Democrats are another Republican Party.

[Kasz216]

Mr Khan said:

badgenome said:

Mr Khan said:

Bingo. He screwed up by even trying bipartisan leadership after the Republicans clearly indicated that they wanted nothing more than to be wreckers, to avert legislative agendas and then blame the Democrats for Republican intransigience

Should've tightened the leash in the Democratic party too, really. Then we'd have a real health care bill to resemble a real country's health care system, not this middle-of-the-road crap

Obama knew very well how fierce partisanship is in D.C., and despite his campaign trail promises to change the tone, poisoned the well immediately after taking office when he said, "Shut up. I won." He had no intention of working with Republicans, and the idea that he wasted all kinds of time trying to reach out to them is just fiction. Trying to get Olympia Snowe to vote for your agenda =/= bipartisanship.

To your second point: what would you have done exactly? Many moderates and Blue Dogs simply weren't going for it. It's no mystery why, especially now that everyone can see plain as day just how false were all the platitudes their leadership tried to feed them about how people would learn to love the bill and they'd be rewarded in the midterms. The Dems had to pull every trick in the book to just barely push any kind of bill through, and when they couldn't revist the bill in the Senate after Scott Brown's election, the whole enterprise was thought to be dead. You're simply not dealing with the political reality with which Obama was faced, and thus are not giving him enough credit.

Unrealistic and a little bitter on my part, i'll grant. I'm just mad that the Democrats blew their one chance to really get this done in a while, but of course now that it's through the door, we can work to fix it, and if all these Tea Party freshmen are true to their own cause, hopefully work within the system to cut health care costs (though they seem more determined to slash at benefits, but time will tell if they really get anywhere, or end up like the Contract With America of 94)

Here's a secret.  You can't lower healthcare costs with universal healthcare.  Insurance companies only make like a 7% profit margin.

Well unless you want to go after the pharmecutical companies and biotechnology companies.

Which is just stupid... because that would GREATLY reduce medical research spending (Us i currently the only one doing a big amount of research, being 84% of spending)... net result?  In a few years, the WORLD'S healthcare is worse off.  Even the show the West Wing knew that and they were about the farthest thing from Republican friendly as you could get.

Sure it's more even coverage... but it's just worse all around.  I'd rather live to 80 and someone else to 100, then for us both to die at 70.

Making health insurance more affordable is just a lie to pass something they wanted passed.  Or th ey just haven't looked at healthcare to hard to realize it.

Other countries can get away with it only because the US is doing the research... and even then  I wouldn't call their plans "affordable" as their isn't a time where the rising costs are a problem for said countries.

Though without new treatments I suppose rising costs would mostly stop.

The real sad thing is thinking about how much better everyones healthcare would be if NOBODY had universal healthcare.

We might have cures for things like cancer already.

 

We can't switch to a europeon style system without first figuring out how to stop the vast defunding that would happen in it's wake.  It can't just be "well the government will just have to spend more" because we've already seen that not work in Europe.

When facing budget problems due to increasing healthcare, government isn't going to increase money to make their budget problems worse... no matter how many people it will save in the long run.