Most of the people who are not covered, but would be covered will probably cheer perry’s decision and say that it is terrible that 0 would try to force the govt to help them in time of need. If the unhelped go bankrupt because of perry’s rejection of expanding Medicaid, the bankrupt will then be able to blame the federal govt because it didn’t help them. Logic is not required to reach this conclusion.

Gasp. Shock. Who could’ve foretold?

Yes, I am floored by this outcome.

It was Max Baucus who forced the ACA to be based on state-federal partnerships. The House bill created a federal program with a single exchange. Not Democrats, Baucus. Jim Messina was just the message-boy to Obama, telling what Baucus was willing to do. And who was Baucus’s legislative aide who drafted the legislation? The former VP Government Relations from Wellpoint. And who was another Democratic Senator (Evan Bayh) married to? A Wellpoint board member. Both of those were beyond public pressure.

There was corruption up the wazoo with the Democratic caucuses in both houses. But it was Baucus who pushed the state-federal partnership approach in part to satisfy the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, who would then get to write the state regulations.

It’s time we examine the details of who did what instead of rolling it all up into blanket responsibility. It makes it easier to point out specific accountability.

And we should not forget that the Republicans, despite their stated opposition, ensured the outcome would benefit insurance companies by holding a united front even though individual Republican Senators might have been in favor of more reasonable alternative provisions than the current bill.

According to data from Urban Institute this move by Perry could leave roughly 1.3 million Americans without access to health insurance

Americans do not need access to health insurance. They need access to health care. They’re not the same thing, and guaranteeing access to the insurance does not guarantee access to the care. There’s a whole ‘nuther set of problems beyond insurance that have to be dealt with to ensure the latter. We haven’t begun serious discussion of those yet. And they’re almost without doubt best addressed without the private insurance middleman. Without inspired leadership, and there’s certainly none of that on the horizon, I despair of our ever getting there. America, I hardly knew ye.

It is a policy disaster, cuz, from what I’ve seen in my 52 years, the last 33 living in Seattle and Boston, working in 3 different careers, cooking for yuppie fucks in fine dining in boston in the 80′s, keeping yuppie fuck email and database servers running at Microsoft in the dot.bomb, dealing with yuppie fucks in seattle education deform (hi Bill Gates and Arne and Rahm and SFC LEV TFA DFER PFL CRPE …)

AND voting for ivy’d up highly titled highly connected highly paid yuppie fuck Democrats who couldn’t run a hot dog stand –

it is a policy disaster cuz the people on ‘our’ side are deliberate sell outs on a typical day, and completely stunning incompetent on the other days.

anyone remember ‘reinventing government’ with clinton and gore? I was 32 in ’92 when I voted for those sell out assholes — I thought the yuppie fuck branch of the Democratic Party was going to make stuff work right, so that we could stuff the lies of the fascists back into the dark holes those lies come from …

INSTEAD, we’ve had DECADES of …

boo hoo… snivel snivel … whine whine … mean meanies being mean!

Lions, And Tigers, And Bears, Oh My!

Yes TarheelDem, the despicable sell outs probably did what you say – I believe you — and WHERE was the rest of the Democratic Party? I’m from Wishy-Warshy, pacified northwest – MOST of our senior Democrats were in D.C., or rising, in ’92 and ’94, and WHAT did their pathetic asses do about Baucus ?? … and this year, I’m supposed to get all hot and bothered over “lessor of two evils” cuz … our pathetics are fucking pathetic!

Time to completely clean house. I do NOT give a shit if the ONLY Democrats in the house in 2013 are Darcy Burner and Alan Grayson – at least we’ll have a base to start with, instead of political pathetics sniveling and whining, and sell outs to throw out.

rmm.

Isn’t Perry supposed to be at the Alamo, or something?

I agree with that. I don’t think we were critical enough about who did what. I was very much aware of Evan Bach’s wife’s position at WellPoint. What went on behind the scenes was the very definition of crony capitalism. And it was not all rolled up to Obama. Many of them had their own bailiwicks. Obama though was not fighting any of it.

If there are no other Democrats in the House, Darcy Burner and Alan Grayson won’t be in the House either. That’s just the way that elections fall out.

I hear your complaints. But my situation is that I have had no progressive Democrats to vote for in NC except in a few primaries and those yuppie fucks turned out to be sellouts to local developers. But…I have had to endure the even greater selling out by Republican troglodytes and Blue Dogs and listen to their racist, sexist, homophobic, and plain out crazy spewing to boot.

I said elsewhere that elections have consequences, and they do. Typically a choice between worse and worser. Do folks in Vermont or Washington state or Massachusetts understand what that is like.

There is no way to clean house in 2012 because the current political culture will ensure that the results will be worser. But in 2014, in a low turnout mid-term election primary or in the general election. And definitely in 2016. It might be possible to get just a few of the loons and sell-outs out of Congress. You don’t clean decades of rot out in a single election, especially if the voting process has been corrupted as well.

The decision by President Obama and Congressional Democrats to base the Affordable Care Act on the existing federal-state partnerships instead of creating a direct federal program is turning into a huge policy disaster, thanks to the Supreme Court and opposition from Republican controlled states.

Obama being a corporate whore who cuts secret backroom corporate deals is on Obama, not anyone else. Obama actively tried to suppress and belittle anyone else, which again that was Obama’s actions, not anybody else…as you’ll recall the Obama administration outright enjoyed doing hippy punching.

The report by the Center for Immigration Studies found:

• 73 percent of illegal immigrants and their U.S.-born children are living in poverty or near poverty.
• The average household income for illegal immigrants is $34,800, compared with $68,800 for citizens.
• 69 percent of illegal immigrants do not have health insurance.

There’s an estimated 1.7M illegal immigrants in TX. 73% of that comes to 1.2M in poverty who wouldn’t be elligible for Medicaid anyway because they’re not US citizens.

I really wish we could just clean house and wake up the next day to a new way of running the country. Too bad it doesn’t work like that. This could be a long slog as suggested by TD. Lesser of two evils could turn out to be far worse than anyone imagined. I can’t go there.

We are trapped with a president and a party that have bought into the conventional paradigm, some call neo liberal, and they are corrupt. They all think we have to cut deficits and lower the debt. And they all take money from lobbyists to tell them what to do, since they are gutless. They are wrong – - all of them. But the Rs could be far worse. They want to lower the minimum wage. They blame the unemployed and as you see they don’t want any help for the poor. They add in a little austrian austerity to their usual neo liberal myth about the free market and small government. They want to do away with SSMM. Give them a chance and they will. Unemployment and poverty to them is hardly even an annoyance.

Very true that,indeed,that’s it.

Think maybe that says we should fix it and give these people a path to citizenship?

They all think…

Is this literally true of all 535 members of Congress? Is there no one in Congress that disagrees with your predicate?

Yes, bring it back to the sole power of the dictatorial President as if Congress doesn’t matter. That isn’t the way it works. If it deals in any way, shape, or form with finances, Max Baucus can stop it dead in its tracks, as he did the public option and any consideration of Medicare for All. “No having the votes” means not having Baucus’s vote (he not only gets to vote; he gets to sit on legislation and not bring it to the committee). And if you see the need to use reconciliation to pass the bill, it also means not having the chair of the Senate Budget Committee’s vote. And the chair of the Senate Budget Committee was and is Kent Conrad, whose mantra the whole time was “we don’t have the votes”. And all of that hardball decision-making likely occurred during the transition period or during the campaign.

But no matter. Gotta keep up the drumbeat. No one’s responsible but Obama. No one’s responsible but Obama. Cause that just might get a third party President elected this year.

Can’t we have a discussion of the ins and outs of what actually happened without reducing it to a mantra? Just because Baucus drove the legislation doesn’t let Obama off the hook; he signed it. He could have vetoed it and had no bill at all.

But by ignoring Baucus, who would still be there as in a third party Presidential win, you set yourself up to hate even the Presidential candidates you are most enamoured of this year.

Let me turn it around, who? I havn’t noticed one, but maybe I missed him. I would have thought Sanders would object but I don’t think he does. He is more a deficit dove. I really think these guys need a class in economics to teach them how money works. They all seem to agree the deficit and debt must be reduced, only in different ways and at different times. Truth is, it more than likely never needs to be reduced in the life of the republic. Who says that? I don’t think there is one in 535.

I am happy to see you bring this up about Baucus. There were others at the time that simply would not accept anything other than what we got. Obama could have vetoed it, but I also think he is at generally center right and this was the kind of bill he liked.

Yes, fast track more cheap labor is just what this economy needs.

The antidote to cheap labor is: more favorable trade laws, higher minimum wages, more progressive taxation at the top income levels, unionization, government subsidized healthcare, and better educational systems. All you have to do is notice what the countries that don’t have cheap labor are doing. None of which Texas state government seems to be interested in.

Immigrants pay taxes but don’t get benefits. That lowers the costs of government on everyone else. And btw, in Texas it is the Anglos who are immigrants. And the US fought a war so that Mexico would not restrict immigration to Texas.

“Americans do not need access to health insurance. They need access to health care”

Exactly.

I am a Texas resident and I have an adult fully disabled child on Medicaid. The reality is that Texas turning down the Medicaid expansion will have little real impact on those who would have been covered. There are no doctors who would see them and they would be left standing in line at the emergency room where they will go anyway.

I recently contacted the state agency that is supposed to have a list of doctors that accept Medicaid. Not one of the doctors they referred me too would accept a new Medicaid patient.

That’s a lot of fixes for one problem, seems like it should be easier.

In 1824, Mexico adopted a new constitution. The former province of Spanish Texas became part of a newly created state.

Texas was very sparsely populated and in the hope that an influx of settlers could control the Indian raids, the Mexican government liberalized immigration policies for the region. Of the 24 regions of Texas, only one settled citizens from within the Mexican interior; most of the remaining settlers came from the United States.

The Mexican-born settlers in Texas were soon vastly outnumbered by people born in the United States. To address this situation, President Anastasio Bustamante implemented several measures on April 6, 1830. Chief among these was a prohibition against further immigration to Tejas from the United States. These measures did not have the intended effect. Settlers simply circumvented or ignored the laws.

Do unto others I suppose.

You’ve got it exactly backwards: it was Obama and not Baucus who pulled the strings. Messina was the message boy from Obama to Baucus.

I lived in Montana when Baucus was still only a congressman and knew quite a few people who had gone to school with him. The consensus was that calling Baucus an average intellect was an insult to those of average intellect. Baucus is a dumb man. He is an empty suit, a puppet. On his own he is incapable of even understanding the intricacies of ACA, let alone implementing such a pro-corporate and devious bill. When Messina was his chief of staff he was Baucus’ puppetmaster, and after Messina’s move to the White House Baucus became their primary Senate stooge, taking direction from Messina. The Obama administration relied on Baucus to move their agenda through the Senate.

ACA was and is Obama’s legislation. The blame for this travesty belongs to Obama first and foremost. Don’t let Obama off the hook by putting most of the blame on Baucus, a low level stooge who was just following orders from on high.

Baucus hired the former VP-Government Relations of Wellpoint as his legislative aide before Obama was President. Baucus may not be the brightest bulb in the lamp, but he did get himself situated and entrenched as Senate Finance Committee chair, the most powerful chairmanship in the Senate. He might be a puppet, but it is clear that he is not Obama’s puppet. He was Wellpoint’s puppet on the ACA. Folks in Montana might want to see who else is pulling his strings directly.

Senate Finance Chairs don’t follow orders of Presidents. It’s a tradition that even the dimmest jealously guard. And one of the brightest, Daniel Patrick Monyihan, shut down Hillarycare.

Obama doesn’t get off the hook on this one. But the real choices for the President were Baucus’s ghostwritten bill or no bill at all. But on the Medicare Part D doughnut hole closure, Obama negotiated to let PhRMA extract more profits by letting it gradually close; PhRMA’s point man on this was Mike Ross (D-AR), a guy with little committee power. That concession gets put totally on Obama; it was unforced and was in exchange for PhRMA’s silence about the bill (which cost Billy Tauzin his job btw).

Well stated and accurate analysis. Our system of government has been reduced to bad reality programming with disastrous real world impact for the 99%.

I thought that war was fought to ensure that Tejas could continue to have slavery, which the Mexican govt. opposed.

No reason for you and TarheelDem to argue. We all acknowledge that Obama acted for the benefit of the Insurance Racket and sold us out. Both he and Baucus are corporate puppets.

Well, Alex, was it “Slavery” or “Manifest Destiny”? Below the Mason-Dixon line, those were inseparable. And Mexico’s failure to stop Anglo immigration was at the heart of it.

Back to my original point. It is important to notice who sold out what.

The aide, Liz Fowler, was not hired out of the blue before 0 was elected. She had already been working for the senate as a health care guru, went to wellpoint, and when it looked like there would be a dim president, she was hired into baucus’s office to be prepared to write the legislation. The Mosquito Cloud takes us down memory lane. 0 certainly did not do this all on his own, but he did nothing to try to do a better job for his constituents, the whole country.

Slavery played a big part.

Turns out once an illegal immigrant (in this case anglo) breaks an immigration law, other laws of the land are easily circumvented or ignored.

Mexico’s failure to stop Anglo immigration was at the heart of it

I guess it’s too bad they didn’t have fence technology back then.

Exactly my point. He did not do it on his own. Interesting that she was the “healthcare guru” and then went off to flack for Wellpoint. I had missed her earlier stint in the Senate. This policy was likely locked and loaded before Barack Obama ever came to the Senate. Sort of a second go at Hillarycare.

TarheelDem – why did Moynihan shut down hilarycare?

I was cooking in Alaska in those days, & then went back to school and got a math b.a., & then was busy job hunting, & then was busy trying to stay employed in the dot.bomb era and NOT ending up on welfare or unemployment (the 90′s, in hindsight, were good to me – chaotic and 1 throw of the dice after another, but, at the end I was a lot better off than at the start), … and there just weren’t the sources for political scoop that there are now.

BTW – we’ll have to disagree on Darcy and Grayson — there has been little or NO consistent messaging for the bottom 80% of us for decades, nevermind that the policies that are just lessor of two evil have been, in the BIG picture, f’king scraps we’re supposed to grovel for.

While there is a % of the population who will ALWAYS be vying to be a ringwraith of sauron, and there are a lot of people who will GLADLY join any Leni Riefenstahl production, I think there are about 80% or so of us who aren’t too far off from each other, depending how the soundbite is sold. The bottom 80% of us is a completely untapped market.

I’m 52, I voted ‘moderate’ Dem for decades, I’m sick of getting sold out with those ‘moderate’ votes, and I ain’t voting for it anymore.

rmm.

Re: Monyihan

For a very arcane reason. The legislation was written in the White House and dropped into the Congress instead of being written in the Congress where other special interests could get their mitts on it. As Senate Finance chair, Monyihan punished the upstart Clintons because he could. In short, elite arrogance that Bill and Hillary would not kiss his ring.

Rahm Emanuel was in on this. Rahm was liaison with Congress. And decided apparently that he would be all about kissing rings; as mayor, he still is. So there was Baucus’s ring, and then Kent Conrad’s, and then PhRMA, the AMA, the AHA, and AHIP…and it’s amazing what kind of sausage appears when you kiss rings. But you have to say that President Obama did not automatically have to agree to Rahm’s strategy or Nancy DeParle’s or anyone else’s. Nonetheless that’s where the advice was coming from. Overweening emphasis on not making Clinton’s mistake again.

I think you are right about the fundamental agreement on a lot of stuff by 80% of the population. Which is why so much money goes to making sure that that agreement never takes place. From buying out media to the point they tolerate blatant lies, to billion-dollar campaign seasons, to using the police to suppress Occupy protesters. A lot of money is being spent to keep Americans at each others throats.

I kind of remember reading that the Clinton’s had their wings clipped by all these Democratic barons in Congress … in the wall street journal ??!

I just skimmed 4 articles in The Nation, before I responded —

I was reading the Journal in the 90′s cuz, like now, I can’t take leftie-liberal reporting — sure sure sure, the numbers of people getting screwed over are in the reporting, and, how mean the mean meanies are is in the reporting, and, the Center For Nicey Nice Is Appalled – BUT

wtf are the specific SYSTEMS to make shit work? it is like all problems boil down to writing a book and making a movie and going on a gabfest tour, and sally field stands up with her “Union” sign & we call go home happy.

YAWN. so, the fascists are purging voter polls in right wing hell holes like Texas and Florida … WTF are they supposed to do? They are NOT nice people, they’re f’king fascists.

IF we’re gonna have participation by citizens in voting, HOW are we gonna do it? WHO is going to do WHAT? WHEN is WHO gonna do it? WHERE is WHO gonna do it? Do we the community need 1 election person for every 100 people, or every 10,000 people? Might election people staffing requirements be a function of population density? What are the election people supposed to do?

HOW are we going to make election staffing WORK to do the job of running good elections, instead of just providing tons of employment for the kinds of CON$ultant$ and bureaucrats and f’king lawyers who infest health care, or education?

Election people will write essay’s for The Nation all year telling us that mean meanies are mean? We’ll all get college degrees adn have meetings about how we don’t consent to the inhumanity of mean meanies …

and how are the 7 billion people of earth going to have a pair of shoes, a few t-shirts, a hat, clean places to shit and piss, safe 2000 calories a day? We’ll ALL go to college and have meetings and write essays, and The Organic Biodegradable Tofu Rodin Fairy is gonna sit on a stone and think it all up!

Friends, Romans, Countrymen – I wrote The Containment Strategery! Let me fly around the country signing books!

ugh.

rmm.