So I was watching Sharron Angle debate the other night, and I realized: she either believes, or is attempting to make people believe, that what the ACA does is replace all the existing types of health care insurance with a single thing called "Obamacare" -- that in 2014, we'll all have government health insurance. Moreover, she seems to believe that right now we all have lots of choices about health insurance, but that after "Obamacare" is implemented no one will have any choices at all.
My question for conservatives is: is that pretty much what you think was in the ACA? Do you think that Angle and other GOP pols think that -- or do you think they're just using a shorthand for regulated health care? I'm curious as to whether health care reform opponents have a minimal understanding of what the legislation does. Of course, there are very legitimate disputes about how it will work out in practice, as well as legitimate disputes about whether it would be a good thing even if it works the way Democrats say that it will work, but I'm more curious about whether Angle and others have just a basic, minimal sense of what's in the law.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
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When your target market thinks in bumper stickers, you argue in bumper stickers.
ReplyDeleteThe founders of our Republic couldn’t have foreseen that some day marketing would be a university discipline, with its own faculty, side by side with humane letters, divinity, medicine, and the law.
You’re looking at the dark underbelly of The Permanent Campaign.
Who knows, blogger?
ReplyDeleteWe'll find out in years to come, as the 2,700 hastily thrown-together pages are digested, and costed out, and all the consequences intended and unintended are identified.
You know, the types of activities that take place in a healthy legislative process, before legislation is acted upon.
To be fair, Jon, it's hard to take the question seriously when it's in the form of "when did you stop beating your wife?"
ReplyDeleteI don't think that non-tea party conservatives think this. I don't even think that their leaders think it. But Angle? O'Donnell? The rest of them? Yeah, sure. I really don't put any kind of truth beyond them. Their information circle begins and ends at Faux Noos, talk radio, and some crank sites on the interwebs. However, the electeds don't have time to watch that and get their info from staff, who get it from a mixture of sources (including Faux Noos, but also other sources more sane)
"that in 2014, we'll all have government health insurance."
ReplyDeleteI don't think this is believed by most on the right. What is believed is that in order to cover several million more people in 2014 taxes and/or insurance rates will soar. They are skeptical of the claim that the new law will pay for itself as many liberals currently state.
Mercer, if the right was more amenable to the idea that the free market isn't necessarily the best deliverer of healthcare than we could have passed something known to work and work much cheaper than ACA, Medicare for All, i.e. single-payer. Since the right is not amenable to this and acted to prevent HCR from passing even in its most moderate form possible, resulted in a ACA that is a hash of policies that people aren't really sure will work or not. Sometimes government is the solution.
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