7 ms·

I kinda feel Obama is more of a Trojan horse. It was not he tried and failed to get what he campaigned for implemented, it was more like he did a U turn after h

• JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
  > he called for universal health care but once he was elected he started saying it was "too radical" ACA was the most radical package that could have passed, and it still cost Democrats the Congress. This line of argument reminds of the folks who complained about Sinema and Manchin. You know what we’d have with a few more Sinemas and Manchins in the party right now? A majority. The bill that passes is better than the ideal that doesn’t.
  • parineum 11mo ago
    > The bill that passes is better than the ideal that doesn’t. For your resume, sure. Sometimes reform only works when you fully commit and if half the country isn't on board, it's not better to pass some mutilated and watered down version.
    • JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
      > For your resume, sure No, for everyone. Some voters like politicians who pass zero legislation while holding firm to their values. Occasionally they get rewarded. Most often, they’re branded–correctly–ineffective. (And, I’d argue, unfit to lead. If you’re using millions of Americans as human shields to pass an ideologically-pure package, that’s immoral and belongs with Twitter celebrities, not leaders.)
      • parineum 11mo ago
        You didn't mention the effectiveness or positive effects of the hypothetically passed legislation at all. You're arguing that it's good for a politician's resume.
    • threatofrain 11mo ago
      No, losing ACA matters. It's a good program that's helping people afford or qualify for life insurance. I was able to get insurance because of it.
      • beedeebeedee 11mo ago
        Yes, but it does not provide health care, it provides a subsidy to the health insurance companies (I.e., throwing even more money at lucrative companies that profit by denying coverage). It is sad that it is the best our government can do for us.
        • kelnos 11mo ago
          It is sad, agreed, but having the ACA is better than not having it.
          • roenxi 11mo ago
            That seems like a difficult one to provide evidence for. A major problem in the US seems to be that they've got this impenetrable thicket of legislation around healthcare, insurance and employment that makes it impossible for people to make rational decisions. Just not having that legislation, letting employment & insurance decouple and a sane market for healthcare develop might easily be better than the ACA.
            • kelnos 11mo ago
              > Just not having that legislation, letting employment & insurance decouple and a sane market for healthcare develop might easily be better than the ACA. Maybe? But what is the mechanism by which employment gets decoupled from health insurance? That would require a different law, I suppose? But that wasn't what I suggested: I said having the ACA is better than not having it, not that having the ACA is better than other possible alternative laws. I can think of quite a lot of alternative healthcare reform laws that would be significantly better than the ACA. And I think it's reasonably safe to say that in "ACA vs. nothing else", ACA wins, if we judge by the millions of people who will lose healthcare coverage if the ACA were to be repealed and not replaced with anything new.
    • squeaky-clean 11mo ago
      This attitude is why Trump is president. Yeah we have a terrible leader, but we could have had a mediocre leader and I guess that is somehow worse in people's minds.
      • parineum 11mo ago
        That doesn't track at all. I'm talking about legislation and, hence, legislatures.
    • johnnyanmac 11mo ago
      >and if half the country isn't on board By that logic, we can never pass anything, ever. And that more or less is represented with congredd Grdidlock for the past 20 years. Is that a better outcome? I see it as Sprint vs. Waterfall. Except Waterfall takes 8-10 years in policy to do and no one is in office long enough to finish the task. So we gotta pass in a lot of smaller tickets until we get there.
  • dralley 11mo ago
    Manchin and Sinema shouldn't be mentioned together in the same sentence. Manchin was genuinely the best Democrats could hope for from West Virginia. Sinema was absolutely not the best Democrats could hope for from Arizona. Manchin was also, while not perfect, more honest in much of his opposition than Sinema was, and sometimes he was actually right.
    • duped 11mo ago
      Manchin was a stooge who voted how he was paid. He doesn't get a pass for not being as clear a traitor as Sinema.
      • jychang 11mo ago
        He voted how his electorate would have wanted him to vote. He probably also hoodwinked some rich people to pay him some bucks while he was at it. He's about as "shades of gray" as a politician gets.
        • SkyPuncher 11mo ago
          That was always my impression of him. It was easy to feel like he was breaking ranks, but realistically he seemed to vote exactly how his electorate wanted him to.
          • dralley 11mo ago
            He voted in line with Democrats when it mattered, but was enough of a visible pain in the ass to satisfy his constituents.
        • deleted 11mo ago
          [deleted]
      • _fizz_buzz_ 11mo ago
        Without Manchin the Inflation Reduction Act would not have passed. Arguably Biden‘s biggest accomplishment.
  • jgoodhcg 11mo ago
    No. I think an honest attempt at doing something "radical" economically for the working class can cross the divides we have.
    • Aunche 11mo ago
      Radically changing healthcare works out great in people's heads, but then they immediately whine about their Ozempic no longer being covered like in socialized healthcare countries which don't use expensive cutting edge drugs as a first resort. No matter how competent the government is, which ours isn't, any radical change (besides just throwing more money at the problem) will make things worse before they are better and voters are the most fickle bunch there is.
      • edmundsauto 11mo ago
        Semaglutide isn’t exactly cutting edge, it’s 16 years since it was invented. GLP-1 drugs go back to the 90s. They are undeniably trendy but it’s odd to consider them cutting edge. Expensive, yes.
        • Aunche 11mo ago
          Semaglutide was approved in 2017. By cutting edge, I suppose I mean covered by patent. Luckily for Canada, Novo Nordisk forgot to pay their for its renewal. I was just pointing to an example of why healthcare reform is politically difficult. One relevant to the ACA was ending discrimination based on preexisting conditions, which caused a majority of people's premiums to go up to subsidize those who are chronically ill. Morally, most people agree it's the right thing to do, but it was politically disastrous since one person gets one vote.
      • deleted 11mo ago
        [deleted]
      • __d 11mo ago
        FWIW, semaglutide is available in Australia via the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (part of the socialized healthcare system), when prescribed for treatment of type 2 diabetes. Which means it is cheap, because the government bulk-buys it at a negotiated price. There are plenty of treatments that aren’t subsidized, but it’s not as restricted as it might be perceived. There’s very little whining about things not being covered, because most things are.
  • monocasa 11mo ago
    The ACA was essentially the Republican plan for healthcare reform. They just went scorched earth on it because they were pissy that he got the credit for their plan. That's also why they haven't been able to come up with a coherent replacement. Obama had a plan early on to be inspired by Lincoln's cabinet of rivals and to try to unite the parties. Because of that he didn't push nearly as hard on the right wing of his party early on like Lieberman, who were the holdouts who pushed for the lack of a public option to have true universal healthcare.
    • WillPostForFood 11mo ago
      Republicans in Congress never wanted or proposed anything like ACA. It is weird half truth because Massachusetts, one the more liberal states, with Democratic supermajorities in both houses, passed something similar while Mitt Romney was Governor. It was the brainchild of Jonathan Gruber, MIT Economist and Democratic consultant who worked on the ACA for Obama. You can go back and read the GOP platforms of the time, there is nothing like the ACA proposed.
      • monocasa 11mo ago
        The 1993 HEART Act was very much like the ACA, built around the individual mandate to purchase private health insurance, primarily through your employer. Romneycare was massaged out of this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_Equity_and_Access_Reform_Today_Act_of_1993#Comparison_with_Affordable_Care_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_Equity_and_Access_Refor... This was the Republican alternative to the time's Hillarycare proposal, and was authored by the Heritage Foundation of Project 2025 fame.
        • nwienert 11mo ago
          From what I understand, the HEART act wasn't really backed by Republicans, it had only 20 or so R's on it and was actually more of a ploy to prevent other more substantive bills from passing. It was designed to obstruct not to pass, later Dole supported a more restricted bill and HEART was never even debated. The vast majority of R's didn't support it, it was basically a political maneuver.
  • marricks 11mo ago
    > ACA was the most radical package that could have passed, and it still cost Democrats the Congress. People aren’t excited by half measures that let health insurance companies generate tons of money and CONTINUOUSLY raise premiums. People still go bankrupt receiving cancer care here. The person who gets free healthcare and cuts overall costs by destroying health insurance middle man will be massively popular and, once the effects are borne out, win congress in a landslide. Perhaps Obama couldn't have made it happen, but he didn't try. He could have made a speech about "how we will do because not because it's easy, but because it's possible because every other western nation has this same basic thing." But here we are with a crappy compromise.
    • EgregiousCube 11mo ago
      “It works in Europe” isn’t a very good American political rallying cry though; Americans generally don’t have the opinion that Europe works very well.
      • mdhb 11mo ago
        Only because American discourse and thinking is so utterly poisoned by the absolute bullshit that is “American exceptionalism”. In terms of almost any possible quality of life metric you can think of Europe is ahead of the US. That combined with just a breathtaking level of ignorance of what Europe is actually like in any meaningful sense. You saw this a lot in this NYC election where they were trying to paint Mamdani as an actual communist because well over half of the country has no idea what “democratic socialism” means let alone communism.
        • olelele 11mo ago
          Except the McMansions and that every family has at least 3 cars…
          • mdhb 11mo ago
            The majority of Americans live pay check to pay check back in the real world. It’s the only country I’ve seen outside of a war zone where people are regularly trying to crowdfund money for basic things like food, education, justice or medical care. The story you’re telling yourself is entirely divorced from reality. I remember the parent of an ex of mine who was from NY tell me how lucky they were to have such incredible insurance and medical coverage when his wife got cancer because he only had to pay the first $100k/yr out of pocket and then the rest was “free”. It was repeatedly stressed to me what a rare thing this was and most people would be in such a worse position. Anyways, long story short… They hit that limit by February and then spent the rest of the year getting denied by their insurance company until the day she died. But at least she was treated at “the best cancer hospital in the world”.
  • Ericson2314 11mo ago
    > ACA was the most radical package that could have passed, and it still cost Democrats the Congress. Bad casual reasoning. There is so little evidence that voters care about policies years before they go into effect.
    • CamperBob2 11mo ago
      Fox News made damned sure the voters cared.
      • Ericson2314 11mo ago
        Well sure, but do you think Fox News wasn't already going as hard as they could? Were they really rewarding the ACA we got versus a hypothetical public option by hammering it slightly less hard?
        • CamperBob2 11mo ago
          Yes, that's basically their corporate charter in a nutshell. Fox News was founded to limit the damage that a future Watergate Committee could do. Later, the Republicans realized it was much more useful than that. It gives them a fulcrum to move the Overton Window by dragging wedge issues into the limelight and making sure they stay there.
          • Ericson2314 11mo ago
            I take it you disagree then with the GP that watering down the bill in hopes that Republicans and Fox News campaign against it less is a foolish idea?
  • BrenBarn 11mo ago
    With 20/20 hindsight I'd say that's the wrong lesson. The actual lesson is that if you're struggling to get 40% of the legislature to make obvious improvements to your country, you should use your majority for even more radical things. If they'd used that same majority to pack the supreme court, pass a nationwide anti-gerrymandering law, break up hundreds of large corporations, and so on, we might have averted a ton of disaster. At the time perhaps it was hard to see, but in retrospect what we saw in the period 2008-2010 were early warning signs of how the flaws in our system of government were going to send us on a downward spiral.
    • whoooboyy 11mo ago
      It wasn't hard to see at the time. People just thought the West Wing was how politics should work. That somehow all the players come to play good, fair ball. Many of us were out here caucusing against Obama and Gore and Biden because they represented an obvious losing strategy in the long term.
  • rtpg 11mo ago
    I do think it's worth considering that FDR got elected for 4 terms (granted, congressional control went through various flows). The push for the ideal might have locked in something generational. Maybe.
  • somenameforme 11mo ago
    I think people had rose colored glasses about Obama because he was, by far, the most charismatic President we've had in modern times. His speeches still give me goose bumps, even when I disagree with what he's saying! That man has the gift of gab. Him also being intelligent further, sadly, makes him an outlier in modern times. But many of the things he did were dubious and ACA is a perfect example of this. It's little more than an subsidy for private insurance companies whose profits dramatically increased relatively shortly after adapting to it. Universal healthcare doesn't have to be adversarial towards private insurance, but it should not directly drive increases in profits because, especially once its mandated + subsidized, profits need to be controlled as the government is effectively guaranteeing them. Medical loss ratios (insurers must pay a minimum percent of premium revenue on medical costs) are obviously insufficient since they do nothing to motivate lower costs. On the contrary, it directly incentivizes maximizing costs which is exactly what's happened. For one specific datum medicare administrative costs are around 2% - private insurance administrative costs start around 12%. --- Basically there is no way this was even remotely close to the most socially motivated (I don't see radical as a desirable adjective) package he could get have gotten passed. And now with the country so divided, it's unlikely we'll be getting anything better anytime in the foreseeable future, because whichever side tries to pass it will simply be opposed by the other, regardless of merit. Hopefully Mamdani isn't a complete failure, because more parties in power is perhaps one way to break the divides in society.
    • macNchz 11mo ago
      The ACA was, I believe, a highly intentional better-done-than-perfect effort, fully cognizant of the historical cycles of political will around major healthcare policy in America. If you review in depth the efforts in the 90s under Clinton, and earlier under Johnson, I think the approach was well considered. A more ambitious policy proposal ending in failure very well may have have put the topic to bed for another twenty years. The loss of the “public option” did sting, though.
      • TheCoelacanth 11mo ago
        Yes, and many states blocking the Medicaid expansion also hurt it.
  • Der_Einzige 11mo ago
    This line of thinking died the moment that the parties began another realignment with 2024. We are in the beginnings of the 7th party system. Curtis Sliwa was significantly to the left of both Eric Adams and Cuomo on a whole host of issues, which is one of the many reasons why Trump refused to endorse Silwa (they hate each other). If we didn't have a Sinema or Manchin, we might have liberal republicans like a Silwa who would be objectively better if you're a liberal.
  • mmooss 11mo ago
    > ACA was the most radical package that could have passed And they only passed it by bypassing the fillibuster and using the budget reconciliation process. But arguably, if they were more aggressive and offered bigger benefits, they'd get more support. The GOP has been extremely aggressive, generally. People don't vote for those hesitant and afraid of conflict. > You know what we’d have with a few more Sinemas and Manchins in the party right now? A majority. True, and it's also true if the Dems had a few more Sanderses and Warrens - and then they'd have a solid majority rather than one that caved like Manchin. But they'd need a bunch more to pass a healthcare bill without reconciliation.
  • renewiltord 11mo ago
    You are right in a deep way (as you often are on this site). Wins Against Replacement isn't something most people can comprehend. If you look at baseball, you'll see that a lot of what they're doing with what they think is advanced moneyball would seem like normal statistical techniques to anyone. But then you realize that what is trivial in an HFT firm is kind of black magic to anyone else. Even WAR is beyond the comprehension of the average person. The average person wants someone who "totally dunked on the other guy, dude" and then loses the election but "never sold out, man". Part of the wisdom of supporting Rosa Parks and not just the first Black woman who was in that position is about being good at winning so your cause advances. Our lives in America are so good that winning or advancing your cause doesn't really move the needle as much as "making a stand, dude" is. Given that life is really good and change isn't immediately to acute suffering, almost all politics for the average person is about posturing and signaling. From closer to home, people are annoyed in San Francisco that the state speed camera laws are not permanent and the fines are not humongous for someone going 100 mph over the limit. Most people fantasize about things happening as God placing down edict from upon high, rather than the thing that can happen on the political frontier.
  • pantulis 11mo ago
    > The bill that passes is better than the ideal that doesn’t. This is the essence of politics.
  • meowface 11mo ago
    The fact that people are still saying things like what the post you're replying to is saying really makes it so clear how Democrats have to face endless false propaganda from the left and the right while Republicans generally don't have the same problem.
• Tiktaalik 11mo ago
  Run from the Left, govern from the Right. A pretty classic political electoral strategy of centrist liberals.
  • potamic 11mo ago
    Why would someone do that? Especially for presidency which is the final stage of their career? They're not beholden to or reliant on anyone no more so shouldn't have to be swayed by any adverse interests.
    • esseph 11mo ago
      Reelection
    • lapcat 11mo ago
      Look at Obama's net worth when he left office and now. Look at Bill Clinton's net worth when he left office and now. It wasn't the final stage of their career but only the beginning.
    • tsimionescu 11mo ago
      A presidency lasts 8 years of your life, best case scenario. And the presidential salary will not make you rich. So, if your only goal is a good life, you have to use your presidency to get people to make you rich afterwards, which means favors for the wealthy.
    • Tiktaalik 11mo ago
      They run from the left in order to get elected, that is the sham. They tell people things that people want to believe that they know they can't deliver in order to get elected. Then they govern from the centre right status quo which aligns more with their actual beliefs.
  • deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
• Slow_Hand 11mo ago
  The Affordable Care Act wasn't a complete solution - and I don't get the feeling universal health care was necessarily achievable - but it is the reason that I have health care and mental health services today. So I consider it to be a meaningful - if incremental - improvement. I imagine there are quite a few people aside from myself who are happy to have it.
• adrr 11mo ago
  There was a government option in the original ACA. Dems couldn’t get the votes to overcome the filibuster in the senate to pass it. It had nothing to do Obama u turning. It was an amazing feat to get it passed in congress and get 60 votes in the senate.
  • vjvjvjvjghv 11mo ago
    Obama was pretty timid. Especially at the beginning of his presidency he assumed that his fellow democrats like Lieberman and Baucus were rational and wanted the best for the country and not just being pawns for the insurance industry. I bet if he had pounded the table, he would have way more success. Heck, LBJ made senators cry to get things done.
    • scott_w 11mo ago
      Hindsight is 20/20. I recall Obama later saying he wished he was more radical because he only realised too late that the holdouts to ACA were never going to vote for it. Essentially, they negotiated in bad faith but Obama only realised this after they’d made all the requested changes and still couldn’t get the votes.
      • vjvjvjvjghv 11mo ago
        My ex worked at Congress at the time and even stupid me realized quickly that Obama was being played. I remember having fights with her when I told her that Obama is naive. Maybe they don’t see what’s going on when they are on the inside.
        • scott_w 11mo ago
          I can totally believe that. I mean, look at the shock that Democrats have had to Trump doing all the authoritarian things he said he'd do! I saw a similar thing in the UK where the newly-minted Labour government thought they could combat ReformUK on asylum policy. Luckily, I think they're slowly starting to realise that, no matter how hard they tack, ReformUK will always promise something more insane and unworkable.
• dboreham 11mo ago
  Proper Obamacare wasn't implemented because healthcare industry interests held up legislation until the midterms at which point the Republicans took over congress.
• Ericson2314 11mo ago
  There will be lots of pressure to on Zohran to do the same. But hopefully the cautionary tale that is Obama will be learned from.
• ajross 11mo ago
  > [Obama] called for universal health care but once he was elected he started saying it was "too radical". He "called for" a bill that would pass (barely, as it required a filibuster-proof majority that will never happen again in our lives), and it did. It's absolutely infuriating to me the extent to which the American electorate fails to understand basic civics. Presidents take all sorts of legislative positions, but they don't run congress and never have. And so the cycle continues. Presidential candidate says "I thinks Foo is good", electorate takes that as a promise to deliver Foo. Foo fails to appear, electorate gets mad and votes for the other guy promising to deliver Bar. Never mind that MetaFoo actually passed, Bar is impossible, and the Barite party wants to enact hungarian notation via martial law. Electorate is still pissed off about Foo, somehow.
• solumunus 11mo ago
  Not too radical to be good and effective, too radical to break through current political constraints. You have to confront the reality of what can actually be achieved within the system you’re working in.
• docmars 11mo ago
  [flagged]
• jrm4 11mo ago
  I genuinely can't believe, still, that I have to spell this out for people. Obama did not do a U-turn. It is the worst naivete to think that what happened was "he had big ideas and he changed his mind." He had to bring up big ideas to get elected, and then he got elected the first Black president and some of you seem entirely too dense to actually grasp what that means. President. Not King. Subject to all of those checks and balances you hear about and then some. You people act as if he could wave a wand and just sweep away everyone and everything who was against his big ideas, when the opposite was at play. Please, grow a better sense of politics.
  • yesbut 11mo ago
    Consider the framing today: "Trump is doing all these terrible things, making all of these drastic changes, exploiting the system to his will." The Dems can no longer use the excuse that the president is handcuffed. Trump 2.0 is showing us what the president can do. The dems consistently use that excuse to prevent popular policies from being enacted. Obama even had a ~6mo super majority where he could have codified abortion rights. But instead they keep it around as an outstanding issue because it is a good fundraising issue.
    • jrm4 11mo ago
      It is astoundingly naive to think that the forces in America make it such that "whoever is the president has unlimited power, whether they're an old rich white billionaire or a relatively young black guy on the Dem side." Again, I implore you all to grow a bit smarter.
      • wredcoll 11mo ago
        People acting like the supreme court would overturn laws in favor of obama the way they do for trump...
        • whoooboyy 11mo ago
          We'll never know because RBG chose not to retire when Dems could have done anything, and every Dem after that just politely waited for GOP to take advantage of them. It's still happening with folks like Jeffries today being utterly willing to capitulate on policy if it means the institution is respected.
• jayd16 11mo ago
  Yeah, can you believe all those progressive bills he vetoed? ...I mean c'mon now. Congress passed what they could and it cost the Dems greatly. Why are we pretending Obama could have gotten more?
• tartoran 11mo ago
  I feel Obama was trying to appease the Republicans as well, he appointed many of them who back stabbed him shortly after. Maybe he was trying to no be too radical just because he was black and knew how racist a part of America was and it turned out it was right, Trump mainly got elected because "Democrats" put a black person in the White House. In retrospect, yeah, maybe he should have been more radical.