How many liberal lawmakers said give us socialized medicine or we are shutting down the whole government, including your precious military-industrial complex?

If the tea party is the standard for the far right, then there are literally no radically leftist people in congress.

I went to a rally and heard him say it.

part of their health care plan.

IIRC, it was Joe Lieberman who scuttled the public option from Obama's original plan. The public option was dead in the water by the time Obama was elected and had pulled together his overhaul of health care in this country.

for people like me with devastating health conditions. Joe Lieberman didn't want single payer for the people the insurance companies are least in favor of insuring because he thought it would be converted to universal single payer down the road. And he was right.

That worm serves the insurance companies. He has never served the people or his home state.

the rest of the country! I'm glad I was part of the effort to throw him out of our state Dem party but alas, I fear we only got him angrier and more vengeful on everybody! He lived in my neighborhood but sold his house and left soon after he was tossed from the party and went to live in Stamford, which is part of NY for all we care here. We were just glad to get rid of that effing bastard!

right along side Benedict Arnold and Quisling.

His is another obituary I'd love to live long enough to read.

However, with no health insurance, there was no preventive care so I will probably be gone long before he is.

Please know that there were those who did what we could here in CT. I have no words to describe our loathing of that evil man...

Buyer's remorse set in rather quickly.

He's truly evil.

I wish Ned Lamont had won the Senate seat. I did canvassing and phoning for him and I called Dems some of whom were still gonna vote for Ole Joe. Some just didn't like that Ned was a rich guy who lived in Greenwich. But Ned was OK and would have made a good Senator. However, that said I did not vote for him for governor (I voted for our present gov. Dan Malloy, who I thought was better suited for the job).

It makes me feel "speshul"!

or opening Medicare to all would have lead to us to near single payer. This would have been voluntary and people could keep there current insurance.
But i think the advantages of of this choice would have led the majority to public healthcare.
We were close to obtaining this when the law was passed, but between Obama desperately trying to get a single Republican vote, and the obstruction of a few Blue Dogs, we missed a great opportunity.

Heritage Care locks the insurance profiteers into the system, and we will now never get them out. If the president had insisted on a non-profit option, where you could elect not to give 20% to Big Insurance (joining a Medicare-for-all co-op), the insurance ghouls would have died a quick death, and we would actually have health CARE very soon. But Obama was bought off by the insurance companies and we are now stuck forever with the highest prices and worst health care in the rich world.

What precludes a federal public option from being introduced later?

If we could have pulled off having a public option to begin with, one could as easily have said, "You think there is any chance they will rest until they have eliminated that public option cutting into their piece of a 3 trillion dollar pie?"

says you

opposed the public option.

We couldn't get it passed because we needed 60 votes to overcome the filibuster and Lieberman was one of them.

Obama wasn't the obstacle, Lieberman was.

The best option would be to try implementing single-payer, or at least the public option, at the state level. Vermont is already gearing up to go single-payer as soon as the waivers are available in 2017.

are desperate for health care...

And we needed 60 votes to overcome the Rethug filibuster.

since now every adult is required by law to give money to Big Insurance.

... from insurance companies will lead to single payer.

It isn't the insurance companies that are the problem, it is the for profit health care providers that will resist. As long as there are insurance companies between them and the buyers, their pricing is harder to control. The reason the public option was important was it put the government in the direct position of purchasing the health care. Our next best hope is going to be nonprofit health insurance cooperatives.

Excellent point ... nonprofit health insurance cooperatives would not necessarily be a bad thing.

I support the ACA in the sense that it is a start. it is far better than the traditional (read republican) thoughts in this country of "i have mine "f" everybody else"

are administered by, you guessed it, insurance companies.

start up co-ops and single payer. Vermont will be going with single payer and Oregon has set up two co-ops -- to name just two examples.

It is absolutely plain to me that Obamacare is a big step in the right direction. Simply abolishing medical underwriting and lifetime maximums, to name just two features of the ACA, is enormous progress.

It wasn't "enormous". It federalize health insurance regulation. It did little to nothing to control the rate of inflation of health care, and it is the cost of health CARE that has always been the problem. Even the White house is predicting that health care costs will continue to rise at 6-7% per year. It will help about 10% or so of Americans, and do very little to change the basic problems for the other 90%. Didn't make it worse though, other than putting insurance companies in the system by force of law.

If you want private "insurance" out of the equation, giving them a BIGGER chunk of the pie is not a step in the right direction. Surely even the most devoted Fan Club member can see this. What I can't understand is how the BOG has to insist that everything that's happened since the president took office is either 1) the bestest bestest thing ever, or, 2) not his fault. Some time between the campaign and the beginning of the HC discussions, someone pulled him aside and told him the truth - that Big Business decides what happens in this country. Big Insurance is one of the biggest, and American health "care" will include their billions of dollars until someone with the nerve to stand up to them gets elected president.

Medical cost inflation isn't sustainable and everybody knows it. Single Payer is eventually going to become the only viable way to cover everyone who isn't wealthy.

Without the ACA, you'd get there because as costs rises more and more people would lose access to private health insurance and demand that the government create access for them. With the ACA, you get there because subsidizing peoples' private insurance policies is going to be too big of a drain on the federal budget to continue doing, so you're going to have to create a public option.

Would we have gotten there faster without the ACA? Maybe we would have, it's hard to say. But the ACA does give a lot of people access to care that they would not have otherwise gotten.

millions who support the ACA.

It's Republicans and the Ted Cruz leftists who oppose it.

Is that the latest BOG insult of real dems?

attacks on the ACA while insisting that their brand of ideological purity distinguishes the infidels from 'real Democrats.'

To the Ted Cruz left, even Bernie Sanders is too far rightwing to be considered a 'real Dem' since he brags about his role in helping pass the ACA.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/176599/week-poverty-what-defunding-obamacare-really-means#

They are irrational.

Same as Ted Cruz rants about the "Surrender Caucus" inside the GOP--their niche is to attack everyone on the left for not being extreme enough,

Unlike some, my beliefs don't change depending on which party is hawking what.

Because, as you know, the party of Carter-Mondale-Dukakis did such a bang-up job of enacting progressive policies.

Here is the House make-up from 1966, right after the Dems passed Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, Medicare, the Great Society (and during the VN debacle)

247 Democrats
187 Republicans

Senate:

64 Democrats
35 Republicans

You need to face the fact - Dems started losing when they decided to be Republicans.

even under this general paradigm could contain more actual reform and less papering over of the existing nightmare.

The idea that this was some binary choice between single payer, what we got, and nothing is lazy and unsupported. Broad outlines used to obscure the details. I can construct a form of and revenue streams for single payer that would make such a good basic idea, hellish.

Is what we got the worst permutation of a market based scheme? Certainly not. It's it the best plausible construction under even that framework? Not even close, I fact so weak that escape velocity from the current paradigm is a matter of faith than the actual structure of the law. Not by the CBO projections it doesn't.

Does this law make some meaningful changes to the existing system?

Yes, particularly in a very abusive individual market but it does so by emulating a large group market that is no world model, giving the insurance cartel a key to the treasury, managing customers to a still loosely regulated cartel with an antitrust exemption, giving pharmaceutical manufacturers an even greater hand to extract wealth rather than forcing them to the negotiation table, taxing benefits, shoving self rationing and greater cost sharing down or collective throats, and no small amount of robbing "Peter" to pay "Paul" to spread the pain rather than going after those with resources in a significant way because a fees for service model will always do that when from within that structure those with the least are given aid and support.

The bite is less as you go up the ladder, cost are spread in an anti-progressive fashion one you leave the tier of greatest benefit up to the point where the scale of economy dictates that in the wash, those at and near the top actually save significantly as a share of income with less financial exposer than they had before reform and avoid any significant taxes in the exchange.

The support for the most vulnerable has been structured in a fashion that also greatly aids the well of at the expense of the rapidly shrinking middle, especially in attacking plans that folks have traded lots of income with no legislated path to recover those wages.

Ramping to subsidized plans on the exchanges is close to nonexistent. Cost controls were an afterthought, let to a poorly thought out MLR provision which is an open invitation for increased systemic costs. Universal coverage is silk not in the cards and want even before the Supreme Court hobbled the Medicaid expansion.

No, even under this structure the final product could be very different and this is not the only conceivable structure that isn't a form of single payer or the preexisting system.

Is everyone's brain stuck in weird little boxes, THINK PEOPLE! Stop being herded like sheep into false choices.

Pretty sickening but entirely expected

You basically look like a jackass when you try to dispute something that man says, but some will try anyway.

We will never make any progress if we are restrained by the limits of the champions of the status quo. Krugman is correct that single payer could not happen, but his reasoning is flawed. It could never happen only because our team never even asked for it.

So yes, liberals should have INSISTED on single payer, just as we should be insisting on an end to the NSA and these damn wars.

Ted Cruz didn't have an all or nothing strategy, he had no strategy at all in terms of winning anything with his shutdown. He had no achievable goal beyond what he accomplished, which was to get his name out there on the national stage, to solidify his credibility with teaparty social conservatives, and to cause the maximum disruption he could. In all these he was successful. He "won."

Whether this was a good idea for him personally remains to be seen. Back to healthcare...

Liberals should have insisted upon and fought for a NHS style single payer system, and if necessary settled on a government insurance option that would compete with insurance companies to drive prices down. And no, we should NEVER settle for a mandate.

As it stands now we have the absolute worst of all possible worlds and we are further from single payer than we were when we started. The only path to single payer from here comes when the ACA is demonstrated to be a catastrophic failure, and even then the amount of money we have handed to the insurance industry all but ensures that -- failure or not -- we are sticking with what we have now. To call this anything less than a horrific loss is like putting frosting on dog shit and calling it cake.

Members of the progressive caucus did "insist" on a public option. Their bluff got called.

And spare me the Ted Cruz levels of hyperbole, "absolute worst of all possible worlds"--"horrific loss"--"catastophic failure"--give me a fucking break. That's not how sane adults talk about the ACA. It;s how Teapublicans talk about it.

You're rooting for it to fail. And you're going to be sooooo disappointed when it doesn't.

I would not hesitate a second to admit I am dead wrong about the ACA. In fact, I would freaking LOVE being wrong about it.

Time will prove one of us more correct than the other.

And don't compare me to Teaparty republicans. I could not be further from them politically. They oppose the ACA, not because they have some ideological problem with it (they wrote the damn thing in the first place), but because President Obama is the guy who signed it. The irony your position today is this: had I asked you in 2007 what you thought of the provisions in the ACA, you and damn near everyone posting here would have been 100% opposed. President Obama himself would have been opposed -- in fact, he was opposed. You only changed and became a cheerleader when our party proposed and passed it. So here you are now, championing a Heritage Foundation law first proposed by Newt Gingritch and first passed by Mitt Romney, and calling me a Teapartier for maintaining the Liberal position you have abandoned.

Time will prove one of us correct. I expect it will be me, but if not I wont be afraid to admit it. After all, if you're right I still win -- I get affordable healthcare. But if I'm right we all lose.

In 2007, Clinton, Edwards, Obama all had very similar plans. Obama didn't have an individual mandate, Clinton and Edwards did. Krugman attacked Obama FROM THE LEFT for his failure to include a mandate.

The other stuff in the law--limits on profits of insurance companies, guaranteed issue, community rating, subsidies, expansion of Medicaid, emphasis on preventive health care, minimum standards of quality in insurance programs (i,e, a ban on junk insurance) are all liberal, Democratic ideas. The Massachusetts plan was passed by a very liberal Massachusetts legislature, with several provisions passed over Romney's veto.

Those of us who have been Democrats for our adult lives and voting histories know better than the dishonest talking point that the Heritage Foundation seriously supported a giant expansion of Medicaid, federal regulatory and taxation authority, and profit limits on health insurance companies.

So, you can sit there and pretend to excommunicate Paul Krugman from the world of liberal Democrats on health care, but he has been very consistent on these issues.

Except to say that I am not excommunicating Krugman for this. We simply disagree on an issue, just as the two of us have done.

to trust government, and to expect insurance to be something the federal government helps and doesn't hurt. So if ACA is a failure forget it.

It's really that simple. People might not trust the government -- I damn well hope they don't -- but they trust them a hell of a lot more than they well ever trust UnitedHealth. Rather than handing subsidies to the insurance companies, the federal government could save the money and offer those qualifying for the subsidy the option of purchasing a federal insurance plan. That competition would force the insurance companies to lower their rates or lose their customers.

not in our lifetimes anyways. Thats the political reality as I see it. But yes, it was bad that it didn't make it into the original law and it is the way forward.

Their motives: unclear.

I think it is sad that we got a bill without a public option, because in 50 years it would have put the health insurance scams out of business. If we ever get single payer in this country, that is how it will happen. Offer it to the public as an opt-in policy, and then wait for it to evolve into a place of dominance.

Some of us have been saying this for a very long time.

and educate themselves to the world around them we might have had a different outcome. Instituting a Bismarck system was much more doable. It is the US fixation on "single payer" that stymied true reform.

If the people had a choice of not having the insurance companies take 1/5th of their money to buy yachts with, that would have set the insurance profiteers on the short road to extinction.

and the WHO agrees with me.

I have such a crush on this man