In other news, water feels wet …
I understand Americans.
What? But I love going into debt and/or dying because I can’t afford cancer treatments!
Realistically, if we’re ever going to get real healthcare reform, it will have to come from a Republican. Trump probably isn’t the man to do it, but Republicans at this time in history are the party of change. Democrats don’t support any change. I wonder at this point if people with progressive issues on healthcare should start running as Republicans.
There is a zero percent chance that Republicans turn on their donors
I would agree, but for different reasons. The GOP is unapologetically obstructionist when the Dems are power. Conversely, Dems are more likely to compromise. Now, if a moderate Dem can quietly work with a moderate Rep, or at least one that agrees health care reform is a priority, some kind of reform could happen. Private insurance isn’t going anywhere, though. There’s just too much money involved for a politician from either side to threaten those profits! The old excuse: “But what about the economy!?”
We got healthcare reform (nowhere near enough but we got some) under Obama, so I think it would have been possible under Harris as well.
I agree that we got change under Obama, but I wouldn’t call it any more than that. Softening the edges of the existing system just enough to gut any real push toward change isn’t reform; it’s entrenchment.
Well then you didn’t have any pre-existing conditions.
I did.
That was huge for me and millions of other people. A game-changer.
Well then you didn’t have any pre-existing conditions.
I don’t know why you would assume that, or why you would imagine that I was unaware of this change.
That was huge for me and millions of other people. A game-changer.
Of course this was huge for people, but it wasn’t a huge reform for the health insurance agency. It didn’t change the for-profit nature of health insurance; it just put a guardrail on it. It softened one of the hardest edges of private health insurance, which made it palatable enough to escape real reform.
- Mainstream news: “Murder will not lead to any change”
- Also mainstream news: “Let’s suddenly talk more about that problem in one week than we’ve ever talked about it in the past 20 years”
violence never solved anything
1 dead CEO later
why can’t I hold all these solutions?
And many of them voted for the guy who said he had “concepts of a plan” to maybe fix it, if it can be done better. So them being unhappy about it doesn’t mean much when we are about to get a government that is actively hostile to improving any kind of health care for anyone ever.
Trump is objectively worse than Kamala. But don’t fool yourself. There is no real difference between the two on healthcare. Neither had any real plans to make any real reform. Biden has a trifecta, and he didn’t do shit. Kamala explicitly ran as Biden 2.0.
Of course there’s a difference. Among others vaccines might soon be banned. Think also about women’s healthcare (abortion etc.). But yeah, if you are thinking about systemic positive change she likely would not have done much.
You should add to it that he claimed he will have a plan within a week or so, for the past 8 years, while antivax RFK Jr. will be health minister next month.
If you don’t like it, why vote to empower the rich and mega corps at the cost of the other 99% of the population?
Yeah, Dems really have a lot of work to do to earn back the trust of most Americans.
Literally no one I know believes anything they say (or I say about them) or at best they’ll think it’s all performative (which they’re mostly right about). Most folks just don’t really care about news/politics and live normal American lives and feel the struggle. It’s mind blowing to me that our messaging was about how great the economy is and how much better is. Literal insane shit to most working class people.
Instead of saying the economy is great, they should use another word for what they mean, which is specifically like the rate of inflation/cost of very specific things or like a very specific unemployment rate. Whereas when regular people hear economy, they think of more abstract things like money in their pocket/savings, the cost of groceries, their ability to plan for the future based on stable finances, or even the increasing APR on the credit cards they owe (something we choose to ignore but many struggle with) - none of that shit is great, it’s literally worse than ever. lol
The Kamala campaign was very careful to NOT say that the economy was doing great. It was Biden who essentially had this as his campaign strategy. I wonder why this piece of misinformation is so persistent on this platform. It is always mentioned by people without reference to a source.
Let me add a reference to break this spell: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/sep/25/harris-opportunity-economic-plan-middle-class
I feel like they would have fared better if they went all in on the “corporations are gouging consumers” line and not try to convince people with GDP figures or the unemployment rate.
This is exactly the problem. The Dems hyperfixated on how well “the economy” was doing as some of kind of abstract entity, instead of acknowledging that none of those metrics actually represent a truly healthy economy. There’s more money, but it’s all going to the wealthy. There’s more employment, but being employed means Jack Shit if you’re working three jobs and still can’t make rent.
Successive Dem and GOP governments have spent decades overseeing the creation of an economy that has destroyed the livelihood of the average person (and the same has happened all across the neoliberal world). I’ve seen it said, accurately, that “poor” in the eighties was vastly more comfortable than poor today. Never forget that the Simpsons were supposed to be an average working class family struggling to get by. The Frank Grimes episode lampooned how the Simpsons basic existence had already transformed into one of relative luxury, and that aired in '97. It’s gotten so much worse since then.
People may be ignorant and easily lead, but they still know how much money is in their bank account. You will never ever win elections by telling voters they’re not actually poor because GDP growth is up.
The solutions Trump offered to these problems are objectively terrible, built on ignorance and outright lies. But he offered solutions. The Dems looked at a house full of people actively burning to death and said “What are you on about, there’s no fire. You’re stupid.”
Against that, the GOPs ideas didn’t have to be good. They just had to be different. The average voter figured that there if there was even a 1% chance that Trump made things better, that was still better odds than the Dems were giving them. Most of them didn’t even bother looking at the details of Trump’s plans, they just figured “Hey, he apparently has a plan, the other guys clearly don’t, so let’s go with that.”
I think I really agree with you here. Trump may have only had concepts of a plan but the Democrats denied even needing a plan in the first place.
The sky is blue and water is wet rank beside this revelation.
Yes clearly, but bizarrely during the campaign season voters did not list healthcare among there primary concerns, caring more about immigration and the economy.
That’s what Republicans told them to be afraid of. Never mind the economy recovering. Slowly, yes, but it has been recovering. Immigration is mostly about exceptionalism and racism.
I would never have guessed!
What??? Why???
