You have a fundamental flaw in that argument. There are no millions of people who have no healthcare. Healthcare...free healthcare has been available for many decades. the current bill that you think is so great is supposed to deal with the underinsured. And it is supposed to reduce healthcare costs to aid in that goal but it does little of that and instead does a lot of destructive and/or politically devious crap that many of us reject even though some of it is good. A nice tasty glass of lemonade is good but I don't want to sip it from around arsenic laced ice cubes....Bet51987 wrote:...
Republicans have never had any intent to do anything to fix healthcare for the millions who need it.
The current healthcare bill that you celebrate does far less good than you think it does but since it is a democrat in office right now you consistently refuse to discuss or even acknowledge the many flaws in the bill.
As far as the intent of republicans to help/care/whatever...you are half right, the other half is the same is true of the democrats! This bill is a political manuver not an act of reform. Think about it...by your own smug accusation you confirm it! You site republican control producing nothing....well unlike the republicans you site your democrats have had a filibuster proof congress and the Whitehouse all at once. Yet they didn't pass the plan Obama campaigned on and barely snuck in this abortion of a bill we have today! Why! Politics/power struggles and selfish greed among these people you think are so great. Exactly the same characteristics you hate the republicans for cultivating!!
You can't be that naive can you? That un-informed perhaps?...probably since you have shown us here that you selectively ignore debate and instead just drive by shooting off democrat party talking points.
So here, take it from a liberal source instead of from me:
from here or read it below....
It's not that republicans wouldn't have voted for those provisions back in the '90's but they prefered Hillary suffered a total defeat rather than morph their ideas into her plan and let her have even a half victory....not that she would have accepted their input to the plan....so once they saw they had her dead in the water they chose the purely political goal of destroying her (and President Clintons) maneuver over improving the HillaryCare legislation.Pelosi: Health Care Bill a Conservative Bill (Time to Go Back Under the Bus, Veal Pen)
By: Jane Hamsher Tuesday March 23, 2010 4:58 pm
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Just before the House passed the health care bil, Nancy Pelosi sent out a letter. In it, she said that “An op-ed by E.J. Dionne on Friday reveals that the current health reform legislation pending before Congress was “built on a series of principles that Republicans espoused for years.” She bolded Dionne’s headline:
Why Democrats Are Fighting for a Republican Health Plan
It’s great that the Speaker of the House is telling people that intellectual credit for the health care bill belongs to the GOP. But Brad DeLong concurs:
Neither Democrats nor Republicans have an incentive to discuss the Republican roots of Obama’s health-care plan. But that doesn’t mean they’re not real—and deep….The conservative DNA of ObamaCare is hardly a secret. “The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts plan,” [David] Frum wrote. “It builds on ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to ClintonCare in 1993-1994.”
DeLong says the Republicans are so busy demonizing the bill for political advantage that they don’t want to admit it’s essentially the plan the GOP has been putting forward for years. He believes that the political calculus for the Democrats was “Romneycare or nothing”:
But if they pointed out the intellectual origins of the plan—oh, and by the way, the guts of the plan came out of the conservative über-think tank, the Heritage Foundation, and it was what Mitt Romney thought was good policy back in 2004—then the left-wing Democrats’ heads would have exploded and their votes would have vanished.
If it was so politically wise for Democrats to pass an essentially Republican plan, one wonders why Obama never campaigned on it. Pursuing this logic, Obama rode into office espousing something that was too wacky and “liberal” to ever pass Congress — even though the majority of Americans supported him for it.
.....
The health care debate was essentially a fight between political parties, not political philosophies. And the public understood that (via Scott Payne):
If Bush had tried to pass this bill the entire progressive movement (such as it is) would have squealed like stuck pigs, with the volume and intensity they responded to Bush’s privatization of Social Security. Instead, we’re hearing about the “twilight of the interest groups” and the second coming of Abe Lincoln. It’s no surprise that Pelosi and others are trumpeting the bill’s conservative underpinnings today: now that they no longer need liberal veal pen validators to whip Democrats in order to pass it, they are anxious to insulate themselves from GOP attack by distancing themselves from progressives once again and trumpeting the bill’s Heritage Foundation roots. The question is why anyone was ever hoodwinked into thinking this was a “progressive” victory simply because the Republicans were against it. It was a Democratic party victory.
The White House is betting that those who committed themselves to Obama during the campaign won’t be bothered if he triangulates againsth is own campaign rhetoric and passes a right-wing health care bill — that their commitment to the ideals of the campaign will be trumped by their commitment to him as a personality. They may well be right. And the interest groups? Well, have a look at ACORN, because that’s where the dumb ones are headed. The smart ones (and they know who they are) got their payoffs.
In the end, “progressives” should be honest and admit that they are clapping for a health care plan that most found to be moral anathema when the GOP proposed it in 1994, and that going forward they will settle for nothing from the Democrats. And like it.
On the Republican side, there is a huge gap between the GOP corporatism of this bill and the libertarian anti-tax critique that the GOP is attempting to harvest with their “stop the mandate” ballot initiative campaign. But since the GOP won’t have to take responsibility for passing this bill, they can exploit it to turn out the vote in November without much fear of anybody noticing. Democrats will protect themselves by blaming the “liberals” for the bill’s shortcomings, and run to the right — as if they weren’t already there.
Before it’s all over, this thing is gonna make NAFTA look like the Emancipation Proclamation. And as for NAFTA itself — well, when Bart Stupak tries to repeal it, progressive leading lights will no doubt oppose him on the grounds that the President thinks he’s “icky.”
So do you see why I beg you people to abandon your party, regardless of which party you think stinks less, and vote them all out?!?
