I believe it can be fairly said that the hatred of Obamacare is mostly hate for Medicaid. They just can’t quite say it in those terms and more than a few are not really conscious that’s their goal with all the Obamacare hate.
1 Like
Great work, Alice Ollstein. Thank you.
10 Likes
This issue is about to become personal for me.
My daughter in law lives in Michigan. She has been incapacitated by a liver malfunction as a result of an issue of abuse of an OTC drug that happened 10 years ago. She’s not a candidate for a liver transplant at this time, but is unable to hold down a job because of the symptoms and actions of this malfunction.
Some would look at her and say she doesn’t need help. Will she be one of those, of which the Wisconsin DHS spokeperson said,
… the waiver will “help more people move from government dependence to true independence by encouraging work and providing incentives for healthy lifestyles.” They added that they are “cautiously optimistic” about winning approval from CMS.
6 Likes
I’m encouraging the active Democratic candidate for Governor of Wisconsin to show up at a town festival this weekend and march with Indivisible and the rest of the Democratic representation this weekend. He’s already making the rounds throughout the State. Walker has gotta go.
@pluckyinky, if a candidate insists upon running against 45 in any subsequent election, they will lose. No question. They need to run against specifics in the GOP agenda and make it stick. Run the footage of your GOP representation saying that they voted for repealing ACA and in favor of AHCA. Run the footage of their support of 45 after last weekend. Run on the issues. Forget the personalities. And don’t be nice about it - the Dems lost the last election on that go low-go high nonsense. We need to become the freight train, the avalanche that takes these idiots out of office.
3 Likes
It’s $$$$$. Only $$$$$$.
@19tibekius6, as a practicing Christian, we have no one to blame for ourselves. Christians in general have allowed the GOP to co-opt Christianity, starting with Falwell and Reed, and didn’t fight to take it back before losing the connection entirely.
It would be nice if Dem candidates would point out the inconsistencies between the GOP and actual Christian doctrine, but that may fly in the face of all the other religious doctrines the Dems are trying to include in the big tent. Thing is, we all benefit, Christian, Jew, Muslim, when we take care of each other. And that’s the point that needs to be made, loudly.
9 Likes
Ah yes, the generally underreported malefeasance that is “conservatism.”
The GOP: Natural born killers.
With the bonus of knowing said people are cheering it on.
3 Likes
It’s good to know that being a white Christian male is the preferred and legislated way to go in this country. I should be rich any day now.
I’m still waiting.
People always stay home and people always vote third party. Grousing about that is like grousing about bad weather. The point is to find candidates who get people to the polls, and who make third party votes insignificant – which they should be, and generally are.
It’s too bad we don’t have a body politic that can grasp that whole social contract thing, or look a few feet beyond their own navels so as to grasp the obvious about what happens when they prefer to be entertained rather than voting for their community, state, whatever.
Yeah, I know, straight from the Planet Cornball, but I can’t help myself.
4 Likes
Yes it’s a pity, but that’s yet another political fact of life. It has to be given consideration too.
It’s the stupid vote, as Bill Clinton used to call it.
1 Like
Congress can then refuse to fund anything the traitor wants to do.
I do not wish either blindness or bad teeth on anyone, but, from what I have been reading about Medicaid, it provides pretty good coverage for vision and dental, coverage that most group policies do not cover without the purchase a supplement. Knowing the high intellectual quality of this blog’s readers, perhaps someone could provide a link to a site that addresses what appears to be the more comprehensive nature of Medicaid, as opposed to private or group policies. This piece by Nancy LeTourneau is what really got me thinking. http://washingtonmonthly.com/2017/08/15/a-next-step-toward-universal-health-care-medicaid-for-more/ I suspect that one of the arguments for Medicaid reductions is that “they” get their coverage for free, and “we” have to pay for ours.
3 Likes
Agreed, but, from what I observe, those folks who would be deprived of health-care coverage don’t even think about things like this until after they find out that they need care and can’t pay for it. The ones I know never connect their lack of health insurance with whom they vote for. Sad but true.
1 Like
Price’s smirk is disgusting.
5 Likes
Yours is an eloquent explanation of the implications of gutting Medicaid. However, in my humble opinion, calling voters who endorse the cuts “patient” and “misinformed” is just too kind.
There’s another angle here, too, besides the racist and prosperity-gospel ones. It’s perhaps minor compared to the above reasons but definitely there.
It’s the idea that people get sick because of their moral state. Basically, divine retribution for real or imagined sins. It’s not just germ-theory rejecting bible literalists who have these beliefs, either. It drove me nuts when I had cancer back in the eighties, that so many patients I talked to, mentally or physically clutching a couple of then-bestselling books on the subject, thought that they weren’t visualizing “popping cancer bubbles” enough or that they must have been depressed because they retired too early or because they didn’t retire soon enough. The books were about using mental state as a cure, not a cause, but that’s not the lesson these patients took. I mean, of course if you eat in ways that make you feel better and move in ways that make you feel better, and arrange your life in ways that make you feel better, of course you’re going to feel better. Of course if you have an optimistic outlook you are more likely to seek out and to stick to difficult treatments. But this whole “thinking bad thoughts” as a mechanism for causing disease is vastly overblown and often outright wrong.
GOP policies toward the sick as well as to poverty fit easily into this misconception. There is a vicious urge to punish the weak-willed or the lazy, to make them work, to keep out the druggies and the undeserving. (That the very qualities they ascribe to a mythical urban underclass happen to align with their conception of race is not a coincidence, but they’d be the first to tell you it is.) You don’t need healthcare if you don’t get sick and you don’t get sick if you don’t deserve it.
It’s not just the right or evangelicals of a certain stripe or the GOP who hold these beliefs, by the way. Everyone wants to be reassured that they won’t be stricken with whatever disease their neighbor gets. Of course there are many conditions that you can control or prevent with diet and exercise and vaccinations and so on, ones that can be caught early with screening, ones that can be treated with modern procedures. But there’s still the John Mackey faction claiming people don’t need a backstop, they jjust need to shop at the right stores and eat the right foods, and if they live their lives as god or karma intended, they will be rewarded.
Picking winners and losers in the healthcare debate, what the GOP is obviously trying to do here, is the antithesis of what health insurance actually is. Don’t let them get away with this corruption of the idea, people.
/high horse
3 Likes
How could any sentient person possibly have believed that Trump would be “humbled by his responsibility?” Judis is even more clueless than I thought. Don’t understand why JM keeps him around.
2 Likes
Your friendly neighborhood GOP, hard at work…
2 Likes
I’m about as “cynical left-wing internet commenter” as it gets, cynicism being totally appropriate these days, but I’ll say this about that passage from John Judis: I would have said almost exactly the same thing.
Except instead of believing or hoping that Trump would somehow grow into the job, I was worried that he would appear to grow into the job. I’m not saying there’s a good principled defense of the Muslim ban, or the transgender ban, or the wall, or nuclear brinksmanship, or statue fetishism… but there are more effective defenses, including the ones where the only difference is he doesn’t use Twitter.
Susan Sarandon and any other supposedly liberal millionaire who shrugged at Trump and said, “oh well, if he gets elected it’ll heighten the contradictions” can go to hell. But as insanely dangerous as Trump at 120% of his potential stupidity and wickedness is, it may be safer in the long run than Trump operating at 95%. I don’t harbor any fantasies about a snap impeachment, but I do know that a surly fourth-grader could have repealed Obamacare with a Republican Congress to help him, and yet Trump somehow failed.
I’m all for being exposed to “alternative viewpoints,” although I don’t think TPM or any other given site needs to host multiple perspectives themselves. By that standard, very little of what I’ve read from Judis (that I can remember) feels like an ideological stretch from the rest of this site. Just my opinion.
2 Likes
Everyone always has a few cells in their body that have mutated. Mostly they get taken care of by the immune system or die before they can do any harm. When the immune system misses them and they multiply, you don’t ignore them.
2 Likes