Reply #29: But you're still trying to roll out the ole "Mission Accomplished" banner

[TheKentuckian]

The comparison is fairly apt. Saying this is progress would be very much like rewarding the folks the profited from slavery and maintained jim crow. I don't get the contrasts to efforts like Social Security, Medicare, and/or civil rights. All those lifts may well have been incremental but it is hard to argue that Social Security started by reinforcing elderly poverty or the precursor civil rights bills doubled down on jim crow rather than doing too little to reverse it.

This bill willfully avoids root causes and mostly in an effort to maintain the sacred cows of the employer based system, maintaining industry profit centers, and state based regulation plus maintaining an insane anti-trust exemption for the industry that was willfully scrubbed by the Senate.

Covering the 32 million is great except most of these people aren't going to really get helped because we lost track of the inarguable fact that most people don't have coverage because it is unaffordable for them. Single wagers from as little as a little over $8/hr up to realistically at least $18/hr are going to get hammered even with the subsidies. Failing to deal with individual affordability means thin ice for sure.

The idea that costs are ok even for larger employers has also made the thing a clusterfuck because now that is the baseline being drawn for cost but lower wage earners are increasingly getting choked out for a policy they can't real afford to use even if they can keep on the wheel with the premiums.

Also, obligation is not a rest stop on the way to a right. We got off way on the wrong track and lost sight of quality, affordable healthcare for every American and got stuck on people showing up at the ER and costing policy holders money, involving "stakeholders", and not rocking the boat.

This is the same king of progress Esau made by trading away his birthright for a bowl of Jacob's stew aka hollow and very, very, very short lived.