If the Senate bill does pass, won't this KILL us in the fall?

[Ken Burch]

Since everything progressive is out of that bill and the only gains are for Big Forma, can't we assume all voters will hate us for it if it does get passed?

Can somebody please tell me why passing the Senate bill WON'T doom us to massive and irreversible electoral losses?

[rudy23]

1. Yep. Then the DLC can pass corporate legislation with the R's as an excuse.

Did you notice how much kabuki theater it took for the D's to pretend they couldn't reform healthcare, when they had a supermajority? It was exhausting and humiliating for them. Never again.

Rahm and the DLC want to recreate the conditions of Clinton's presidency from '94-00, b/c that's when they were able to raise the most funds. To do this, they need to tank it this year.

[gravity]

2. Because the bill is not nearly as bad as everyone here makes it out to be

The bill is certainly far from perfect, but all this talk about doom in gloom is nonsense.

[salguine]

5. It's every bit as bad as everyone makes it out to be. This bill ought to be

driven out to the desert, made to dig its own grave at gunpoint, forced to kneel and shot in the back of the head.

Anyone who thinks this thing is going to get incremental improvements at some point down the road is insane. All it's going to do is exponentially consolidate the stranglehold the insurance cartels have over our not-healthcare system.

[gravity]

10. No it isn't

I mean every single Democrat in the Senate supported it while all the Republicans oppose it.

[Donnachaidh]

36. sooooo because the repukes dislike it it's a perfectly fine bill?

:wtf: :silly: :crazy: :wow: :thumbsdown:

[salguine]

44. Well, that clinches it. This bill is obviously great!

[Ken Burch]

46. Obama could introduce a bill imposing the death penalty on all gays and abortion providers

and the GOP would still oppose it. Just because OBAMA supported it.

[Ken Burch]

14. It does go without saying that the people can't possibly be happy if it passes

n/t.

[tblue]

3. I got no good answer to that.

The only good in the bill will be in the marketing ("We passed comprehensive healthcare reform!"*** Kudos, kudos, kudos!).

***Void where prohibited.

[backscatter712]

4. I think once all the fighting over the health care bill is over...

Things will actually start to improve.

Hopefully, Pres. Obama and the rest of the Democrats will rethink their strategy, and get more aggressive with Wall Street as Obama's been hinting at doing, and work on a proper jobs bill to edge the unemployment rate down.

I think that will bolster our numbers significantly.

[Aramchek]

6. Is this all you got?

[Ken Burch]

15. It's about the leadership's failures and the failures of centrism

This process proves that we always fail when our leaders DON'T stand and fight.

Your post proves you've got no rebuttal to the point.

[Aramchek]

18. I've got no rebuttal to someone who is inconsolable

All I can say is that things are much better than you perceive them to be.

[Ken Burch]

19. Nobody but the insurance companies backs this bill anymore.

Reform is NEVER supposed to mean LOSING ground. The people hate us for letting the insurance trust win.

[Aramchek]

24. do you ever get tired of speaking for Everyone?

do you not feel your thoughts are important enough by themselves, so you need pretend like everyone agrees with you?

you can tell us what KenBurch thinks.
but please, quit pretending you speak for 'the People'

[Ken Burch]

26. I'm not claiming to speak FOR anybody else

Just pointing out the obvious.

Without the public option, the bill is the status quo and will never be popular.

[Aramchek]

30. assuring Insurance for People with pre-existing conditions is most definitely not the status quo

you must not have cancer or some other condition that keeps you from getting insurance,
or you would not be calling this bill the status quo.

[Ken Burch]

40. You're assuming what's left in the bill won't be stripped out.

n/t.

[Aramchek]

49. you're assuming it will.

It's in both bills that have passed the House and Senate.

why would it be removed now?

[Hello_Kitty]

7. DLCers in DC and on this board are utterly oblivious to this

They have no idea how deeply unpopular this bill, in its current form, is with a large percentage of the public. That's important because the people who dislike the bill feel much more strongly about it than the people who support it. The lackluster support among those who approve is a direct result of taking out the public option and putting in the excise tax. You water down your bill, you water down support for it.

[Ildem09]

8. hopefully

If the Reich winger outrage was this summer instead of last I think we would be in a lot more trouble.. We are still going to loose seats. thats a fact. however, I think we can stop the hemorrhaging and probably loose 20-25 in the House and maybe 2-3 in the Senate

[Ganja Ninja]

9. Regardless of what's in the bill the GOP will make it an issue.

They will lie and blow everything out of proportion to try and bamboozle the voting public. That's what pisses me off as a Democrat. The House and Senate bent over so many times the bill looks like it was written by the Republicans yet it's the Democrats that own this piece of crap.

[Hello_Kitty]

12. Exactly. They're going to call us socialists no matter what we do.

So put forth the most progressive legislation possible and negotiate from there.

[BrklynLiberal]

11. Losing the Senate seat in MA will definitely do us no good at all come November.

[tinrobot]

13. Blame it on the GOP

They're the obstructionists.

[Ken Burch]

17. Blame it on the right wing of our party and the president who NEVER stood up to that right wing

If Obama actually wanted the public option, he'd have told Lieberman that a no vote would mean every military base would be pulled out of Connecticut STAT.

(That's assuming the administration and Big Premium Joe weren't on the same side all along).

[tinrobot]

29. Politics 101 - blame the other party

Yes, we do have a number of miscreants in our party, but blaming them does us no good politically. It only makes us look weak.

Blame the GOP for making the bill so awful.

They'd sure as hell do it to us.

[dionysus]

37. by what, executive decree? you have no idea what you're talking about, do you?

:rofl:

[Ken Burch]

41. Not executive decree...hardball

LBJ would've got this thing passed, WITH the public option.

[dkf]

16. The GOP needs this bill to run against.

They will take all our objections and find their own righty twist and bury us.

It's their path to populist outrage.

[dionysus]

39. well, you've provided them with a list of talking points by now.. thx!

:eyes:

[dkf]

42. It's so obvious. Geez.

They are salivating at this juicy target. If we pass this we are sitting ducks.

[deaniac83]

20. No.

"since everything progressive is out of that bill..." Here are only some of the progressive things in the bill:

+ $10 billion in funding for expanding Community Health Centers
+ Outlawing pre-existing conditions
+ Prevents insurance companies from dropping you or jacking up your rates when you get sick
+ Bans lifetime or annual limits on benefits
+ Caps your out of pocket expense
+ Lets small businesses with 100 or less employees buy into their state's exchange, increasing their bargaining power multifold.

The bill's not perfect. But it has a lot of progressive elements to it. We will finally be seen as the party that got health care done. That will help us, not hurt us, in November.

[damntexdem]

21. Likely. Also if it doesn't pass.

The Democratic Party: once again aimed to snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

[Hippo_Tron]

22. If the bill doesn't pass then the Democrats just spent a year doing nothing

I'm not going to get into a debate about whether or not health insurance = health care. The devil is in the details and quite frankly most of us have never read the bill.

What we do know is that the Democrats lost the House and Senate in 1994. A common and well supported hypothesis for the reason they lost is that they failed to pass a health care bill and thus were seen as ineffective.

[rudy23]

23. Why did Obama pick a life/death issue to stake his political strength on?

If he were going to use a bill to show off his effectiveness in getting things done, why did he pick an issue that literally pertains to our lives and deaths?

[Aramchek]

25. because it was the most important

[Ken Burch]

27. The it was important enough not to fritter away with pointless concessions

And it should have been important enough to make the bottom line "no lost ground for the people".

[Aramchek]

31. how does giving coverage to millions who were previously barred from it 'losing ground'?

[rudy23]

45. B/c that's not all it does, and you know it. It takes from the working class.

It does nothing to control costs or to increase competition with private insurance companies. No antitrust exemption, no medicare buy-in, you've heard it all before.

[Aramchek]

50. so you're willing to give up saving lives just to save some cash?

this bill gives Healthcare to those who need it most,
the ones who have diseases that need treatment.

You would sink it just because you don't think it saves enough money?

[rudy23]

51. No, it's taking money from the wrong people, who also need medical treatment.

The House bill puts more of the burden on the rich. Why does Obama favor the Senate version, that taxes Union & other working class plans?

[Aramchek]

52. you're still willing to trade lives for money?

Obama favors a Bill that will pass both Chambers.

If the House bill can't pass the Senate, then there is only one option.

[rudy23]

53. No, this bill trades lives for other lives, no matter how you want to reframe our reluctance

to tax the rich, or to hold insurance companies accountable.

[Aramchek]

54. who is going to die from having their Cadillac-plan taxed?

people will most certainly die from the conditions currently preventing their insurability.

[rudy23]

34. Right, I'm saying that's backwards. If we wanted to pass something just to say he could pass it,

he should've gone with something where the compromises necessary to get it passed aren't compromises on our lives.

[Hippo_Tron]

28. I don't know, but we're there now

If I had to venture a guess, I'd say it's because health care is generally a good political issue for Democrats. The reason being that as insurance company friendly as the Democratic Congress has been, the Republicans openly campaign on the idea that the status quo is just fine and dandy and that is just so out of touch that it's almost unbelievable.

Democrats may support a crappy solution but they get political points for at least acknowledging the fact that there is a problem.

[HughMoran]

32. You mean "doesn't"

Why assume the way you did?

[dionysus]

33. because everyone knows the whole country is as irate as a handful of DUers...

[rudy23]

38. How hard will it be to campaign against gov't mandated insurance, enforced by the IRS?

That's three things that are almost universally loathed:

Big Government mandates
Insurance companies
the IRS

[Proud Liberal Dem]

35. If the bill dies, will that HELP us electorally, then?

People may have some reservations about the bill but a defeat of HCR (again) is going to be spun and played up by the Republicans and their corporate media enablers non-stop as a HUGE failure for President Obama (think "Waterloo") and the Democrats and, whatever reservations people might have about the legislation, people are NOT going to be better off by maintaining the status quo in any event and will end up being helped by many provisions in the legislation (at least eventually- but it will be a sooner "eventually" than if we do nothing). I think that, no matter what happens in the upcoming midterms, we can all safely agree that Congress is NOT going to become more progressive next year absent some unexpected circumstances, so the chances for more progressive legislation are, well......none and there is going to need to be a LOT more "horsetrading" in next year's Congress to get HCR passed, so any progressive elements of this bill are going to have to be watered down significantly or eliminated entirely to get anything through next year. IMHO the time is now to get something through that we can build on in the future.

BTW: We NEVER had a solid "60 votes" in our corner no matter what the Republicans and their corporate media whores tried to claim.

[Ken Burch]

43. I'm not sure anything helps us at this point

This administration has fallen into the same centrist Beltway trap-lock out the base, surrender to the enemy, and then STILL demand that the base support you anyway(because the other side is worse).

It's based on this notion that the base is to blame for the party's past defeats and must do eternal penance-despite the fact that that meme has been discredited over and over again.

McGovern lost because the party establishment cut him loose for no reason.

Mondale lost because he didn't give you the sense that anything COULD be better. People don't vote for depressing candidates.

Dukakis lost because he didn't fight back against the smears.

NONE of those losses were the fault of progressives, and there were no non-progressive candidates running in any of those years that would've done better. Scoop Jackson would've lost 49 states to Nixon and everyone knows it. Fritz Hollings or John Glenn would also have been doomed to blowout losses against Reagan. And there was no "moderate" even worth discussing in 1988.

[treestar]

47. Your argument assumes most voters agree with you about the bill

Which is not proven.

[totodeinhere]

48. The short answer is "yes."

But passing no bill at all will also hurt us. That's why it's important that bona fide progressive HCR passes.

[jasi2006]

55. Better to be dead with a bill in our cold hands then dead with nothing. nt

[Wardoc]

56. If losing in Mass won't wake people up to what this crap bill is going to do, then nothing will...

It is poison and needs to be defeated, or November will make this situation look like a picnic.

[Drunken Irishman]

57. And if it doesn't pass, it kills everyone.

Short term losses for long-term gains.

[JVS]

58. It looks like they've decided that this is the hill they want to die on.

I think this bill is way past the point where they should have bailed out.