this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2024
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I mean..
Thanks Obama?
I get it. We're never supposed to criticize democrats.
But it sure does seem that at every opportunity to go hard, they as a team, simply don't.
Obama could have made single payer a priority. He could have made codifying RvW a priority. He could have made lots of things priorities, but he didn't. He made compromise his priority as if they were ever going to give him an inch. The only thing truly progressive about him was his marketing.
Not going full stop into your priorities has consequences. This is one of them.
The counterargument is always that the democrats don't have the votes, so they shouldn't try. Democratic strategy has put us into a ratcheting crab walk towards fascism and totalitarianism. This happens as a function of 'compromise' and as a function of the insistence we run 'safe' candidates, when realistically, you aren't capturing any centrist voters on a D ticket, ever, and haven't been since before they year 2000.
We need to kick the blue dogs out of the party and run leftists down ticket in ever race. We can't have spoilers taking D seats. They aren't D's but we're not giving the people of those places any other options. Let those blue dogs run as Republicans. They won't win. They're too moderate. Crab-walking the Democratic party further and further right trying to cater to a non-existent center is a major factor for why things are continually getting worse.
My understanding was that the plan was to baby step it in.
Start with getting everyone insured, then move on to patching things until the insurers are not part of it at all anymore, and it's just the medicare paying for it all, and being able to negotiate prices, and directly hire doctors themselves and buy out hospitals. The end goal would be for healthcare to become a service like the post office, with every address serviced regardless of the cost.
That was the dream rather.
Democrats had about 90 days in 2009 to get it done, not knowing that it would just be 90 days.
That was the last Democratic super-majority, republicans then went hard into State legislatures in order to gerrymander the US so that a Democratic super majority of both houses could never happen again.
They also went hard on the racism, because the southern strategy worked the first time.
I get that you are making these points in good faith, but its really not our job to make excuses for the inability of democrats to get the work they are elected to do, done. They can't keep getting apologized for on their own behalf. If these are the excuses they want to use, they need to be the ones to make them, because even these excuses demand further accountability.
Republican obstruction and wanton destruction is responsible for the lack of progress. Refusing Medicaid expansions and then overturning the individual mandate is what gutted the plan.
And sure you could jump right into single payer without any incremental change. But you're going to put the 400,000 Americans currently working in the health insurance industry out of work, if you do that. Which is not a small consideration. (That's per a CBO analysis of the feasibility of single payer, which does conclude it would save money, but it will require a massive work transition.)
https://www.healthaffairs.org/content/forefront/congressional-budget-office-scores-medicare-for-all-universal-coverage-less-spending
The broader point that I'm making is that incrementalism as a philosophy has resulted in us going backwards. The acceptance of it as a viable strategy when it consistently fails to yield results is a serious problem.
A majority of successful social programs in the US did so in broad sweeping reforms that dramatically changed the way people interacted with systems.
Arguing that 400k jobs in an industry that is basically parasitic to the process seems Stockholm syndrome ludicrous, and yet unsurprising, because this is about the best that branded, 'Democrat with a capital D' , Democrats seem to be able to come up with.
Incrementalism sounds great on paper, it fails for two primary reasons. The first is the opponents to a program have to do far less to dismantle it, so its easy to work against. The second is that it fails to create its own proof points for why something was necessary in the first place. Obamacare is a great example of this second kind of failure. We're still utterly fucked in terms of healthcare. Most people are more fucked than they've ever been in terms of healthcare. We're worse off than we were because at least in 2008, although I didn't have healthcare, I wasn't paying several hundred dollars a month to basically not have healthcare. Incrementalism fails to make enough of a difference in peoples lives to show them that a given project is worth investing in.