Affordable Health Care Law under review by SCOTUS

[onejayhawk]

The actual quote was "we have to pass the bill so that you know what's in it away from the fog of the controversy."

Clearly Pelosi was incorrect about that, judging by comments here.

I reread this about six times and I still don't know what she intended to say. Regardless, the usual interpretation is correct. She clearly wanted to pass the bill without debate.

J

[Judge Jude]

this is the full version, apparently:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2010/12/the_ghost_of_gaffes_past.html

"You've heard about the controversies within the bill, the process about the bill, one or the other. But I don't know if you have heard that it is legislation for the future, not just about health care for America, but about a healthier America, where preventive care is not something that you have to pay a deductible for or out of pocket. Prevention, prevention, prevention—it's about diet, not diabetes. It's going to be very, very exciting. But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy."

Slate then sympathetically adds:
"Pelosi was trying to say that the press was only reporting he-said-she-saids about the bill, and that its benefits would become clear, and popular, once it passed. They did become clear, though they have yet to become popular."

I don't think it's important whether the legislators themselves read the entire bill, as long as their top aides did. Do I think their top aides did? I suspect not, but that would be the tipping point on the issue. The whole process seemed a bit chaotic, iirc, even by Congressional standards.

Anyway, as I've said often before, I hope the law works out for the best. That would be good for the country, and let's not worry about who benefits politically if it does work - as long as we collectively benefit.

[Judge Jude]

To be fair, the Tea Party and President Obama both promised all sorts of transparency in terms of bills that they have never delivered on.

[Don Quixote]

The Affordable Care Act is 906 pages long.

The dimwitted Tea Party swore up and down in 2010, amidst rallying cries of "READ THE BILL!!!", that they'd put the text of bills online at a minimum of 72 hours before the bill's passage.



In what is perhaps the most accurate microcosm of the verisimilitude of all things GOP-related, the GOP spending bill that passed the House was 1,582 pages long. Oh, and it had 1,278 additional pages of riders. Oh, and it was passed 44 hours after it was posted.

So the GOP had less than one minute, assuming they didn't sleep even one wink, to read each page of the bill they passed.


Lol. Mouth breathers.

The fact that what the Repubs did with the spending bill was wrong does not make what the Dems did with the ACA right.

"They do/did it, too" is NOT a valid defense for anything. If you want people to believe that whole Hopey-Changey thingamabob from a few years ago, you have to do the right thing, NOT just do what the "bad guys" do because they did it.

Or do you admit that "Hope and Change" was just a political slogan?

As someone posted on a Yahoo thread a couple of years ago, "I thought the idea was to grow crops, not just spread more fertilizer."

[onejayhawk]

The fact is that the Washington politicians are worthless hypocrites. Oh, but what did the Democrats do? I eagerly await the next installation of revisionist bullshit. Tell me how no one had time to read the bill (various revisions of which were debated for two years)! Tell me how Pelosi said she didn't even read it! Parrot those talking points! Facts, shmacts![/url]

Fixed that for you.

I like the attitude about facts. It fits right in.

J

[nots]

Or do you admit that "Hope and Change" was just a political slogan?

Sadly, it was and I swallowed it hook, line and sinker in 2008.
But as long as the GOP is worse, or slightly more hypocritical, the cheerleaders in the room can deflect or rationalize any criticism of this guy.

[nots]

There are real and legitimate reasons to dislike Obamacare. Making quotes up to suit your fool self aren't among them.

- The individual mandate is questionable. I can see why that rankles conservatives.
- The website has been and continues to be atrocious.
- Too many delays.
- The mass confusion about insurance, who's insured, and related issues remain and look like they will remain for some time.
- Young people aren't buying into the program at the rates necessary (40%) in order to keep the program afloat.

But still people like nots simply make stuff up out of thin air to suit their predilections (and then deflect from their own idiocy or laziness by calling others "cheerleaders"). People like 1J have no idea what's even in the law, but bemoan it all the same. People like Quixote buy into the conservative lies about not having enough time to read it. Hell, even Justice Scalia, whose fucking job it is to read the laws up for judicial review, parrots that talking point. Clearly what's really needed is for the House to vote to repeal it for the 99th time (fiscal conservatism, folks!) and go back to having the worst health care system in the industrialized world. Obamacare is obviously a piss-poor alternative to single payer, but the cowardice of the middle and the psychosis (socialism! communism! bring in McCarthy!) of the right apparently make the best solution an impossibility.

First off chief--I have been a supporter of single payer on this board since we first started talking about it 4 years ago. It's the best solution for the masses, and for the economy in the long run. The paraphrased Pelosi quote (note the use of ' instead of " in my post) was a little attempt at a joke/sarcasm.
Single payer would have got the same number of GOP votes as the ACA did--zero. So, if the Dems had some balls, they would have gone ahead and passed single payer and the country would have been far better off (could it be the Dems in Congress and the President that is actually displaying the cowardice, not the GOP?). Instead, we got this mess (for all of the reasons you correctly listed above).
But yeah, I'm lazy for calling the faction of this room (and the country) that knows this law is (at best) bloated and unworkable yet continues to champion it, cheerleaders. What do you think is going to happen if we can't get the young folks enrolled at their 40% threshold? Higher premiums for everyone else? Government subsidy to insurance industry? Health care tax?
And hey, if this works well enough to be a bridge to single payer, I will be the first one to come on here and say I was wrong to have mocked the law. What would it take for you to admit you're wrong?

[onejayhawk]

This was the most brass knuckles wide scale political fight we have seen in a generation. The Democrats grabbed everything they could leverage. They were bounded by their own membership, not the Republicans. Single payer was not going to fly.

J

[onejayhawk]

All sorts of good news for the ACA lately.

CBO now projecting that it will cost over $100 billion less than anticipated. 12 million more uninsured will be covered this year alone than if the law had not gone into effect. 8 million have signed up through the health care exchange (that's pretty remarkable, given the horrendous start.)

Let us know when it hits a few million net. Also when the CBO figures in actual premium receipts.

J

[Judge Jude]

I hope you're right, since we'll be better off for it, but I'm also hearing "Mission Accomplished" echoes in my head for some reason. Some of the cheers are a bit ahead of the nitty-gritty, at least for now.

[Lucky]

I hope you're right, since we'll be better off for it, but I'm also hearing "Mission Accomplished" echoes in my head for some reason. Some of the cheers are a bit ahead of the nitty-gritty, at least for now.

Good point. There is indeed a lot to be done.

My personal story is that after a year of being uninsured (and worrying every day that something would happen to one of my family that I couldn't afford to fix), I got coverage under the ACA. It was only for about four months, until I was lucky enough to find a good job with benefits, but it provided welcome peace of mind. I only needed it once, when my wife fell and broke her ankle, and I was a thousand miles away. There were no problems with her getting the care she needed, which started with a really expensive trip to the ER.

So, the ACA is one of those things that has pluses and minuses, but I'll always see it as something that helped me and my family during hard times, and I'll be grateful for that.

[Judge Jude]

"Things are going much better than even the most optimistic of projections at this point."

hence the echoes. and while sometimes exceeding projections is impressive, at other times all it tells us is that the people who made lowball projections in the first place were shrewd. not clear to me which we have here - yet.

[Hornsby]

Look, I don't care which side of the issue you stand on, Universal Health Care in the USA is something that's long overdue. People like Lucky, who through a combination of event, or simply bad luck, don't deserve to have to live in fear of a random accident, or an illness. They deserve to have peace of mind that they can go, without shame, to a hospital or clinic and get the treatment that they need. And without having the bill passed along to the rest of us in the form of 20 dollar aspirin and 6 figure surgeries.

It's here to stay people, now is the time to tweak it and make it as good as it can possibly be for ALL of us.

[revo]

Let us know when it hits a few million net. Also when the CBO figures in actual premium receipts.

J

Let us know when the death panels are created; or when the government takes over the health insurance industry; or that Obamacare will kill 800k jobs.

[Moonlight J]

My widowed aunt who lost her 6 figure job when she had to take care of my uncle and then her own major health issues which fully bankrupted her. She now has health insurance for the first time in eight years. Could not be happier for her as she's a prime example of how the old system could completely f*ck up a great life.