It’s not unprincipled to simultaneously believe in rugged individualism for those who can and a safety net for those who can’t. We can quibble over where to draw the line, and the conflicting ideologies may make purists cringe. But for anyone who believes that no person should lack for health care in America, it’s hard to shrug off poverty with the cartoon character of the welfare queen.
There are poor people in America who didn’t do anything wrong to be there. Some suffered misfortunes outside their control. We have a severe dearth of decent-paying jobs, despite the lie of low unemployment. Technology has produced massive structural un- and under-employment, even if you’re enjoying hipster heaven coding for cash. There are hard-working poor who need health care and can’t afford it. There are people with serious illness who need it.
And there is a vast middle-class whose real earnings have declined seriously since 2007, with no hope of improvement, who don’t exist in the Washington spin cycle. While the ACA served the poor, the struggling middle class was burned on both ends. Premiums remained high, and went higher, while deductibles and co-pays ($7,150 for 2017) made their policies worthless unless they suffered severe illness. This was catastrophic insurance, which is fine when you suffer a catastrophe, but is a worthless sinkhole otherwise.
An unattributed comment about the Republican health care bill was that Trump understood neither the politics nor policy of what he was doing. This is what comes of electing the guy who makes empty promises of greatness without the details that Americans had historically demanded of people before they voted for them. Claiming he had a great plan that gave everybody everything is easy. Having a great plan is very hard.
Trump had no plan at all, which comes as no surprise. After all, we knew he was just making noises to get elected, playing on the twin benefits of a politically clueless constituency and the public rejection of progressive politics. After all, if you’re going to ponder the efficacy of health care for your family, the answer isn’t to tell the voters that their lack of viable health care and underemployment is just their white privilege, and the important focus of government is where a dozen transgender high school kids pee.
So the plan cobbled together, despite a seven-year lead time to come up with a good idea, was to burn the poor, burn our wives and daughters, and still do nothing to help the middle class. It reveals three really important things: first, that the Republican party, for all its bluster, has no answer. Second, that Trump was blowing smoke up everyone’s butt all along. Third, that the pervasive belief by middle America that there are easy answers to what ails us and it’s just those lying, cheating politicians with all their fancy, complicated doubletalk, keeping us from salvation, is total crap.
Crafting good law is incredibly difficult*. It involves hard choices, sure, but it also involves deep working knowledge of how things work, affect people and fit together. These problems are solved with deep thought and hard choices, as no solution will fix every possible problem, serve every person’s individual needs. But with a lot of effort, it can serve most people.
But to achieve the best possible law would require us to reach a consensus about what’s best for a nation rather than each individual.
On MSNBC last night, Rachel Maddow was dancing atop a table in a whine bar with a lampshade on her head, her most hated enemy defeated, rendered impotent, revealed as the ignorant liar she nightly shrieked him to be. Whether the win was as huge as she claims remains to be seen. That House Speaker Paul Ryan pulled the bill before party loyalists paid the price proved something, but what?
The debacle shows President Trump and Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, that they can’t count on automatic Republican majorities, especially when they’re offering a destructive, incoherent measure.
Which is pretty much what happened here. Despite their ceaseless attacks on the health care act since Mr. Obama signed it into law in March 2010, Mr. Trump, Mr. Ryan and their colleagues have never had a workable plan that could gain the support of a congressional majority.
That a bad bill failed despite a Republican majority in Congress is less a win for Democrats than a hint that the system isn’t dead yet. The Republicans killed their own bill. Some moderate, some radical, but not the Democrats. It was certainly a defeat for Trump, not because this was his ugly baby, but because it proved that he has no baby, no viable idea, nothing beyond cheap talk.
Sorry, kids, but when you felt as if he reflected your dreams and desires, you were being played by a huckster who knew how to scam your vote but had no clue how to run a government. You believed it was all going to be easy, that a few simplistic answers would make the world right again. It doesn’t work that way. It never did. You were, and are, wrong.
Then again, being saved from the irresponsible AHCA leaves us with the unacceptable ACA, the same problems we faced before. As Ryan announced, “Obamacare is the law of the land.” So we’ve avoided worse, because Republicans killed it, and are stuck with bad, because that’s what the Democrats gave us.
What’s missing here is that neither side wants to try to achieve good, a good health care law that will take on Big Pharma, find that tipping point between those who can and those who can’t, recognize that middle America consists of a nice bunch of people who, like the adored marginalized, could use a government that works for them as well, that serves a nation rather than a minority of interests at the expense of the majority of Americans.
So Trump’s first real test of governance was a miserable failure. Shocking. The alternative demagogue basks in his defeat, but has nothing better to offer. And so we’re left with bad law rather than worse law, but no one interested in making good law that actually serves the needs of a nation. Them’s the breaks.
*This post is not about what the best health care law should be. Do not go there. Do not go there.
SHG, a short, but brilliant, guy from New York said it best. “If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.”
All the best.
RGK
I can appreciate that Judge. Or as we’ve been known to say down south. You can’t get there from here.
There is no good healthcare law.. anywhere, anytime..
It is always about rationing what money there is, and as new science creates more cures the price goes up every year.
Politicians will just use it as another handout to buy votes with while ripping cash out of the big companies involved. The more they offer a nice monopolistic closed environment, the more expensive it will get and the harder companies will fight to get in on it.
It may be hard to fathom, but getting Govt out of healthcare completely is probably the best solution. That makes it one less thing for politicians to lie to us about.
What part of don’t go there completely eluded you?
“It reveals three really important things:”
Those were revealed a long time ago. This merely finished wrapping the package and tying the bow.
Some people aren’t as woke as others.
Like with a lot of Trump’s screw ups, liberals don’t appreciate how lucky they are that Trump is so lazy and undisciplined. An equally terrible person who had his sh*t together could have gutted the ACA, pulled off the travel ban, etc.
Not liberals. Progressives. Please stop making me sad. Had the Democratic Party not forsaken liberal values in favor of progressivism and socialism, any half-assed candidate would have beaten Trump 80-20. Had the Republicans had a candidate who wasn’t utterly clueless (and yes, lazy and undisciplined), they would be putting the final nail into the Dem coffin today. Neither wins. America loses.
It seems to me to be a confederation of fund raisers.
“But to achieve the best possible law would require us to reach a consensus about what’s best for a nation rather than each individual.”
Sadly, this seems to be an impossible dream today, where each side is far more interested in scoring points with their extreme supporters than crafting legislation that not everyone really likes, but everyone can live with. Oh, for the heady days when Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill came together somewhere in the middle, devising laws that worked for the country, not one extreme or another.
The nation desperately needed a statesman, and instead we got to choose between Trump and Hillary. There is a void to be filled, if anyone is foolish enough to endure politics to fill it.
Agreed! Today, leadership has been equated with the person talking the loudest and most forcefully, neither of which is true.
I STRONGLY DISAGREE WITH THIS SAD TRAITOR
ALL CAPS VERBOTEN. Can’t you read the rules? N0 eXcepti0n.
I don’t know what everybody is getting so worked up about. It’s obvious that they are never gonna give the key back to wind up justice John.
But speaking of insurance just when do you think them actuaries are gonna deal with that sixth amendment Assistance of Counsel rider?
Worse than dental insurance I tell ya!
Bill? Can you handle this, please?
On a Saturday afternoon?
That’s the trouble with you esteemed one, and your lawyerly brethern that don’ take insurance, or if you do, you only take Preferred Provider coverage
You just can’t wrap your head around the premium breakdowns not to mention just how much time it takes to hunt down enough flea market treasures to make the co-pay on the two bottles of beer a day prescription from the doctor let alone the co-pay for your lawyer’s investigator’s secretary efgorts for even the most mundane of pre trial motions.
And don’t even get me started on the ethics of Legal Maintence Organizations taking sentencing reform kick backs from the DA. It’s not good for the economy or the “patient” no mater what wind up Justice John might come up with next month after Gorilla Glue Gorsuch gets through his first stage of hazing only to have Clairvoyant Clarence paddle him after Ruth the Righteous gets done giving him a wedgie in chambers.
All Ears Elena is gonna get that look in her eye even if Sonia is laying down some shrill laughter in the background as the other boys tap the the second pony keg.
I hear they go extra hard on those that peppered their Yale, Harvard, or Columbia with some Oxford.
But Bill already knows that.
P.S. What-cha-gonna-do when Single Payer for the Sixth becomes a thing esteemed one? Oh it already is a “thing”…. Never mind. Silly me!
P.S.S. Psst… Bill don’t listen to your LMO lawyer or your HMO doctor no matter what they tell you, it’s still legal to take back 2.24 gallons of beer with you from Canada if you ever find yourself up there for some competent and affordable professional advice, and it’s good for you too. Something or another about the water.
Speaking about water that’s gonna be the next big thing esteemed one, don’t miss the boat.
LOL (literally, not literally-figuratively)
Very matter-of-fact. “Clean-up on aisle 3!”
You said “the ACA served the poor.” No, it serves the middle class. Like most people ineligible for the subsidy, I am ineligible, not because I’m too rich, but because I’m too poor. And I’ve never considered myself poor at all. Without the subsidy, insurance would cost me more than everything else put together (rent, food, taxes, etc.), and I’d go broke pretty quickly, so I do without and hope for the best. Anyhow, like most (?) Americans, I don’t want any subsidy. I pride myself on never having been on any form of public assistance. All I’ve ever wanted from government is to be left alone.
There’s a pretty obvious disconnect in there. Don’t blame the ACA for your choice. It’s perfectly fine choice, but it’s yours.
What’s been accomplished is important. The narratives of Trump as Hitler have been supplanted by Trump the incompetent. Foaming at the mouth will lessen, facilitating the possibility of responsible govt. Increasingly, ACA will implode as Trump predicts, leading to darkness before the dawn, when the pols will be compelled by their constituents to devise at least some reasonable fixes. When this happens, Trump will get the credit.
Not to mention that Gorsuch will be confirmed and Trump’s restrictive immigration policies will ultimately win in court.
I agree, the ACA will implode of its own accord. I suspect it will come sooner rather than later as insurers flee exchanges, leaving no options, and people come to realize they are still paying a lot of money and get no actual benefit. Kinda like unemployment, politicians keep telling them how good everything is going, except for the fact that they have no decent job or healthcare.
But unlike the “literally Hitler” hysteria, Trump’s lack of ability in politics or policy will become hard barrier to addressing real issues. It we don’t get past cheap talk, we don’t fix problems. In time, that will be an undeniable reality. The “darkness before the dawn” is something many people expect to come of this, that if things get bad enough, some party or group of pols will rise up to fill the void. Whether it happens has yet to be seen. For the sake of America, I hope it does, but that’s just “hope.” If wishes were horses…
You don’t seem to be too concerned about someone going there and talking about the best health care law when they agree with you that the ACA stinks.
Didn’t you used to rip apart any non-lawyer who expressed an uninformed opinion about the law? How is it any different when a criminal defense lawyer expresses an opinion about health care policy?
It’s a wonder that you know how to breathe.