Even its supporters are struggling:
Wing and Young have set up quite a straw man, taking ObamaCare opponents’ most exaggerated fears and exaggerating them even further.
They set up a straw man on the other side of the debate as well. The article opens with the “concession” that “the Affordable Care Act isn’t perfect. . . . Like most laws, Obamacare never will be perfect.” (That “most” is a nice touch. One wonders if they have an example in mind of a law that is perfect.) But we don’t recall anyone promising that ObamaCare would be perfect. What Obama and his backers promised was that it would be very, very good–that it would provide “universal” (or nearly so) coverage while reducing costs and maintaining or improving the quality of medical care.
Now, however, Wing and Young dramatically scale back that promise, describing ObamaCare as an “ambitious reform effort meant to make a dent in the nearly 50 million Americans who currently lack health insurance.” Again, that’s a contradiction in terms: It was in fact “ambitious,” but it would not have been so if it meant only to “make a dent.”
This is all by way of setting a very low standard for evaluating ObamaCare, one that will ensure it will be judged a “success” as long as it doesn’t destroy America. But the meat of the article is actually an indictment of ObamaCare, at least if one applies a reasonable standard of asking whether on balance it is a good piece of legislation.
It’s not. It’s an awful piece of legislation, perhaps the worst in history. At least recent history. Which is no surprise, when you consider the manner in which it was passed.
Mickey Kaus, who supports a government health care plan, thinks the worst thing that can happen to the Republic is Immigration Reform.
Mr. Kaus, who leans liberal-Left but is famous for his iconoclasm, would admit to shortcomings of Obamacare and has talked about the promises made about it. His take is that we can survive the faults of the health care law, but Immigration Reform could wreck us as a country.
The thing about Immigration Reform is, yes, we are all immigrants or descendents of immigrants, even members of the First Nations — human beings did not originate in the Americas.
But because of “diversity” or “P.C.” or whatever, the rules that even my recent-generation immigrant parents adhered to are all out the window. The Melting Pot, embracing a common American Culture. My parents were in Francophone Canada over Canada Day (proximate to the U.S. 4th of July Independence Day) with a car that broken down, the Queen paying a visit that stoked certain feelings in that part of Canada, and without a hotel room for the night.
The hotel clerk asked my parents-with-the-blue-passports “So, what are you Americans celebrating on the 4’th of July, anyway?” Mom, without missing a beat and speaking in an accent “this thick” said, “4th of July is when we threw out the Eeeeenglish!”
“We threw out the English”, and this is coming from a person who had just come off the boat (actually, Mom came here in 1949, and her aunt had booked her passage in First Class on a trans-Atlantic propliner airplane — it took her years to pay this off at the prevailing 90 cents an hour wage of the late ’40s).
But today. Just an hour ago there was breaking news of rabbis being charged in a torture-kidnapping plot for hire scheme. And this plot involves all of PC-dom of womens rights wrapped up in the rights afforded to minority religious communities to have their own marriage customs.
Turns out that for Jewish persons observing the strict Orthodox traditions, if a woman wants a divorce (within that religion), her husband has to consent. Well, that goes against PC-dom right there — what century are we in? So what is alleged is that these rabbis accepted money from women in their congregation wanting a divorce, they or their “muscle” kidnapped the husbands, and tortured them with Tasers and cattle prods until they relented.
I share this story because it is “funny”, and it is funny because we usually don’t associate Jewish persons with this kind of conduct, and many persons of Jewish heritage have been at the forefront of feminism and other socially progressive movements, although there is a woman’s rights angle to this particular allegation.
But there is no more melting pot, and the formulation of insular communities with their own (different) law traditions is a given. Having immigrant parents, I am conflicted about this, but I see Mickey Kaus’s point that the good of our country depends on Conservatives and Republicans losing this fight, not that Obamacare is that good an idea but because they need to get ornery to oppose Immigration Reform, that is an existentially bad idea.
If I can amplify my remarks about “low-trust immigrant enclaves” undermining our high-trust American system, when David Kazinski turned in his brother Ted as being the Unabomber, it bothered Mom greatly, that of brother-turning-against brother.
Mom calls me up, “If you suspected your brother, would you turn him in?” “No, Mom.” “Well then, if your brother had done such a thing, what would you do.” “Ma, I would ‘beat him up’ — I wouldn’t turn him in, I would punish him myself.” After a long pause, Mom replies, “Ok, that’s fine.”
So Mom and I were no different than Mario Puzo’s fictional Sicillian immigrants or the rabbi’s charged in this scheme? On the other hand, mass immigration can introduce low-trust insularity and undermine what makes America so prosperous and a good place to live. It undermines what makes America so exceptional compared to other places in the world where low-trust insularity is the norm.
On reflecting on our conspiracy to (hypothetically) take the law into our own hands, I wondered what I would indeed do in such a situation. Maybe, given our understanding of mental illness, a person such as the Unabomber showing such signs as illness underlying his crimes, and our system of rights and protections, I would approach a private attorney, express my suspicions under protection of attorney-client privilege, and ask about options regarding forcible committment.
But David Kazinsky turned his maniac brother in without such hesitation. We live in a high-trust society (so far). Losing that would be a far greater loss than having to carry health insurance or pay a tax.
perhaps the worst in history
Ben Carson says it’s the worst thing since slavery, which must make it worse than Jim Crow, Wounded Knee, the internment of Japanese Americans, etc. Not a very high hurdle to clear!
A serious question: is the Affordable Care Act a worse law than the Medicare Act? If so, why?
Unlike slavery in the US in the 21st Century and Medicare; I cannot choose to not participate in ACA.
It’s actually much easier to not participate in Obamacare than not participate in Medicare. To not participate in Obamacare you just have to stay keep your income under the threshold for having to file a tax return ($9,750 for a single person in 2012). You can also join a sect with a religious objection to insurance, or a “recognized health care sharing ministry”. To not participate in Medicare you have to go a lifetime without any earned income whatsoever.
Again: what is objectionable in Obamacare that is not even more objectionable in Medicare?
They are both objectionable and none of the government’s goddamned business.
JIm, of course, misses the point. Perhaps medicare is objectionable too?
To not participate in Obamacare you just have to stay keep your income under the threshold for having to file a tax return ($9,750 for a single person in 2012). You can also join a sect with a religious objection to insurance, or a “recognized health care sharing ministry”. To not participate in Medicare you have to go a lifetime without any earned income whatsoever.
Well then, sounds like Ed has the right answer.
There are some who say that Medicare has problems of its own — such as the tens of trillions of dollars of unfunded encumbrance of people who have “paid into” Medicare and will be entitled to benefits.
And Medicare imposes price controls the burdens other parties — such as persons purchasing health insurance as individuals or small businesses or simply paying out of their own pocket for their care.
On the other hand, we “pay into” Medicare, both with payroll deduction from wages or self employment and with the Medicare Part B premiums whereas the Affordable Care Act is offering subsidies to persons out of General Revenue for incomes well above the official poverty line.
On the other, other hand, Medicare is an even bigger “3rd rail” of politics than Social Security because it is a bigger threat to solvency, in some ways a more important benefit in old age when everyone gets sick from something, and politically impossible to “touch” as Paul Ryan found out when he was depicted as pushing Granny in a wheelchair off a cliff.
Maybe that Medicare is not only unrepealable, it is untouchable and unmodifiable, such as postponing the age it kicks in (having been through this with parents and not far from this myself, something a disagree with), raising the “means tested” fees for Medicare B (been there, done that, and I strongly support raising Medicare B premiums on those who can afford to pay is order to preserve the solvency of Medicare), or the Paul Ryan “voucher plan”, of which I am skeptical but I have had a reasonably good experience with Medicare Advantage.
But just as some on the Right are spitting fire about the Affordable Care Act, a columnist at NRO has suggested, “chill, Affordable Care Act is just the ‘cherry on the top’ of a largely “socialized” health care system”, everyone who supports Obamacare is equally spitting fire and doesn’t seem to make a reasoned, sober case for its provisions. The decision is “gotcha” — the WW-II Memorial was not shut down in the 1995-6 shutdown because there was no WW-II Memorial at that time. True, but it doesn’t make the case apart from showing one’s intellectual superiority to persons one disagrees with.
The thing is that yes, Rand dispenses a lot of hard-core Conservative/Right/Libertarian opinions, and yes, a lot of right-wing snark mixed in whereas you, Jim, balance this with hard-core apology for every last thing this Administration in doing and with some left-ish snark mixed in.
Yeah, yeah, echo chamber, and free speech, and you have as much right to comment here as anyone else, and you are countering some glib right-wing talking points and need to “straighten” Rand and others out. But this is Rand’s place where he is generously supplying the bandwidth for you as well as me to take him to task on his opinions.
There are also some of us who “hang here” because we have conservative/libertarian leanings, are skeptical of the Obama Administration initiatives, but are necessarily knee-jerk toeing the Right Party line. I just don’t know what your intent is with respect to influencing the opinions of us fence-sitters. I have said this before, but a case for certain things, including, yes, Obamacare, could be made in a more careful and persuasive fashion.
“Liberal” statists using straw men? No kidding. If it weren’t for the Straw Man Argument and the Argument from Pity, “liberals” would have to just sit there silently. (And wouldn’t that be a wonderful world?*)
*http://www.thoseshirts.com/imagine.html
This is from 2009 but it’s still relevant.
http://elizabethprata.blogspot.com/2009/08/deconstructing-liberals-argument.html
The blogger could be commenting on recent posts by Jim, Chris Gerrib, and others of that Hive-minded ilk.
Jim
Actually to not participate in Medicare, you do the same thing the Amish do, it’s file a Form 4029, and permanently opt out, but,
you need to join a sect recognized before 1950.
Thanks for the correction. So both Obamacare and Medicare have religious exemptions.
Medicare and Obamacare have a lot in common, but in the ways that Obamacare upsets the right — compulsion, degree of government involvement, privacy of health information, cost — Medicare is much, much worse. And Medicare is very popular, so popular that in 2010 GOP candidates ran to the left of Democrats on Medicare, promising to restore Medicare spending that Democrats had cut. We’d all be better off if, instead of creating Obamacare, Congress had simply made everyone eligible for Medicare.
A Star Ledger story that begins as follows: “Hundreds of thousands of New Jerseyans opened the mail last week to find their health-insurance plan would no longer exist in 2014 because it does not cover all the essential benefits required by the Affordable Care Act.”
The story goes on to say the changes will hit more than 800,000 New Jerseyans.
Some defenders say it’s still an improvement, because these people will get more coverage. But that wasn’t the promise.
In 2009, President Obama put it this way:
“No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. If you like your health-care plan, you will be able to keep your health-care plan.”
Gee….another lie.