Clarity on this part of our History of the Obama Admin, still_one. Very Important Reality Based information!

Right now folks on Medicare have paid for Part A through their payroll deductions. They pay for Part B through Social Security deductions or a monthly invoice. Then you have to buy a supplemental policy to cover what Part A and Part B don't cover. So how is Medicare for All going to work?

First, I applaud the OP for outlining the challenges of, and success in, getting the ACA passed into law. It's a bold attempt at universal health care. But, basically, it's great if you have no money and had no insurance. If you're middle class, it's very expensive! Much more so than typical employer sponsored insurance. So, what are the costs with Medicare for All? Does it bend the cost curve for us?

nt

In a few seconds there will be a post about how President Obama only had to use the bully pulpit and twist arms. It is all so easy.

and getting that wish list through Congress are two very different things.

Think Breaux of LA was in that group as well.

The Republicans and blue dogs got concessions, but the GOP reneged on their pledge to back the bill.

Only Collins is left in the Senate, but nothing she says can be trusted.

Medicare For All is a good idea but not politically possible. Candidates who support it like Harris. Bernie and Warren should be out campaigning for Democrats to take over the Senate.

whenever possible, house candidates as well.

gov john bel Edwards needs some help in October, only 2 months, as well. a visit from the former vice president or a popular senator might help.

That was before she decided to imply he was a racist for "working with segregationists" as she did last night.

I'm afraid that some people think wishing makes laws.

Thank you for the reminder. Facts matter.

difficult it was to get the ACA and how impossible it was to get more. Now, the repeal and whatever swarm has control of the Senate and Presidency.
The ACA is under attack and it seems to me that Democrats should not be trying to help Republicans destroy it. There will be no Medicare for All to replace it in any near term realistic future. In fact, people with preexisting conditions, those on medicaid expansion, and those who only can afford insurance through ACA are not able to wait years or decades to get health coverage returned if ACA is repealed or overturned in the courts.

Google Howard Dean’s reccolection of what went down. He was DNC chairman and was pissed.
Dems caved to Joe Lieberman, he insisted on removing the public option. With Lieberman’s support we get the ACA with the public option

Ben Nelson would have never approved a public option in the bill. He was my senator at the time and quite adamant in his opposition. He barely voted for the ACA as it stood.

Blanche Lincoln almost assuredly wouldn't have voted for it, either.

Joe Lieberman insisted on removing the public option. Yes. That's exactly what happened.

skunked the public option in committee. It's why the Democrats lost the House in 2010. The base wanted the public option as the fall back position to single payer. What we got was a convoluted cut and paste version of insurance reform. Give the base a reason to vote or too many will stay home on election day.

Insurance lobby got uts money's worth on him.

... one of the first orders of business in the Senate is to change the rules so that the necessary legislation be passed with a simple majority. We can thank Moscow Mitch for this, since he pulled the nuclear option on judges.... And other things too...

The other side can pull the same shut on us if/when they regain control of both houses.

the fuckers wouldn't vote fpor them

No candidate who supports Medicare for All will give an honest and realistic explanation for how it would ever become law given how difficult ObamaCare was. What is the point of giving people who need healthcare right now the hope that Medicare for All is anywhere on the horizon?

Republicans have shown they will do so to wreck this country, while also use it to block Democrats when we have respected the rule. It seems the rule means a lot less since McConnell used it to rob Obama of a Supreme Court pick.

If you have 50+ votes in the Senate you control the Senate.

And as has been demonstrated, it only takes 50+1 votes to change the rules of the senate.

prefer not to.

that watered down the ACA in negotiations they dragged out for months. This was in addition to Republican opposition, but they didn't succeed in removing coverage for preexisting conditions or no annual or lifetime limits on coverages.

Btw, I just looked up to confirm, and of the 45 house Democrats who voted against the final version of the ACA in 2009, only 3 are still in office -- Collin Peterson, who also voted with the Republicans to repeal in January 2016 (noting this was while Sanders was promising to repeal from the left), Stephen Lynch and Dan Lipinski.

Voting against Obamacare turned out NOT to be quite the voter pleaser the blue dogs believed it would.

RW propaganda, blockage of attempts to improve and expand coverages, and severe damage to the ACA markets and funding mechanism did help give big lift to Sanders' promise to repeal among some on the left. Nevertheless, Sanders also isn't finding running against the Obama administration's great legacy a winner so far.

Polls show that, in spite of unrelenting warfare against Obamacare from both sides for years, 80% of Democrats support what has proven so far to be a remarkably indomitable program. And when we give our legislators the power to add the public option and other expansions, that will happen.

Do you remember how many Democrats voted with the GOP on that one?

to vote with the Repubs that time. I don't know for sure about all the other years and dozens of repeal attempts, but it would have been rare.

Sanders may have wished others did because Republicans helped by blue collars to repeal the ACA would both get rid of it for him and create an actual need for the alternative he was running on, but he himself never voted with the Republicans.

these "plans" the candidates are pushing.

Getting legislation passed under the best of circumstances means negotiations, compromise and deals that often ends up with nothing like the original plan.

Compromise turned out to be a bad choice for many. It would have been sweet if Dems of all types united for a good liberal public option knowing the red state moderates would lose regardless.

I doubt we'll get that many Dems in the senate any time soon. Moscow Mitch has been blocking everything the Dem house passes lately.

we lost the public option for no good reason at all

<<just shakes head>

was willing to sign a bill as long as it did NOT include a public option. So the plan was for that Senate approved bill to go to the Reconciliation committee along with the House bill, which would include a public option -- and for them to agree in committee on a compromise bill with the public option.

However, when Kennedy got replaced by a Republican, that was the end of that possibility. All they could do was take the Senate bill, exactly as it had been passed in the Senate, and send it to the House for a straight up and down vote. If they made any changes they'd lose Lieberman's vote. So that was the end of the public option.

"Democrats actually had the sixty votes we would need to move forward on health care. The bad news was that we would need every single one of those sixty votes. Which meant every single one of us had a veto. Good luck, Harry Reid! ... A handful of moderate-to-conservative Democrats were opposed to the public option, which would have increased competition in the insurance market. Gone. Someone floated the idea of lowering the age for Medicare to fifty-five. Hmmm. Not a bad idea. ... But then Joe Lieberman announced on Face the Nation that he was against it. Gone. Finally, on Christmas Eve, we passed the bill through the Senate. Phew.

Then Scott Brown was elected. "On top of that, our math problem had just gotten a lot worse, because once Brown took office in early February, that would be the end of our sixty-vote, filibuster-proof supermajority. 'Wait,' you're thinking, 'I thought you had already passed the bill.' We had. And so had the House. But there were some differences between the two bills. Ordinarily, it wouldn't be a big deal. We'd convene a conference committee, hash out the differences, and then both chambers would vote to pass the unified bill that came out of the conference. But Republicans were still hell-bent on stopping us from passing health care reform, and now that they once again had forty-one votes in the Senate, they could stop us from voting on the unified bill. .... There was only one solution: The House would have to pass the exact same bill we had just passed. Guess who didn't like that idea? House Democrats. Liberals wanted provisions from the House's more progressive bill, and Democrats from more conservative districts were now spooked by Brown's victory in Massachusetts.

"Finally, after a few hair-raising weeks of negotiations and arm-twisting, the House passed the Senate bill as it was by a 219-212 margin. We would later be able to make some minor adjustments through a complicated parliamentary procedure called 'reconciliation,' which requires only fifty-one votes."

With the president, the house and 60 senate members we barely passed the ACA!

And now we have candidates wanting to scrap it and try for a crazy Medicare for all idea!!

When we control nothing but the house?!?

It’s delusional to me. Were lucky we got the ACA.

And there is never an answer when asked how are we going to pass Medicare for all. Normally no response. Occasionally an insult for being a moderate!

Or the also common: everyone wants it. It will pass!

It like impeachment. It’s not Pelosi...the votes aren’t there!

Reality sucks at times. It sucks worse if you don’t accept it and deal with it.

In order to get the 60 votes Obama had to agree to the "cornhusker kickback" in order to get Ben Nelson's vote. Because Brown won Kennedy's seat the bill had to be sent back to the House where they had to vote the Senate version to avoid going to conference where it would have to go back for a vote in each chamber. Somehow the cornhusker kickback got removed in the process and the bill was signed into law.

What remains of the ACA is a shell of the original bill after SCOTUS and Trump got done with it. In Nebraska the ACA only has one plan available and it has a $20,000 deductible. In the 2018 election Nebraska voters passed a Medicaid expansion amendment but the Nebraska Unicameral failed to pass enabling legislation, like Utah. In 2020 will the voters make Republicans pay a price for this snub? Not a chance.

As your post demonstrates the criticism of Obama on his signature legislative bill (along with the stimulus package) is not grounded on fact. Some of the criticism on immigration, however, is fair. Yes, he extended protection to Dreamers and he got the Senate to pass a comprehensive immigration bill but Speaker Paul Ryan would not bring it up for a vote in the House, killing it but he also had an aggressive deportation policy. Even here his record is light years ahead of what Trump has done but that doesn't mean there weren't issues with his execution on immigration.

The fact that Booke, Castro and Harris think that attacking President Obama is a good move surprises me

Agree

Link to tweet

the ACA

Obama was masterful, brilliant even. When he put those repukes on TV so they could not escape their own words and you could see their faces, contorted by we what you could see they were thinking. OMG it was beautiful. The ACA was a big improvement.
But the greed monsters are out of their minds. Private Insurance has got to go. It is just a scam. A scam that enables the hospitals and pharmaceutical companies.
Result? Can't go to the doc, ain't got no $ if it gets worse I'll just go emergency and not pay the hospital. What would you do? Can't squeeze blood out of a turnip.

He created the votes by pressing people. That is what politics is. Not giving up and saying oh, I guess Joe Lieberman can have his way.

Why do I see more and more posts about "not having the votes"?
Why is that an excuse? Why do we supposedly elect people to "lead" and then watch them follow the path of least resistance?

It's either
a) they aren't leaders
b) they didn't want the issue to pass (whatever it was) in the first place

There were also conservative Democrats. The parties are much more skewed to the extremes these days, with far fewer moderates to help form majorities.

nonsense have no desire to understand the differences or the situation, and only want to use it as an excuse to not so subtly blame President Obama, and the Democrats at the time, even though the facts in the OP made it clear why that wasn’t going to happen

what the situation was at the time. We were very fortunate that the ACA was passed in the very small window of time -- 4 months -- when we had enough votes to overcome the filibuster. And one of those votes was Joe Lieberman's, an independent who opposed the public option.

It's why I don't post much here anymore. It seems like too often I get into a fight with other DUers whose mantra come across as excusing weak results and getting angry at me for demanding better from our elected officials (of both parties).

In any case, if politics is the art of the possible, the key is to make things possible, not throw up your hands because you think trying is futile...

and party leaders routinely put majorities together by working across the aisle.

Then Republican House leader Dennis Hastert came along and decreed that, from then on, they would only pass a bill if they had a "majority of the majority" -- that is, with Republican votes alone.

Sometime later, we lost most of our "DINO's" -- conservative Democrats that progressives liked to disparage as "Democrats in name only."

So the parties are heavily skewed now, and there is little to no working across the aisles. The most "liberal" Republican is Susan Collins, who only votes with Democrats about 36% of the time (even less often on crucial votes).

http://www.progressivepunch.org/scores.htm?house=senate

Thanks for doing this research. People need to be reminded

...says one of the author/architects of the Affordable Care Act:

Link to tweet