4 ms·
People need to take a step back and take the red/blue team fanboy emotion out of it. It wasn't "destroyed" because it was "deemed socialist". It was destroyed
by potato3732842 1y ago
People need to take a step back and take the red/blue team fanboy emotion out of it.
It wasn't "destroyed" because it was "deemed socialist". It was destroyed because it used tricks of law to get something that didn't have broad enough support at the time done and those regulatory tricks were not durable. Same exact story as Roe v Wade but in a much more compressed timeline.
Unfortunately, the whole debacle has likely hardened the resolve of everyone who is against it even though a functional Romneycare system would likely be satisfactory to them (and needless to say an improvement over the status quo).
Turns out "the perfect is the enemy of the good, ship it" isn't how you run a society. This is a common theme. Stuff that's 50-50 either gets gutted or repealed with time. Something needs to be truly popular, like will lose you votes if you undo it, in order to stick around. For example no amount of pothead deadbeats or drunken wife beating is bringing weed or alcohol prohibition back at the state level.
We're 15yr on from the ACA and with very few exceptions things are worse. The nation likely would have been better served by letting the states that were inclined to run such systems continue doing so without federal meddling.
- ceejayoz 1y agoThe regulatory tricks were upheld by SCOTUS. Republicans just zeroed out the penalty in the individual mandate after that decision. They knew what that would do; that's why they did it.
- potato3732842 1y agoAnd where did they get the political capital to do that? They got it from the approximately half of society that they could pander to by saying "look, we did that, vote for me and I'll take it even farther" at the next cycle. The ACA is going to go down in history as something that caused some yet unknown number of decades of suffering because it was just barely too much just barely too soon. If they'd have kept it in their pants another decade or maybe even less, or legislated a more incremental solution at the time we'd probably be 5yr into something workable by now.
- mystraline 1y agoAnd some of us remember that asshole, Lieberman, was the one who blocked the Public Insurance option (aka universal insurance fund, a type of single payer). And he also blocked having medicare/medicaid from again negotiating for drug costs. I keep saying, cause its true: this is a republican plan, pushed by republican governor, and by a republican thinktank, branded as socialist because a black democrat had the audacity to push it.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- brookst 1y agoI don’t see how anyone can seriously suggest society must only use “perfect” policies. They don’t even exist. How does that help anyone?
- schmidtleonard 1y ago"The Democrats weren't able to stop Republicans from killing it, therefore it's the Democrats fault that Republicans killed it." Instance #234535 of "the bar is never too high for Democrats and never too low for Republicans."