Democrats really do have a knack for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, don’t they? As loathsome as the Repub’s parroting of talking points with one voice is, they do manage to sound authoritative when they’re spewing their drivel. Can it be that no one on the Democratic side understands issue-framing? Do the Dems really have no one who can defend issues without devolving in 100 point, 10,000 footnote tomes? I’m not talking the Republican lockstep parade, but the Democrats are a fucking demolition derby.
One of the key goals of the Affordable Care Act was to establish minimum benefit levels for insurance plans. Companies have been cancelling these plans left and right and offering ACA-compliant plans with vastly increased premiums. But the “Landrieu bill”, offered by Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA), would force insurers to continue offering indefinitely these individual junk policies they’ve been suckering dummies into buying for years, which lets the insurers off the hook for being rapacious who would fleece your grandmother for every last nickel if it meant their stock prices would tick up a couple of points.
Someone in the “Democratic Party leadership” needs to point out that people with cheap, crappy policies are basically uninsured – and letting them carry on is little different from letting the uninsured carry on. Maybe letting the junk plans continue, to calm the immediate shitstorm, will pay off in the long run, after people start noticing who’s getting what and who ain’t, and competition starts to kick in for reals. I dunno, it’s all so hard to wrap my head around with all the talking noise. Could it be that with all the resistance and sabotage having limited competition, there aren’t actually good, reasonably priced plans available yet to nearly enough people…? The death-twitches of zombie insurers? I DON’T KNOW! ARGGHH! I. DON’T. KNOW!
What we have here is another catastrophic symptom of having a political spectrum that mostly just has representatives from the center to the far-right. You’ve got one party that almost entirely just represents the right-wing fringe, and even the theocrats and free-market extremists can agree on dismantling the welfare state completely, and you’ve got another party that ranges from the rare European-style socialist to center-rightists on both social and economic issues to people who’d be conservative Republicans even today if not for the Republicans’ extremism on some issue or another.
Maybe what this country needs is for some transformational fucking president to give us a primetime, golden-tongued, straight-shootin’ fireside in-service. Better than tucking himself away in tense times while Repugs pound away, defining the issue as their own.
Nothing about this has anything to do with the Duraflame® corporation
Perfectly said