| richardhutnik said: One of the fallouts of not having a universal safety net and welfare system, with a lot of answering for consequences, is that tort reform gets taken out of the equation. Because you run an adversarial system, where if you lose, you suffer, people will use the courts as justice. The courts act as a bounty system and exert fines on individuals to deter bad behavior. And individuals are rewarded by getting these paydays, because it encouraged them to hunt down corruption, and if harmed by it, make the evil doers pay. Unless there is a system by which individuals can be taken care of, if they are harmed by bad consequences, you will be running this bounty system. In regards to Obamacare, it isn't what Obama ran on. The original idea was to have a government run insurance program that people could be part of. Well, out came opposition from the Republican side, and the insurance industry, so Obama adopted the GOP alternative, proposed by the Heritage Foundation, and others (heck even Romney ran it), to end up regulating the insurance industry with tighter requirements, and also mandating people pay for insurance, or have coverage some way. |
It doesn't have to get taken out of the equation, and Democrats certainly could have included it when they were overhauling the entire system (overhauling it to make it the status quo on steroids, that is). Only the Democrats didn't include it in the "Affordable" Care Act because, as Howard Dean said, they were scared of pissing off lawyers.
Obamacare isn't just not what Obama ran on, it's what Hillary Clinton was running on and he was running against. Yet he went with it anyway. It was stupid then, it was stupid when the Heritage Foundation came up with it, and it remains stupid.
