…in order to find out what’s in it:
“It’s not top-notch coverage by any stretch, but it is better than no coverage,” said Neil Trautwein, a health care lobbyist at the National Retail Federation. “There’s slight irony, given the president’s repeated assertion that if you enjoy your coverage you can keep it, that this would take the coverage away from part-time employees until 2014.”
And these idiots think that health care is going to be a winning issue for them this fall?
Yes, they do. The people who got shafted are low-wage and part-time 7-Eleven workers who need benefits. This excludes kids just starting out. It’s adults who have fallen off the usual conveyor belt of career and been unable to crack out of the miserable service serf kind of job. That can be because they went to jail, they had a drug and alcohol problem or a divorce, they’ve got a (real) disability, or they’re recent immigrants with English issues.
But these people are guaranteed Democratic voters, no matter what. The Democrats could pass laws forcing them all to be tattooed with a Geburtsnummer and submit to random cavity searches — and they would still vote Democratic, because they don’t see any alternative at all. (And this is in part the Republican’s fault.) So they can be totally taken for granted.
The category that matters to Democrats this fall is white middle class college-age students, unmarried white women, divorced women, and those who have a relative working for the government. These are all constituencies which are large, cannot be taken completely for granted, but which lean Democratic and can be swayed by what the Democrats do. And they will all be swayed in the right direction by the perception that the Democrats have done something (1) noble and (2) ultimately to their benefit. The fact that the ex-con or 25-year-old big dumb kid or Honduran refugee whose English is the pits get bent over is of no real concern to them.
Even if it doesn’t affect them directly, the Republicans could still use it as campaign fodder, juxtaposing the story with a montage of clips of Obama lying “…if you like your plan, you can keep it.”
While I agree with you, Rand, I think the important word in that statement is could.
I wonder exactly who it is that will go around tearing-up peoples’ insurance policies (in the spirit of “If you like it, you can keep it” ha ha, sucker!)? Insurance is a state-controlled commodity, and if the state insurance commissioners refuse to do Obama’s dirty work, who will?