RSS Feed MenuWas there any time this year when the Republicans in Congress and conservatives in the country had anything like a strategy on healthcare? Either a credible plan as to how to beat it – or else a set of negotiating demands for amending it?
Sure doesn’t look that way. The demands of our base for unrelenting opposition ruled out negotiating. But the weight of numbers on the Democratic side – and the evolution of the Democratic party into a much more united coalition than it was in 1993 – raised the odds against oppositional success lethally high.
Maybe reaction against Obamacare plus the bad job numbers will gain seats in next year’s mid-terms. (Equally maybe the passage of Obamacare will mobilize Democrats and reduce the losses they would otherwise have suffered – tough call.) But that result only implies that the GOP had a 2010 strategy. The Dems had a 2009 strategy. Result: it looks like they win the year.
SpartacusIsNotDead // Dec 20, 2009 at 2:20 pm
Sinz wrote: “And that should PLEASE you. I’m right-of-center but not extremely so. And yet I think that what Congress came up with wasn’t bad for a first attempt. If this bill, once it’s explained to the American people, can win over most folks except the far leftists like you and the far rightists like MI-GOPer and franco2, that would be a magnificent achievement.”
Well this is really strange. I want the bill to be passed, but I’m terribly bothered by the absence of stronger cost containment measures. And from your perspective, that makes me a far leftist. You, on the other hand, apparently don’t support the bill and are still hoping that one day cost containment will be added to RomneyCare, and that somehow makes you just right-of-center.
This makes no sense.
SpartacusIsNotDead // Dec 20, 2009 at 2:30 pm
Sinz wrote: “Given that we have a liberal President and a liberal Congress, the health care reform bill that is now likely to be signed into law is about the best we can hope for at this time.”
Your heavy reliance on labels such as “liberal” and “conservative” has become a substitute for analysis. We do not have a liberal President or a liberal Congress. We have a Congress and a President that are both just barely left of center. If they were liberal the bill would have a robust public option, or at the very least it would look more like Wyden-Bennett.
More importantly, you’re dead wrong on the substance. If the President and the Congress were any more conservative than they are, we wouldn’t have any healthcare reform at all, as evidenced by the past 8 years when absolutely nothing got done on healthcare. So, it’s silly to suggest that we could have gotten a better bill with a President and Congress that were further to the Right.
Lastly, raising the Medicare eligibility age to 70 would have worsened the healthcare problem in this country – not made it better. One of the main goals of reform was to expand coverage. If you raised the eligibility age, you would have reduced coverage. Do you not see that?
SpartacusIsNotDead // Dec 20, 2009 at 2:37 pm
Chekote wrote: “But wasn’t Obama supposed to change this? What happened to reform? What happened to letting the C-Span camera cover the negotiation?”
So let me make sure I understand you correctly. You want more cost containment measures in the bill, yet you haven’t identified any that would be acceptable to you as a conservative. And, you’re opposed to the bill because, despite Obama’s pledge regarding C-Span, it was, in your judgment, as non-transparent as every other major piece of legislation that has ever been passed?
Do you have any criticisms of the bill that can be taken seriously?
SpartacusIsNotDead // Dec 20, 2009 at 2:41 pm
“Eat your heart out, Pelosi! We conservatives did it first!”
Except, you didn’t do it. And that’s why it’s taken over 30 years and a Democratic President and Democratic Congress to get it done. If it wasn’t for conservatives, we’d probably have a bill today that is closer to Nixon’s plan.
Incidentally, by no modern definition could anyone label Nixon a conservative. You should know that.
mlindroo // Dec 20, 2009 at 2:47 pm
Sinz54 wrote:
> In 1970, then President Richard Nixon (considered a Republican conservative at that
> time), proposed comprehensive health insurance for all Americans. It was actually
> more liberal than even the Pelosi plan passed by the House, in that every single
> American would be covered
[...]
> Eat your heart out, Pelosi! We conservatives did it first!
Yeah … and liberals in Congress (encouraged by the unions) refused to go along as they were holding out for more! After all, Nixon wasn’t popular and the Dems were fairly certain the winner of the 1976 presidential elections would be a Democrat.
—
By the way, it seems Richard Milhous N. was sincerely interested in universal health care. His parents were poor and he lost two brothers to tuberculosis. So it was a personal thing to him.
MARCU$
mlindroo // Dec 20, 2009 at 2:56 pm
SpartacusIsNotDead wrote:
> If it wasn’t for conservatives, we’d probably have a bill today that is closer to Nixon’s plan.
Sinz54 may correct me, but my understanding is Nixon’s plan likely would have succeeded if the Dems (who controlled both houses of Congress in the early/mid-1970s) had agreed to support it!
In fact, Ted Kennedy had already brokered a compromise between the White House and Congressional Democrats by the time Nixon was forced to resign. But the labor unions were not in favor of the plan.
MARCU$
SpartacusIsNotDead // Dec 20, 2009 at 3:19 pm
mlindroo,
“If it wasn’t for conservatives, we’d probably have a bill today that is closer to Nixon’s plan.”
I’m speaking of conservatives today – not those during Nixon’s time. Present-day conservative pressure resulted in a bill that is not as far reaching as the one that Nixon proposed.
balconesfault // Dec 20, 2009 at 4:09 pm
sparticus Incidentally, by no modern definition could anyone label Nixon a conservative. You should know that.
The main thing left in the Republican Party from Nixon is the Southern Strategy.
sinz54 // Dec 20, 2009 at 5:26 pm
mlindroo: Nixon’s plan likely would have succeeded if the Dems (who controlled both houses of Congress in the early/mid-1970s) had agreed to support it!favor of the plan.
You are mostly correct,
and Paul Krugman admitted as much in his most recent column. He wrote that America would have been better off today if back in the 1970s, the Dems hadn’t decided to reflexively oppose Nixon on everything, including health care reform.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/18/opinion/18krugman.html
Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford (who back then was known as a staunch conservative), proposed universal catastrophic health insurance. (That was the “conservative” approach to health care back then.) Again, nothing came of it–because Ford was a lame duck from the day he got inaugurated.
SpartacusIsNotDead:
The policies and philosophies of “liberal” and “conservative” shift slowly over time, as we both know. Compared to the policies being proposed by liberals of the 1970s like George McGovern, Nixon was a conservative–and Gerald Ford certainly was.
Today, Mitt Romney is similar: He’s certainly conservative, but he’s not way right on the political spectrum. Hence his own push of health care reform in Massachusetts, complete with a public plan for the truly needy.
Not all of us conservatives talk like the folks on RedState.com.
rbottoms // Dec 20, 2009 at 5:38 pm
Not all of us conservatives talk like the folks on RedState.com.
True. But since nuts at RedState.com define the bulk of how the party so-called moderates are being driven out and the crazies have the loudest voices, so what exactly is the reason we should do anything other than hand people like Olympia Snowe an anvil?
I expect next summer the teabaggers will be out in force, pistols on their hips, threats against the safety of elected officials on their signs, and general insanity in full bloom as they delve into deeper despair that Obama is still president (no smoking Nigerian having been found) and their paranoia goes into super-over-overdrive.
sinz54 // Dec 21, 2009 at 9:38 am
rbottoms: True. But since nuts at RedState.com define the bulk of how the party so-called moderates are being driven out and the crazies have the loudest voices, so what exactly is the reason we should do anything other than hand people like Olympia Snowe an anvil?
You just answered your own question.
As Tip O’Neill once observed, “All politics is local.”
The voters of Maine couldn’t care less what DeMint thinks. They like the job Snowe is doing, so they vote for her. Snowe and Collins won by big margins even while Obama and the Dems were winning big elsewhere.
rbottoms:
If a decent center-right GOP candidate is running in your district or your state, I would hope you would give that candidate a fair hearing. The Dems do have their share of bad candidates and bad public officials, you must admit.