Ironically, you need Dubya for this.
Not really ironic; it's the nature of the two parties as they currently stand. The Republicans are assholes and the Democrats are pussies.
Put another couple of ways:
Jesus christ, the entire nation watched Bush wrangle his party to do things they didn't want to do for 8 years with threats of fundraising cuts, primary endorsements to opponents, stonewalling on pet legislations, etc... Why the fuck can't we take a page from the republican playbook FOR ONCE and be a fucking effective party?
Because we aren't ideologically orthodox or respectful of authority the way the republicans are. That's the nature of the liberal mind set. Add onto that the fact that we got the majority by running candidates that are barely discernible ideologically from republicans to take advantage of the unpopularity of Bush and you end up with a party where half the representatives aren't liberal in any real sense. Oh, and it's the younger half.
Well, sort of. In practice, it's more that the Democrats are taking money from the same people the Republicans are. But yes, the Democrats do not have the party discipline that the Republicans do. The Republicans have managed to vote in lockstep, no compromise, no exceptions, and Bush managed to railroad immensely unpopular things through because he had more balls than the opposition party.
Despite the "Obamacare" name being tossed around, Obama has fuck-all to do with any of this; he never really stepped up on healthcare. I think a lot of that was learning the wrong lessons from the last two administrations -- he didn't want to be too closely tied to the healthcare legislation like Clinton was, and he didn't want to run the country as a unitary executive like Bush did and instead opted to let Congress do its thing while he watched from the sidelines. And here we are.
The let them Filibuster line is FUCKING RETARDED because filibusterin' ain't what it used to be. Back in ye olden days it was one guy reading shit until he got tired. The rules these days state the filibuster party needs one person in the room to keep talking, and the opposing party needs to be there IN FULL or else the minority party can claim lack of quorum.
It is retarded and pretty much why the filibuster needs to die entirely.
Which it almost did in '05 -- at the Republicans' hands because the minority Democrats kept filibustering.
I'm sure I've mentioned it at least once in the thread, but just to reiterate, my attitude at the time was that we should let them do it because the filibuster is an inherently conservative tool. And it's not like the Dems ever successfully filibustered any of Bush's most egregious shit, either.
a bill which increases the number of people on healthcare
In the same way that a draft would increase the number of people serving in the military. Except this would be more like a draft that forced people to sign up with Blackwater or Halliburton.
It's more than just the issue of a compulsory buy-in with the dicks who've been fucking us this whole time. (Ah, I was wondering who the dicks were in my Team America metaphor. Republicans are assholes, Democrats are pussies, and the insurance companies are dicks. Where was I?) Who's going to be paying for this? It's not the wealthy, of course, it's the middle class. Via
Bob Herbert at the NYT:
The tax would kick in on plans exceeding $23,000 annually for family coverage and $8,500 for individuals, starting in 2013. In the first year it would affect relatively few people in the middle class. But because of the steadily rising costs of health care in the U.S., more and more plans would reach the taxation threshold each year.
Within three years of its implementation, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the tax would apply to nearly 20 percent of all workers with employer-provided health coverage in the country, affecting some 31 million people. Within six years, according to Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation, the tax would reach a fifth of all households earning between $50,000 and $75,000 annually. Those families can hardly be considered very wealthy.
Proponents say the tax will raise nearly $150 billion over 10 years, but there’s a catch. It’s not expected to raise this money directly. The dirty little secret behind this onerous tax is that no one expects very many people to pay it. The idea is that rather than fork over 40 percent in taxes on the amount by which policies exceed the threshold, employers (and individuals who purchase health insurance on their own) will have little choice but to ratchet down the quality of their health plans.
So, all right. People who can't afford health insurance are forced to buy it anyway; people who CAN afford it wind up spending more to get less. And not paying the taxes that are actually supposed to finance the thing.
Wait, it gets better:
If even the plan’s proponents do not expect policyholders to pay the tax, how will it raise $150 billion in a decade? Great question.
We all remember learning in school about the suspension of disbelief. This part of the Senate’s health benefits taxation scheme requires a monumental suspension of disbelief. According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, less than 18 percent of the revenue will come from the tax itself. The rest of the $150 billion, more than 82 percent of it, will come from the income taxes paid by workers who have been given pay raises by employers who will have voluntarily handed over the money they saved by offering their employees less valuable health insurance plans.
Can you believe it?
So, okay. A bill that creates undue financial hardship on people who can't afford health insurance, sticks people who CAN afford it with something worse than they already have, and is financed by pure bullshit.
and gets rid of pre-existing conditions
They can still cap the amount of money they'll spend on you in a given year, which amounts to the same thing.
isn't worth passing?
You're focusing on (an exaggeration of) the benefits while downplaying the drawbacks. Hate to go all ad absurdum on you, but how many kittens would the bill have to kill before you'd say it wasn't worth medical progress? Damn, I bet
Frist would have had an answer for that.
(Excuse me, I'm just going to bask in that for a minute; it was a very good joke.)
Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't see this coming back at all if Obama kicks it back to the senate, much less coming back better.
The bitch is that you're right; we're fucked on this either way at this point because Barack, Harry, and the rest have screwed the pooch so badly. There is no good outcome anymore.
I honestly don't know where I'd come down on the "it should pass because it's all we're going to get/it shouldn't pass because it's fucking awful" debate, and frankly it's a moot point anyway. We've got a shit bill, the President's going to sign it, and that's the way it's going to be.
Politically, the Dems are going to pretend this is a revolution and the Republicans are going to pretend it's the end of civilization, each in the hopes of winning in 2010 and maybe as far out as 2012.
In practice? We won't even really know what the effects of the new law are by the 2010 election. Maybe things WILL get better than they are. I expect the co-ops or nonprofits or whatever the fuck watered-down bullshit version of the watered-down bullshit version of what we actually wanted WILL probably be at least a little bit better than the private insurance plan that recently decided it had spent too much money on antifungal meds for my lungs. And it'll be nice to see my girlfriend have some kind of health insurance too.
But the fact remains that the Democrats sold us out, Lieberman is the single worst politician in Washington, Obama vocally opposed mandates back when it was politically convenient, and the insurance companies are laughing all the way to the bank.
Which the government is also propping up with our money despite our objections.