Hi America!

[sabotabby]

I won't say, "Congratulations" because to be honest, you guys should get with the rest of industrialized civilization and have universal healthcare. This is, like, a minor adjustment to a major problem, which is that for-profit healthcare is murderous.

But I do like to see a right-wing fucknut get all red in the face, and it's been a good day for that. So. Yay?

Comments

[symbioid.livejournal.com]

Right wing economist Tyler Cowen said this a while back:

2. A rejection of health care egalitarianism, namely a recognition that the wealthy will purchase more and better health care than the poor. Trying to equalize health care consumption hurts the poor, since most feasible policies to do this take away cash from the poor, either directly or through the operation of tax incidence. We need to accept the principle that sometimes poor people will die just because they are poor. Some of you don’t like the sound of that, but we already let the wealthy enjoy all sorts of other goods — most importantly status — which lengthen their lives and which the poor enjoy to a much lesser degree. We shouldn’t screw up our health care institutions by being determined to fight inegalitarian principles for one very select set of factors which determine health care outcomes.

So Fuck you, Cowen.

And while I'm disappointed that this isn't actual single payer or non-profit, it at least is a step forward in some direction, and backwards in others. Also, it's sad that the biggest smile I get is a vengeful one, instead of one of joy.

[cacahuate.livejournal.com]

I will take those congratulations anyway, because if they’d overturned it I wouldn’t currently have healthcare at all!

I’ve been drinking glass after glass of delicious conservative tears all day.

[cucumberseed.livejournal.com]

The tiniest bit of sealant in just one crack; all of Mammon's coffers have been pledged to its destruction.

Though here's hoping that those coffers get a thorough draining before we refill them.

Conservative tears are delicious, though I think they will probably kill me in the end, just the same.

[springheel-jack.livejournal.com]

Who the hell knows. We humans are awful at making predictions, especially about the future. And /especially/ about futures affected by 'omnibus legislation'. Anyone who says they know what all this bill will do or whether it will still exist in a couple of years time is either way too self confident or has some kind of mental ability way beyond mine.

I mean, look at the supreme court decision. I know people who predicted it would be upheld, but offhand I don't know anyone who thought it would be upheld by Roberts, and not on interstate commerce grounds but on the government's inherent power to tax. Anyone who did gets a hat tip because that's some knowing-the-law super powers right there.

For the lower end of the middle class who can't buy insurance (that does them any good) and for the employed uninsurable it's probably a win. That's me, so I'm relatively pleased, so far. My personal health care dilemmas will get a lot easier in 2014. For a couple people I know it was literally life or death, so I'm pleased for them - had the underwriting rules been kicked to the curb they would likely have lost their insurance in the middle of life-extending medical treatments.

And insofar as it starts to peel apart keeping your job and keeping your health care, it's all to the good - that equation has been a massive source of social control for all but the most rich and/or portable. It promises to dramatically ease my parents' retirement, for one thing.

For the poor uninsured, I don't know - there's supposed to be a medicaid expansion for them, but with this state-by-state opt-out, I dunno. But this was a middle class bill from the get-go. Tax credits, mandates to buy - that stuff just isn't on the same planet as the poor, who neither buy health care nor pay income taxes. They'll be shoved into some kind of new program, but what it is exactly I can't say yet.

So, I dunno, we've got something like Switzerland has. Go us? I dunno. Hope so. When Doc comes Back from the Future, we'll know how it all shook out.

We can regret socialized medicine isn't here, but we can also protest the rain and curse against gravity for all the good it does. Opposing this bill because it's not socialized medicine would have been grotesque - the perfect there not as the enemy of the good but as its assassin. Critics of the democrats say that it's their fault for taking socialized medicine off the table, but the truth is that nobody wants it. You say the word 'socialize' and people run for the hills - the british are coming the british are coming. Even if people say they like their Medicare, they won't vote for socialized medicine. Clintoncare, Romneycare, and Obamacare are all ways of getting around that basic truth.

I personally predict we'll keep the bill, because it's going to take supermajorities to repeal and they won't get them. The repeal rhetoric is just a campaign thing they know they won't follow through on, like all the stuff the democrats say about labor. But as I say that prediction is worth the paper it's printed on.

[dominika-kretek.livejournal.com]

I've been saying "a tax by any other name is just as constitutional" for a while, but I didn't guess that Roberts would be the one. Maybe that retrospectively explains Scalia's sputtering.

Vermont intends to use the ACA money to go single-payer in 2014. Shumlin has to get reelected first, though. We'll see how it goes, but maybe it will be a model for other states.

[sadie-sabot.livejournal.com]

go Vermont! Man, I really ought to move back there.

[the_axel]

Critics of the democrats say that it's their fault for taking socialized medicine off the table, but the truth is that nobody wants it.

I get the impression that the problem isn't with socialist things, 'cos the US has loads of them, it's the word itself which is demonic.

And of course the level of ignorance on the Right...

This is what I woke up to, since this is my weekend and I slept in. Heeeeeeee.

[soberloki.livejournal.com]

www.buzzfeed.com/daves4/people-moving-to-canada-because-of-obamacare

[rackletang.livejournal.com]

Just chiming in to agree.

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

I was told to not allow the ideal to encumber the good.

[dobrovolets.livejournal.com]

The genius of the Roberts decision is that it calls out Democrats for what they were trying to hide about the individual mandate: That it is the imposition of a new, highly regressive tax.

Peter Sloterdijk characterized Cold War ideological discourse as "liars calling liars liars." That's also an apt characterization of U.S. political culture these days.