Obamacare’s Reality

 

 

The noise among the talking heads this week is all about how Obama screwed up with the implementation of the ACA, and that criticism is certainly valid but the comparisons to Bush , the deserter, and Katrina are just as certainly absurd. Going into Katrina, Bush already had started two illegal wars and was getting ready to bankrupt the country. Katrina was just the poisoned icing n the fetid cake. People were actually dying in New Orleans so the comparison, like most of the noise being made by the right is at best faulty. This is especially true when one considers the fact that no one was trying to stop Bush from saving Louisiana, as the right has been trying to affect a catastrophe with the ACA.

 

If nothing else, this mess is an abject lesson in the differences between the two parties. The Democrats, even the ones who hated Bush, were always willing to back him for the sake of the country. The Republicans, even the ones who know Obama is right about healthcare have always tried to destroy his legislation for the sake of their own selfish ends.

 

Watching Martha Raddatz question Kristen Gillibrand is a clear example of a tainted host not asking the right questions In the middle of the interview after asking about the future of the ACA and having Gillibrand explain the important points of the program, Raddatz flips the discussion by saying “We’re talking about leadership here…” No she wasn’t. She was talking about why the ACA would fail and Gillibrand was talking about why we needed it.  That’s exactly what’s wrong with Washington and all the corporate media people  who inhabit that fractured city.  Obama’s leadership qualities are not important to this particular discussion.  The ACA, why we need it and what can be done to fix it are the only pertinent concerns here. Who the hell gives a damn about Obama’s legacy?  What the people care about is getting functional, affordable healthcare for everyone without bankrupting the country.

 

Sure Obama has made some big mistakes on this, the first being not making it a single payer system. Why didn’t he do that? Because he couldn’t get enough Democrats, many of whom, were on the take from the insurance companies, to back him. But despite that, it seems that those same the insurance companies, who can now see a million additional customers coming on line, are trying to help. The only ones who don’t see the ACA eventually working are the far right and their reason is obviously because a black guy proposed it.

 

Anyone who wants to call that last statement reverse racism is clueless about who lives in this country.

 

In the same general discussion Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal makes the statement that is the most warped of any that has bee made in the entire ACA debate when he says that it will be the ACA’s fault when in June thousands of employers move full time workers to part time status to avoid having to keep paying their ACA benefits.  This is pure unadulterated bullshit. Any management that moves a worker to part time to avoid having to pay his medical benefits is just a greedy pig and must bear the blame for the act he has perpetrated. It isn’t the healthcare law that is at fault for the despicable actions of greedy fat cats who just want bigger bonuses and Bret Stephens should be ashamed of himself for making a statement like that. I know he works for the Wall Street Journal but that doesn’t mean he has to be a complete whore. The perfect analogy is to be seen in the glass in the side windows of your car. It is made to crumble, rather than shatter when it is struck. This is so that it will not cut the occupant of the car. But when a car thief easily breaks this same window and steals the car, is it the manufacturers fault the car was stolen or the thieves? Bret Stephens wants to blame it on the manufacturer.

 

David Gregory and the like, are not interested in whether or not the ACA will work or how long it will take to fix it. They are only interested in the political aspects of what is going on at this precise moment and that isn’t good for the country. Who will care two years from now, what they think will happen because of this bad opening? By that time everything will have changed ten times. That’s just the nature of politics. Two weeks ago everything was exactly the opposite of where it is now and two weeks from now it can all be back where it was or completely up in the air. None of that is relevant to actual health care but the talking heads don’t care. All they care about is what will sell papers or in this case how much they can get out of BP for an advertising lie.

 

I give whole hearted bow to Nancy Pelosi, a woman who I have never before supported, for standing up to David Gregory and not letting him drive her off message. She understands what is important in this case and that is, that the nation get healthcare.

 

When Kelly Ayotte, ® New Hampshire was questioned about alternatives to the ACA she came up empty or essentially so on anything that will improve it, this after blasting it for over ten minutes. This is the typical GOP reaction to almost anything. Oppose it if Obama has anything to do with it but God Forbid, we have any reasonable way to deal with it.

 

Cancellation notices:

The problem with cancellation notices is that they have everyone all bent out of shape when the reason for the law is that these policies that are being cancelled were no damn good, in the first place. They were a typical example of how the insurance companies were ripping off the public, selling policies that never really paid off when the insured needed them. Why are we having a big, to do, about people who are too stupid to know when they are being screwed? It seems that we should come up with a way to allow these turkey’s to keep their useless healthcare and still protect the rest the nation from the problems of not having any.

 

Interesting conversation between Dan Henninger of the Wall Street Journal and Ezra Klien, editor of the Washington Post’s Wonk blog.  Klien seems to understand what is happening now and what can happen in the future and that basically is that the White House needs to find a way to get young healthy subscribers to sign up.  He points out that there is plenty of time and that all other plans like this have taken a huge break-in period..

 

Henninger, on the other hand is a true naysayer. He completely misses the involvement of young people whose lives are run on technology. Rather than being befuddled by the tech glitch they will simply ignore the whole thing for a while and them merely sign on when things are fixed. Henninger just doesn’t get this.

 

It’s kind of sad and not a little pathetic that the one thing Obama was able to get past the neo-Nazi element in congress has been bungled to the extent that the technological screw-up in the delivery of the ACA, has become more important than the content of the bill. The GOP, as it is wont to do, has risen on its hind legs and is howling at the moon over the failures of the President’s computer system. Note carefully that though they have long opposed the ACA, they have quieted somewhat over their demand to eliminate it, probably because secretly, most of them realize that the damn thing will eventually work and it is a necessary good.. Like everything else in politics and business, when it does work everyone who was a naysayer about it will look like a fool and a loser and although politics are full of fools that are constantly proving their status as such, there is no worse fate in political America than to look like a loser.

 

The real reason that the right should be silent about the ACA is because it is obviously a necessary program and they just as obviously have nothing with which to replace it. The satiric rumor started by The  Borowitz Report that Eric Cantor has come up with a new healthcare program called, Emergencyroom.com which when accessed will give you the location of the nearest emergency room where you can then wait up to 30 hours for treatment and be billed over a grand for a stomach ache, is more truth than most of us would like to admit. That is, unfortunately, the status quo until we get universal healthcare, and it looks like it will take an electoral sweep and a full frontal assault on the insurance companies and their lobbies, to make that very necessary change happen.

 

The question becomes, can we get an only marginally functional Democratic Party to get off its ass and actually accomplish something as important as universal healthcare, and can we do it before we all die for lack of it?