deleted 10y ago
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      • mac01021 10y ago
        > You just get to try and elect people who will HOPEFULLY do what's in your best interests. You get to do a bit more than that, though few ever do. Making full use of representative democracy means continuously contacting your representative, not leaving them alone until you're convinced they'll act in your interests, and not leaving your friends/family/community alone until you've got as many other people as you can badgering your representative just as much. It's very time consuming and won't work at all if there aren't enough people with the same problem but, in the case of the author of this article, the relevant problem is quite widespread.
        • rashkov 10y ago
          Which is why the 40 hour work week and dog-eat-dog economy seem to really suit those representatives just fine. No one has time or energy to make full use of representative democracy, unfortunately, except for some of the well off with resources to spare.
          • mac01021 10y ago
            You're working a lot more than 40 hours per week if you don't have an hour a day to spend on advocacy.
            • deleted 10y ago
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            • 10y ago
• xyzzyz 10y ago
  So why didn't they all vote for Obamacare and for the public option, subsidized by higher taxes? Forgive me for my ignorance, but was there actually a general vote about it? Weren't the elected representatives actually voting? If so, one could argue that the agents of the voters made a poor decision, but then one could hardly blame an common citizen for actions of the politician they voted for.
  • MrZongle2 10y ago
    I seem to recall hearing about it being rammed through the Senate during a midnight vote. Barely a matter of having our elected representatives having a swing at it, let alone the American public at large.
    • maxerickson 10y ago
      99 out of 100 Senators voted on the issue. The abstained vote would not have changed the outcome. Is that rammed through?
      • AnimalMuppet 10y ago
        It was not a midnight vote (or at least, not what the term implies), but yes, it was definitely rammed through. I've never seen such an absolutely-will-not-take-no-for-an-answer ramming job ever on anything.
        • umanwizard 10y ago
          How so? Obama didn't force anyone to vote a particular way, did he?
          • AnimalMuppet 10y ago
            Force? No. Strongly twist arms? Absolutely. Google "Louisiana purchase" for one example; there were several. Now, to some degree, that's just normal politics. But I've never seen it done that hard, for that long, on a bill that passed by such razor-thin margins.
• SandersAK 10y ago
  I think it's worth noting that it is very hard to understand or see the world of the disempowered. Having actual empathy for their situation becomes increasingly harder the further away from the situation you are. If you start from that vantage point, you can try and operate from a opinion of "help me now today" which almost always comes back to "tax me less now." In the same way that most uber drivers don't understand that buying a new car to drive uber is simply trading away future profit for cash today, many of the disempowered do not have the tools to think about money, voting, or political movements in terms of a long term future.
• dragonwriter 10y ago
  > why didn't they all vote for Obamacare and for the public option In substantial quantities, they did. That's what Obama in the general election (and with slight variations, he, Clinton and Edwards in the Democratic primaries) campaigned on. But they didn't get it, because by the time the health care bill got through Congress it had no public option, because while it was in the version passed by the House, it was killed in the Senate. Killed, that is, by a minority in the Senate -- it was the threat of filibuster, not losing an up-or-down vote, that did it in.
  • aston 10y ago
    And who elected those filibuster-threatening senators? Were the senators acting of their own accord, or on behalf of their constituents' desires?
    • drumdance 10y ago
      The Senate is ridiculously undemocratic. Because every state gets two senators regardless of population, a vote by a Wyoming resident is worth 65 Californian votes.
      • kazagistar 10y ago
        Wyoming is one of the state's hit hardest by the unnecessariat phenomenon. Thats the tragedy.
      • stephengillie 10y ago
        The House is supposed to make up for this. A vote by a California resident is worth 3.6 Wyoming resident votes.
        • TheCoelacanth 10y ago
          No. Where did you get that number from? California has 53 representatives for 38.8 million people or 1 per 730,000 people. Wyoming has 1 representative for 584,000 people. So Wyoming is over-represented in the House as well.
• devishard 10y ago
  I don't think you're really putting yourself in their shoes. For most people, things are were better for them before required, high-cost health plans. Most people don't get seriously sick in a given year; that's why health insurance works at all. And for those with required health insurance, it doesn't really help. Take me as an example: I'm 29 in NY and the healthcare plans I have available to me basically fall into a spectrum ranging from $170ish/mo with a $6000ish deductible to $600ish/mo with no deductible. At the low end of that range, health insurance does nothing to prevent a person making $15K/year from going bankrupt; $6K in medical costs is more than enough to bankrupt such a person and you don't get extra credit for going bankrupt by $6K instead of $50K. And at the other end of the spectrum, $600/mo is enough to drive many people bankrupt in itself. The plans in the middle don't strike a good balance; they just cost enough that a poor person can't build up savings so they'll go bankrupt if something does happen to them. I'm lucky enough to have a job that pays much more than $15K, and I can actually afford my health insurance with relative ease. But for most, it's better to just take the risk and not pay for health insurance, because it's not going to prevent you from going bankrupt anyway. Except, now you can't. And yeah, they can vote for Obamacare, but keep in mind that when you're living paycheck-to-paycheck, it's very hard to look at anything other than proximate causes of your problems. You see the tax coming out of your paycheck, you don't see the pointless military equipment it's spent on or the "privatize profits, socialize losses" companies that your taxes could regulate. And all the help the government promises you comes to nothing most of the time. You don't read the newspaper and spend mental energy on that because you're watching junk television to recover from your day, or just plain going directly to bed. You also don't have a ton of education (which doesn't mean you aren't intelligent). So you vote for the guy who promises to take less of your money in taxes and do less that you don't see. All of this isn't finding ways to rationalize acting against their own self-interest (although that does happen too). It's a rational understanding of what's in your self-interest given the information you have, the time you have to research, and the experience you're allowed. And when using democracy to improve your life doesn't work for decades, can you blame them for giving up on using democracy to improve their lives?
  • hyperpape 10y ago
    At 15000, you are making < 138% of the poverty line (https://aspe.hhs.gov/computations-2015-annual-update-hhs-poverty-guidelines-48-contiguous-states-and-district-columbia https://aspe.hhs.gov/computations-2015-annual-update-hhs-pov...), and are eligible for medicaid, or large subsidies in other states. The details really matter here, and my sense (though I'm very open to correction) is that the people who the ACA is most burdensome for are high enough income that they qualify for smaller subsidies, but still can't afford healthcare.
• hueving 10y ago
  When you are motivated for an ideology it's rarely for short term self interest like you imply. If that were true there wouldnt be any rich people voting for Democrats, which isn't the case. With first hand account of a family member that would benefit from Obamacare but didn't vote for Obama, it was a matter of disagreeing with many other policies. E.g. You wouldn't vote for a politician promoting the elimination of the Jews if he/she promised a thousand dollar bonus for everyone remaining.
  • deciplex 10y ago
    > If that were true there wouldnt be any rich people voting for Democrats, which isn't the case. I don't know about that. You can be completely self-interested, wealthy, and still vote liberal/progressive Democrat if you think the alternative is a Reign of Terror or Red October. Or, to dial it back a bit from that, if you think progressive policies will grow the economy of the nation in the long term (and, by extension, your own wealth) as opposed to looting it.
    • hueving 10y ago
      >You can be completely self-interested, wealthy, and still vote liberal/progressive Democrat if you think the alternative is a Reign of Terror or Red October. The same logic applies the other direction. A party is promising free health care, but in their view that comes at a cost of a massive government that oversees every aspect of their life. Either that or they think it's fundamentally unsustainable and will lead to massive losses elsewhere. Basically if you think people vote against their self interest, you don't understand the perspective from which they are voting. To be baffled by it is to fail to recognize your own ignorance.
      • deciplex 10y ago
        > Basically if you think people vote against their self interest, you don't understand the perspective from which they are voting. To be baffled by it is to fail to recognize your own ignorance. Didn't you just write that people can be motivated by ideology instead of self-interest? Yes, you can be altruistic (essentially the opposite of self-interested) and decide not to support universal health care, or basic income, or whatever, because you believe it will be a net loss for society. This line of reasoning is pretty common in conservative circles, in fact, and I didn't consider it worth mentioning. I suspect you are working with a definition of "self-interest" that is so broad as to lose most of it's meaning. I take it to mean the opposite of altruism: working to help others at the expense of your own material well-being (or, perhaps, just without seeing any personal gain). My point is that you need not be altruistic to support these policies (though it does seem to help), if you think enacting them will improve or defend your well-being.
• smacktoward 10y ago
  So why didn't they all vote for Obamacare and for the public option, subsidized by higher taxes? Because there was nobody to vote for who offered that. McCain's proposal was to deny that the problem existed. Obama's proposal was Obamacare without an individual mandate. Clinton's proposal was Obamacare with an individual mandate. Those were the only entrees on the proverbial menu. No candidate ran on a public option, so you couldn't vote for that even if you desperately wanted to. Ironically, one of the first moves of the candidate who got the most votes, Obama, was to decide that Hillary Clinton had been right after all and include an individual mandate. So if you voted for him over her because you opposed that idea, you were officially SOL.
  • dragonwriter 10y ago
    > Obama's proposal was Obamacare without an individual mandate. Clinton's proposal was Obamacare with an individual mandate. Those were the only entrees on the proverbial menu. No candidate ran on a public option Actually, all of Obama, Clinton, and Edwards ran on a public option. They differed on other points (as you note, during the primary Obama opposed and Clinton supported an individual mandate, and there were various other differences between the three plans, but largely Clinton and Obama cribbed their plans from the same place Edwards did first, so they all looked pretty similar.)
    • smacktoward 10y ago
      They sometimes mentioned a public option, but it was never central to either Obama's or Hillary's pitch. See here for an evaluation of Obama on the issue: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/dec/23/barack-obama/public-option-obama-platform/ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/dec/... It was included in his platform, but as an "also, too" kind of thing. And if you took your evaluation of his position from what he said on the stump, you'd never have known it was in his platform at all. (I'm omitting Edwards from this discussion because he flamed out so early.)
      • gbhn 10y ago
        My recollection is that it was included, but then traded to the relevant industries for their acceptance of the plan we have now. Whether it was always intended as a chip or was a serious part of the plan is open for debate I suppose, but the best chips are ones that are serious, so I'm not sure there's much difference in practice.