Further, the democrats have been in power for 12/16 years, and multiple years controlling all 3 houses. They did nothing to help with Women's healthcare. I have followed the issue closely, and I still don't understand what they Dems were going to do to keep abortion legal. If it's a state issue, how would the President change anything ? If it's national issue, why haven't they already done anything ?
The 111th Congress was the only time in the last 20 years Democrats had a filibuster-proof trifecta and that was for 72 days. [1]
That was the government that gave us the Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare.
The other Democrat trifecta was the 117th Congress[2] but if you look that's only with independents in the Senate that caucused with Democrats. Obviously also not filibuster proof.
That's the government that gave us the CHIPS act.
Think about how often parties are in power and they can't even fill appointed positions because of partisan opposition during confirmation, let alone pass legislation.
> That was the government that gave us the Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare.
Aka Romneycare, originally put forth by the Heritage Foundation. If that's the best Democrats can do, no wonder people aren't too optimistic about them.
The Democratic Party are the ones that passed it. The Republicans didn't, not when they held the legislature, not when they held the presidency and the legislature. Even when Romney signed it in MA (to his credit), it came from the Democratic Party held state legislature.
And its passage has helped millions, people I know personally and probably people you know personally. Maybe anyone who'd ever heard the phrase "pre-existing condition" before. It's one of the single most effective and widely beneficial government efforts in our lifetimes.
It's not that fact that Democrats did it by taking the best parts of an opposition party policy isn't impressive, it's that the unseriousness of Republicans when it comes to their own ostensible policy ideas is depressive.
If people were logical like you suggest, they wouldn't vote for an even worse situation. Yet they constantly do, so I'm sorry I cannot accept "logic" as a reason for the latest vote. People voted something, they got something, and they will get something back (where all those somethings aren't even important for elections). No, I'm not sarcastic, also not joking. Campaign and vote looked as seen from here absolutely bonkers.
The public health insurance option, also known as the public insurance option or the public option, is a proposal to create a government-run health insurance agency that would compete with other private health insurance companies within the United States. The public option is not the same as publicly funded health care, but was proposed as an alternative health insurance plan offered by the government. The public option was initially proposed for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, but was removed after the independent US senator for Connecticut Joe Lieberman threatened a filibuster.
As a result, Congress did not include the public option in the bill passed under reconciliation. The public option was later supported by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party in the 2016 and 2020 elections and multiple other Democratic candidates, including the current President, Joe Biden.
The reason Democrats couldn't do more is because not enough people voted for them, so they can only be angry with themselves. We would have had a public option if Congress didn't have to rely on the Blue Dog democrats. IMO Democratic voters have unreasonable expectations for their politicians and Republicans basically have none. Did Trump face any consequence to failing to pass a border bill during his administration?
Well there's your problem. The GOP knows that you need to sidestep those kind of tedious anachronisms in order to wield power effectively and get what you want. The Dems needed to learn that lesson several administrations ago.
>Further, the democrats have been in power for 12/16 years, and multiple years controlling all 3 houses.
When was this exactly? The last time democrats controlled presidency and both houses was during Obama's first term and they passed the most historic overhaul of healthcare in this country, which was a huge win for women's healthcare.
The "Stupak amendment" was exactly that. There were a group of Dems who wanted concessions on federal funding that were holding out until that amendment went in the bill.
That something I find that the left/liberals/progressives doesnt get.
The democrat party is not progressive. If they ever have 60 seats in the senate they will fracture and argue with the progressives elements. Most of the democrat party’s constituents are conservative, religious. Most of the minorities they take for granted are not onboard with nonbinary identities, or anything to do with fetus elimination. They just are afraid of republicans for one reason or another.
> The last time democrats controlled presidency and both houses was during Obama's first term and they passed the most historic overhaul of healthcare in this country, which was a huge win for women's healthcare.
Was it? From a foreign perspective it doesn't seem to have changed the conversation around US healthcare at all.
Before ACA you could be denied health insurance or coverage due to pre-existing conditions (or they could charge you so much that it was infeasible to get insurance).
This was huge because if you ever lost insurance and got new insurance (switched jobs) then you were often screwed.
ACA defined essential benefits. Before ACA insurance usually didn't cover things mental healthcare.
Required coverage of preventative care/screenings/reproductive care for women.
Annual and lifetime coverage limits were banned. Your health insurance could no longer drop you because you got an expensive to treat cancer.
The amount of desperately needed consumer protections ACA added were immense.
Sure there are problems with ACA, especially the marketplace part of it, but overall it was a big change to healthcare in the US.
That’s putting it mildly. Sure, the ACA was, in many respects, a big improvement over what came before it. But it’s still outrageously broken. Let’s consider the perspective of a person who wants health insurance:
1. You mostly want to be insured via your employer, and you mostly get screwed if you leave your job. The financial disincentives to insuring yourself are huge unless you qualify for the subsidies.
2. For some bizarre reason, you can use only buy insurance at some times of the year.
3. You more or less have to buy insurance through a website that is massively and incomprehensibly bad. Want to figure out what that insurance covers? It’s sort of doable, but it sure isn’t easy.
4. Whether or not you will get to fill a given prescription still seems arbitrary and vaguely malicious.
5. The whole system rubs the insane list prices of healthcare in your face, almost continuously. For drugs, even small amounts of Internet searching points out how much cheaper they are basically anywhere else.
It’s really hard to be excited about the ACA.
(For added fun, and this isn’t really the ACA’s fault but it sure is a failure of affordability and sure seems like a massive failure of government: check out hims.com. Pulling a random example, “generic for Cialis” is at least 3x the price on hims.com as it is via GoodRx.)
And if you are relatively healthy and able to pay your regular doctor bills out of pocket, ACA made catastrophic insurance illegal (because of the minimum requirements). It's sort of like making car insurance require $50 copays to the mechanic. Sure, it's nice if you need an engine rebuild, but paying for all that makes the insurance a lot more expensive if you have a reliable car. There's no need for me to pay the doctor's bill and the insurance company's profit+overhead, I'd like to have the option to pay normal stuff myself and only insure something too large for me to pay.
This might not be quite what you want, but the ACA does allow for High Deductible Health Plans (HDHP). Those have consumers paying out of pocket for normal stuff, using a Health Savings Account (HSA).
Which are, nonetheless, rather impressively worse in basically all respects than the old medically underwritten individual plans. Other than the fact that anyone can get them, of course.
I’m not saying that the ACA was a bad law. I’m saying that a not-so-nerdy voter contemplating whether ACA is a great achievement of the Democratic Party is likely to be unimpressed.
Worse in some ways, better in others. The old individual plans usually had serious limits on coverage of pre-existing conditions. And they had lifetime coverage limits which could be exhausted by a single serious illness or injury.
While your complains are all true and the ACA is a mess compared to any developed country, it is still very exciting to have the ACA. For anyone who was barred from getting insurance before, it is the lifesaver, literally.
Compared to other countries, ACA isn't very good (to put it mildly) but compared to how the US was before it, it is the most wonderful improvement ever.
You can use a broker (free to you) and get the same (regulated) plans. If your situation is at all complicated you should definitely use one. Probably even for “simple “ cases.
It was a great thing for the people who most needed healthcare, but it priced me (young at the time and healthy) out of the market. I went from having cheap employer-sponsored healthcare to not being able to afford it (literally from less than 10% to ~50% of my paycheck).
I'm from the other side of the Atlantic. Do you mind explaining how that happened?
To give you some context: every country is different here but usually we have an almost free healthcare system covering everything for everybody (but sometimes you have to wait for a long time) and private healthcare that is more expensive, usually faster but not necessarily better.
Here in the UK my wife and I have between us spent a fair bit on private medical care over the last year - in the case of my wife for cataract operation on both eyes and in my case dental implants and related procedures.
What I find amusing about private health care in the UK is that in each case I have ever used it they make it clear that if something goes seriously wrong they will take you to an NHS hospital.
>What I find amusing about private health care in the UK is that in each case I have ever used it they make it clear that if something goes seriously wrong they will take you to an NHS hospital.
Privatize the winnings, socialize the losses, the "free market" working as intended.
Most of the prices going up for young and healthy people is just the math insurance companies have to do when they can't deny people and have to provide more coverage.
The part where we don't have the free healthcare system is mostly due to politicians being afraid of socialism or being afraid of raising taxes or both and a very strong medical lobby that doesn't want the salaries of doctors (very high over here) to drop.
And in that circumstance you are allowed to maintain your health insurance (COBRA) or buy a new plan ("qualifying life events," which also includes things like marriage and moving).
The comment you're responding to was alluding to if people could choose to not pay for health insurance until after they got injured or sick and then needed the benefits.
Can you explain this more to me? What does it mean to be unable to afford healthcare? As I understand, it is a law that you must have it, or you pay a fine to the IRS by your tax return. Do you really have no healthcare now?
Unable to afford healthcare is pretty straightforward, I think. My plan went from being a relatively small amount I would pay for peace of mind, to being a giant expense that would leave me destitute. As far as the fine, if it hadn't been revoked it would just come out of my tax return, so "paying" would have been no big deal. Yeah, still don't have healthcare. I realized I don't need it much and became more fatalistic after living without it.
That is an unbelievable story. Thank you to share. Stories like this keep me coming back to HN. It is crazy to think that you are gainfully employed, but cannot afford healthcare. I wish you good health!
Yeah, access. That’s what we were all freaking out about. Lack of access. That’s what makes our system different from the rest of the western world. Access. Glad we’re drowning in access.
With a simple majority, they can change the rules of the Senate so that a simple majority will get a bill passed. The filibuster is not in the Constitution.
The same reason the GOP didn't do anything about the border or gun rights when they had the chance. Why solve an issue when you can use it to get people to vote in the next election? Its a gamification of government. They are more concerned with keeping their jobs than governing.
Trump had the Wait in Mexico policy which was great. GOP never promised anything on gun rights, but Trump single-handedly banned bump stocks after the Las Vegas massacre which is more than Obama ever side on gun control.
> I have followed the issue closely, and I still don't understand what they Dems were going to do to keep abortion legal. If it's a state issue, how would the President change anything ? If it's national issue, why haven't they already done anything ?
They could pass a national law that protects a right to travel to other states for an abortion if your state bans them.
With the existence of the Senate filibuster, passing laws is very difficult even when you win. There are entire topics where significant reform is basically impossible, from anyone.
This is why America's supreme court is so important: One can argue that most federal level changes in the last 8 years cane from the court just changing their mind on what used to be settled precedent.
The filibuster has existed for a long time and yet Congress was still able to pass laws. I don’t give them a free pass for this, they need to learn to work together with the other party like we did in the past.
Do you live in the US? The first half of the Biden administration was hamstrung by Manchin, Sinema, and the Republicans. The Democrats had nominal control of the presidency and legislature but faced implacable resistance from the Republicans and these two nominally Democratic senators. Until the recent Supreme Court decision the US hasn't had a king.
Controlling the house doesn't mean anything. Any minority easily control legislation with the ability of an easy filibuster. You seem to forget trump was in for 4 years as well with many split Congresses. You can't blame democrats for all the bad things for that period when one party (minority at times) is actively working for the 1%
Because it was a critical fundraising topic for decades (on both sides, to be fair).
I don't exactly know how much of national politics is optimizing for fundraising rather than for making citizens' lives better, but it's clearly far too great.
Its asinine. Kamala outraised the shit out of Trump but it doesnt even freaking matter since there seems to be fundamental deficiencies in their overall approach or messaging or i dont know what the heck is going on anymore.
Campaigns should be publicly funded and not be raising collosal amounts of money. Either side will get tons of free tv space on popular shows and podcasts to get the word out, why does a candidate need to raise billions of dollars? Totally messed up
It’s not that divisive outside the political class.
60+% majorities have supported abortion as a right until near the end of the second trimester, and for the health of the mother after that (for 30+ years).
That's a popular misconception that has been shattered for well over a decade. That is nearly impossible with the filibuster, there was one slim window of 1 or 2 months in Obama's terms that they could have squeezed it in. Otherwise it's a fight to the death every time with the republicans in the Senate (filibuster)
The problem is the filibuster is a choice of the senate. They can at any time decide to do away with it, it’s not law and not a law of nature. But they don’t because it serves their interests to be able to throw their hands up in the air and not even have to try to pass legislation.
That's no something that is going to happen, -both- parties dearly love the filibuster, if it can just be done away with, against, precedence then it will become useless whenever a party gets the slimmest of majorities. I'm not sure how much longer it matters though, if this turns into a dictatorship
> "I would like to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies that result in women feeling compelled to get an abortion, or at least considering getting an abortion, particularly if we can reduce the number of teen pregnancies," Obama said.
> They did nothing to help with Women's healthcare.
What about Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act)? I think that helped many women secure healthcare, which is incredibly important during pregnancy, childbirth, and early childhood.
> keep abortion legal
As I understand, after the US Supreme Court cancelled (I don't know the correct term) protection abortion rights, many states automatically banned it (via "trigger" laws.) However, I read that many women are using video calls with out-of-state doctors to get prescriptions for (chemical) abortion pills. I wish I had more hard numbers on it, but the number of abortions has not fallen as much as people thought. Also, depending upon your income level and proximity to a neighboring state that still allows traditional (surgical) abortion, many women drive to the next state for the procedure.
I mean.. it is technically not inaccurate, but it fails to account for the remaining portion of the balance of power.
That said, there were very few moments, where a given party had house, senate and presidency at the same time. And most of those moments were divided almost evenly in half so breaking ranks had a big effect.
I think what I am saying it is a tired talking point.
Further, the democrats have been in power for 12/16 years, and multiple years controlling all 3 houses. They did nothing to help with Women's healthcare. I have followed the issue closely, and I still don't understand what they Dems were going to do to keep abortion legal. If it's a state issue, how would the President change anything ? If it's national issue, why haven't they already done anything ?