"what struck me is how very ready huge swaths of the public are for Medicare-for-all."

[phantom power]

What Keefe’s complaint, like most other accurately stated complaints about the ACA are really complaints about this country’s for-profit, market-based healthcare insurance industry. So were Lummis’s. Keefe’s only actual harm from the ACA itself, as opposed to harm from the obnoxious insurance-industry-created provider-networks system—a factor now in most employer-based insurance coverage, although that’s rarely mentioned in the media—is that as a 56-year-old woman (her husband is 59), she should not have to purchase a plan that includes children’s dental coverage and maternity care. Point taken, but that would be an easy fix. (Missing from her article is mention of two benefits from the ACA that may matter to her husband: no annual nor lifetime coverage cap. She does, though, note her gratitude for the ACA’s having ended the pre-existing-conditions thing, a big factor for husband, especially, but also for her.)

As for Lummis, what she’s really complaining about is that, thanks to an amendment to the original ACA bill offered by Sen. Charles Grassley (R. IA) as it was being debated in Congress, members of Congress and their staffs no longer are covered by the federal government’s famously generous and user-friendly healthcare coverage. They now must, like regular folk, deal with the for-profit, market-based healthcare insurance industry that she and her ideological cohorts claim to hold in such high esteem.

As I read Keefe’s op-ed yesterday, what struck me is how very ready huge swaths of the public are for Medicare-for-all. And how thoroughly clueless most politicians, political operatives and pundits are that this is so. Lummis’s husband needed simply to schedule that final test and present his Medicare card when he arrived at the medical facility. And that’s how simple and direct such things should be for everyone. Including the spouses of people whose financial assets don’t range between $20 million and $75 million.

- See more at: http://angrybearblog.com/#sthash.u25ayl0S.dpuf

[merrily]

1. In 2008, polls showed over 70% of Americans wanted a strong public option.

And how thoroughly clueless most politicians, political operatives and pundits are that this is so.

Clueless, my ass.

I am always amazed how people assume that politicians, whose day job it is to know stuff like this and who have staffs to help them know it, are less well informed than the average message board poster. They just don't see and hear the same poll results we do. They're just so much dumber than we are (yet most of them are millionaires and most of us are not).

Wake up. THEY KNOW.

They're not scared or spineless, either. It takes a lot more spine for a politician to thumb his or her nose at what voters who can (at least in theory) vote them out of office want him or her to do than it does to give most Americans what they they want. They don't want to do it. And, because of the ways the game is rigged, most politicians are safe from get booted out of office, no matter what, unless they really fuck up or someone is out to sabotage them.

[djean111]

2. Very few in Washington give a flying fuck about what great swathes of people want.

Not the White House, not most of Congress. And those politicians are not at all clueless, they know where the money is, and it ain't with great swathes of ordinary citizens. Shoot, they can get money out of those people with taxes and premiums and bank fees and such.