Joe Klein, in a parenthetical aside on the Oil FAIL, mentions Obama's successes and future plans:
The truth is, the Administration has a mixed record at the moment. It has achieved historic success with its economic responses to the Great Recession, including the stimulus package, and is about to win a big Financial Reform bill. Its health care plan is a step in the right direction that will need some fixing down the road (especially in the areas of tort reform and the need to shrink or eliminate Medicaid by moving recipients into market-oriented health care exchanges*). Its foreign policy has largely rectified the bombastic bellicosity of the Bush years...although there are real problems with the war in Afghanistan right now.
There you have it. Klein lets the cat out of the bag on the conventional wisdom in Versailles
-- where career "progressives" are fully paid up, sausage-wienie scarfing members, as their shameful suppression of single payer advocacy amply proves -- on incremental HCR changes.
Just what we need! Doubling down on neo-liberalism! Oh, but wait, wait....
You mean all that stuff the access bloggers and the Obama apologists and the career "progressives" were pushing about Medicaid expansion** being this great victory that might even lead to single payer down the road....
All that stuff was just another bait and switch operation?
Say it isn't so, Joe! Say it isn't so!
NOTE * For "market-oriented" read "rent-enabling."
NOTE ** What Obamacare's Medicaid expansion did was make it possible for people a bit more up the income ladder than the truly destitute to lose their houses to avoid being denied care. Medicaid is, of course, means- and income-tested. Yay!
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And we put these people into the insurance market
knowing that they won't be able to sustain paying premiums. The insurance industry will scarf up the premium but deny them care because the can't afford the co-pays for office visits and medicine, and their payment of premiums will lag sufficiently that they won't go to the doctor until the last minute. And that's a feature, not a bug.
It's incredibly brutal.
"Someone needs to point out that elephants produce infinitely more shit than donkeys." Brad Mays
Make money in your sleep!
Where do I short the CDOs containing these tranches?
I know you! You're one of the many bits of offal produced by the welfare state!
TimeWarner
reminder of why CNN and Time stink out loud.
The word you're looking for is
sociopathic.
As they don't know personally anyone who will die for this, what do they care? When there's no one left to mow their lawns or clerk in stores or fix their cars, they may notice, but they still won't care.
Elliot Lake
joke line great joke line! did you just make that up?
"single payer" total brain scrub. It awes me how such a just and feasible system continuously goes unacknowledged.
Fascist leaders often had very intelligent followers. It wasn't that all were lamely stupid.
Moral or emotional intelligence and imagination it has to do with I guess. And that damn cronyism. Amazing the potency of the group think koolaid. And the egoism of class superiority? Lack of empathy.
Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare. (Japanese proverb)
joke line
I think Atrios gave him that nick name. It comes from taking the K from his last name and putting it in his first name.