General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Rachel had it Right, now DU is getting it wrong. [View all]Egalitarian Thug
(12,448 posts)First, I apologize for being short with some of the others that have jumped in here, I don't want any of that to splash onto you. You are one of the few posters here that actually engages in discussion.
We can only speculate as to why the Democrats (politicians, not members) don't want any real solution to our disastrous health care delivery system, but all of those speculations come back to one issue IMO, money.
What is abundantly clear however, is that they do not want one. Just look at the history and actions of Democratic leadership each time this issue has come up over the last 60 years. Truman couldn't get any traction at all, Johnson had to twist arms as only he could do in his own party to get Medicare and there was still significant Democratic opposition to it 60 Reps and 20 Senators IIRC. More contemporarily, the anti-Hillary contingent included several prominent Democrats including Moynihan and Mitchell. Jump forward to 2007 and the Democratically controlled House and Senate. Despite polls (AP, CNN, Yahoo!, NYT, CBS, etc.) showing the American public favoring universal health care by between 54% and 64%, not one proposal was allowed out of committee. Speaker Pelosi repeated this strategy in the following sessions, blocking HR 676 at every turn. The documented evidence that political opposition to universal health care is both bipartisan and abundant. Even the fully implemented ACA never makes access to health care universal.
I don't see how you conclude that the 2010 election was about overreach, from my perspective it was about profound disappointment on the part of a significant portion of the Democratic base, primarily brought on by how President Obama and the Party chose to deal with the economic collapse (trillions for Wall Street, fuck all for Main Street) and the utterly cynical methods and result of passage of the ACA.
The endless con game that has been played on the American public by the republicans and conservadems has been so successful in large part because the Democrats have refused to represent the people that want to vote for them. They keep playing their political games and pushing the same slimey insiders and the same screw-the-people agenda. Compare the records for the so-called Blue-Dogs and the "Left fringe" candidates. The Progressive Caucus keeps growing while the Blue-Dogs keep disappearing, yet we are told over and over that some states won't elect a liberal, except that they will when given the opportunity. It took almost 20 years and some of the most egregious gerrymandering to get rid of Dennis Kucinich and even then they only did so by forcing him to run against another liberal. Dean's 50 state strategy gave us the majorities we squandered and the first thing the third way Dems did was to kill it and cut every liberal lose, pushing conservadems through the primaries so that they could lose to the republicans. Just look at what they did to Kerry in NE and how much he was able to achieve with absolutely no support from the Party. I just don't believe them when they tell us that liberals always lose, and we will never know until we try. I hate to keep coming back to it (but you started it) but how can we know that we couldn't get a better health care bill through when they wouldn't even let any of them be discussed and blocked all of its advocates from the debate?
The republicans are going to remain republicans and the only thing that we can do to counter that is to aggressively present a clear choice and demonstrated conviction to stand up for Democratic principles. If the President and the Democrats continue to appease and try to out-republican the republicans, I will bet you whatever you like that 2014 will look an awful lot like 2010 and barring the nomination of an outright lunatic, a republican President in 2016. A fate that neither of us wants.