Tails you win, heads you also win.


Your employer is much less likely to get mad at you if you don't embarrass them in the newspaper, true.


gtfo out of here with this weak ****, by the way. Just say that you personally fell for the hoax that vaccines cause autism. Be honest with us. This passive aggressive fake observer act is tiresome.

Yeah this there's no reason to look deeper than that. Obamacare is an example of a much broader failure to connect "who is President" to "the material well-being of you, the voter".

Well let's say this is all true and I don't know if it is or isn't but shouldn't the claim then be that they're hypocritical with regards to acupuncture but got it right with this doctor? The baseline assumption is that hospitals should be promoting safe and sound medicine. Otherwise the hypocrisy element is just a smokescreen to try and smuggle in a justification for anti vaxxing.

Trolly:

Hillary Clinton was "****ing terrible" at articulating Democratic ideas because she thought she was winning - and there was no need to bring up controversial issues like the ACA. Because she thought she was winning, she chose to play it safe and run the clock out. That's how football teams lose games - they're ahead by ten points in the third quarter and think they're going to win so they decide to "play it safe" and run the clock out.

Hillary was terrible at rallying people (the last few fence-sitters out there) to her team. Maybe Democratic messages will have more resonance after 4-8 years of Republican disaster. If the rust-belt isn't lost forever like apparently the midwest and the South.

Obama ran hard on the ACA in 2012, Alan. Hillary just ****ed it up.

Well as always - by 2016 CNN was breathlessly following canned leads reporting on Obamacare failures anywhere it was struggling. The narrative had been established that it was a failure. That ending didn't test well in Canoga Park.

Come on fly, you know govt can't do anything right. I sneer at your naivete. Now let's go *save* Medicare and Social Security.

CNN is desperate to prove that they're not biased, so as a result they tend to follow FOX down rabbit holes like that from time to time. Sadly the result is that they become biased the wrong way, unfairly reporting on issues that lean rightward and acting neutral on issues that lean the other way.

The worst part is it also doesn't work, since the entire right wing believes they're biased anyways.

WAAF

Alan you've repeated this nonsense in multiple threads and for some reason refuse to admit the reality that Obama tried for months to get bipartisan input into health care reform and got stonewalled. In the end he even implemented a plan that was Republican from the get go and still got nothing from the other side.

I have to wonder what you'd have done in his place? Just forgot about the whole thing and ignore the fact that thousands were dying each year because they couldn't get access to a doctor? Or would you buckle down and press on anyways knowing the job needed to be done? Obama chose the latter and there are literally thousands of people alive and healthy today who wouldn't have been had he chose the other route. The GOP is literally playing politics with their lives.

No they don't it's covered in the report, there never was a Death Spiral (this is a term of art, you can Google that **** you know), just a repricing of the policies after they undershot the mark in 2014.

dino:

I watched and listened to Dr. Ezekiel Emmanuel (Rahm Emmanuel's brother) giving a talk about how the ACA was negotiated with Congress. (Dr. Emmanuel had agreed to serve as a consultant to his brother and President Obama during the period when the ACA was working its way through Congress. Rahm Emmanuel was the White House Chief-of-Staff at the time.)

Dr. Emmanuel described an interaction that occurred between himself and his brother. (I'm paraphrasing slightly as I'm recalling this from a five or six year old memory.) After another busy and hectic day, it was late in the afternoon when Dr. Emmanuel dropped by his brother's office to bring up a topic he felt was important. He told his brother that he thought it would be helpful to include medical malpractice reform as part of the ACA. Dr. Ezekiel believed including malpractice reform as a key part of the ACA would go over well with doctors (obviously), but also have the added side benefit of garnering at least some Republican support as this was something Republicans (very much) wanted.

Rahm Emmanuel's response to his brother was blunt and to the point. According to Dr. Emmanuel, Rahm responded (in typical Rahm fashion) something to the effect of: "No f***ing way! That's not going to happen!" Rahm went on to explain to his brother that a key constituency of the Democratic Party - trial lawyers - were opposed to malpractice reform so that would not be a part of health care reform. Period. End of discussion.

So Republicans got stiffed by Obama and the Democrats. Something they (very likely) would have bargained for was rejected out of hand. That set the tone for all that followed. Democrats are at least partially responsible for the precarious state of Obamacare. They could have got at least some bipartisan support if they had been willing to negotiate on malpractice reform. They weren't and they didn't, so now we have repeal.

It's not just Republicans who are "playing politics" with peoples' lives.

Wtf are you talking about? Obama floated malpractice reform as a possible carrot to lure Republicans. http://thehill.com/homenews/administ...on-tort-reform

Yeah those of us who liveblogged these negotiations are laughing our asses off that something like Tort Reform would have brought Republicans to the table. Get that **** out of here.

suzzer:

Since it appears that the Hill article you cite and the C-SPAN interview with Dr. Emmanuel that I recalled are somewhat at odds, I took the liberty of reading the [full] article you posted. Apparently you only read the first paragraph or two - and not the full article ...

Here are the relevant paragraphs from the article you linked:

<begin>

In an interview on Federal News Radio on Friday, Democratic strategist Bob Weiner said Obama should strike a deal on tort reform. He noted that Gail Wilensky, head of the Medicare and Medicaid agency in the first Bush administration, recently said Democrats could have gotten Republican votes if they had compromised on medical liability.

Weiner, who worked in the Clinton White House, said, “Why don’t we give a little on that and put some limit on [caps] and then get all of this national health insurance coverage for people and protect them with it? It’s not that much of a price. That’s part of the sausage-making that I think we could done that actually might have made a difference.”

Although Obama has repeatedly cited medical malpractice reform as a possible area of compromise with the GOP, he has not explained where he sees the middle ground and, indeed, has rejected Republicans’ top priority in this area: the hard-dollar caps on lawsuit awards in malpractice cases long sought by the physician and business lobbies.

But officials from pro- and anti-malpractice reform camps agree that, beyond the modest measures already in the healthcare reform bills that passed Congress and some demonstration projects under way at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Obama has not give a clear indication of what sort of offer he is willing to make.

Asked whether they were aware of any new malpractice reform proposals from the Obama administration, these officials professed they were aware of none.

“I haven’t heard anything like that,” Lipsen said.

“Not that I know of,” said Lisa Rickard, president of the U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform, a proponent of limits on malpractice lawsuit awards.

“We haven’t seen any substantial proposal that supports his rhetoric,” said Kurt Bardella, a spokesman for Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who has been a critic of the Obama administration’s stance on malpractice reform. “We have been waiting for his follow through and that’s what we have yet to see,” Bardella said.

<end>

I rest my case. President Obama and the Dems were never serious about negotiating with the Republicans on malpractice reform.

Perhaps her husband's comments forced her to avoid the subject.

When it takes a complex plan to reach ones goals you need to be smart to come up with that plan. Not well educated. Not kind hearted. Smart. Hopefully after Congress agrees what healthcare goals are best for the country they will transmit those goals to someone along the lines of Bill Gates. Someone who is less likely to develop a plan with unintended consequences than the government mediorities who screwed it up the first time.

Not quite the same as Obama rejected comprise out of hand. We'll never know what Obama could have offered to ultimately get Republican support, we just know that he did offer a lot of compromises to Republicans and none of them bit. You can literally point to any one of them and say they didn't go far enough or they weren't sufficiently detailed for Republicans and then blame the failure on Obama. How do I know that? Because that was the fall back position of Republicans if they moved past the "Oppose Obamacare because it's a communist usurping of the free market, government grabbing power, we will never compromise with evil" position that was the default.

Which was a smart move. They then could say that Obamacare was forced on the American people on a partisan basis. Can't say that if Obama gets a buy in from one or two Republicans. Which is also why Obama tried to get Republicans on board in the first place.

Intelligence can't always fix a public choice problem.

Nearly everything the government does is inefficient and stupid. No one would ever design systems like that. But it becomes that way from the compromises, negotiating, and incremental solutions that are politically viable.

If a compromise between two ideas is even worse than either idea alone and even worse than no idea, smart people would know enough not to vote for it.

Get rid of health insurance altogether. Make people pay out of pocket and see how fast the cost of healthcare comes down.

So you get cash payment before treating their medical emergency or after?

What if they can't afford to pay?

https://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/kru...e-replacement/

Pack it up everybody!

Problem solved.

There obviously would be a period of sacrifice, but it would be for the greater good.