JoeMemphis wrote: ↑Fri Aug 19, 2022 11:54 am
Obamacare was covered in the book. Go read it. Then you can speak to it yourself.
Okay, I just purchased Woodward's book, \health care reform (Obamacare). Price of Politics\. I got the Kindle version so I could do word searches. There's only 25 pages in the entire book where the word "ObamaCare" was mentioned. To be fair, on some of the pages, it was mentioned several times. But in a 496-page book, that's not very much, is it?
In the index, when you look up ObamaCare, it says "See health care reform". Here's what's in the index for Health care reform:
health care reform (Obamacare). See also Medicaid; Medicare and Biden working group, 116
Democratic leadership meeting on (January 14, 2010), 38–40
disagreement between Obama and top advisors regarding, 12
and George Washington University Speech (April 13, 2011), 99
malpractice reform, 55–56
Orszag on, 55–56
passage of Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, 46, 58
and pharmaceuticals industry, 124, 148
and Ryan plan, 82–87, 356
and Simpson-Bowles commission, 43, 59, 66–67
TRICARE, 201
and trigger mechanism, 248
unpopularity of, 56, 58
and White House staff/Republican leadership negotiations on debt ceiling crisis (July 2011), 261–62, 264, 265, 266–67, 269
While I AM going to read the book, I think it's clear that this was NOT a book about ObamaCare, which you said it was. It's not. It's just a really weak case of Appeal to Authority, where you threw out Bob Woodwards name, and said he had wrote a whole book about ObamaCare. That is false.
And you made several assertions that Obama did this all in secret, and the GOP was not involved at all at any point. That's patently false. Via
The Atlantic, The Real Story of ObamaCare:
Chairman Max Baucus, in the spring of 2009, signaled his desire to find a bipartisan compromise, working especially closely with Grassley, his dear friend and Republican counterpart, who had been deeply involved in crafting the Republican alternative to Clintoncare. Baucus and Grassley convened an informal group of three Democrats and three Republicans on the committee, which became known as the “Gang of Six.” They covered the parties’ ideological bases; the other GOPers were conservative Mike Enzi of Wyoming and moderate Olympia Snowe of Maine, and the Democrats were liberal Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico and moderate Kent Conrad of North Dakota.
Baucus very deliberately started the talks with a template that was the core of the 1993-4 Republican plan, built around an individual mandate and exchanges with private insurers—much to the chagrin of many Democrats and liberals who wanted, if not a single-payer system, at least one with a public insurance option. Through the summer, the Gang of Six engaged in detailed discussions and negotiations to turn a template into a plan. But as the summer wore along, it became clear that something had changed; both Grassley and Enzi began to signal that participation in the talks—and their demands for changes in the evolving plan—would not translate into a bipartisan agreement.
What became clear before September, when the talks fell apart, is that Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell had warned both Grassley and Enzi that their futures in the Senate would be much dimmer if they moved toward a deal with the Democrats that would produce legislation to be signed by Barack Obama. They both listened to their leader. An early embrace by both of the framework turned to shrill anti-reform rhetoric by Grassley—talking, for example, about death panels that would kill grandma—and statements by Enzi that he was not going to sign on to a deal. The talks, nonetheless, continued into September, and the emerging plan was at least accepted in its first major test by the third Republican Gang member, Olympia Snowe (even if she later joined every one of her colleagues to vote against the plan on the floor of the Senate.)
Obama could have moved earlier to blow the whistle on the faux negotiations; he did not, as he held out hope that a plan that was fundamentally built on Republican ideas would still, in the end, garner at least some Republican support. He and Senate Democratic leaders held their fire even as Grassley and Enzi, in the negotiations, fought for some serious changes in a plan that neither would ever consider supporting in the end. If Obama had, as conventional wisdom holds, jammed health reform through at the earliest opportunity, there would have been votes in the Senate Finance Committee in June or July of 2009, as there were in the House. Instead, the votes came significantly later.
To be sure, the extended negotiations via the Gang of Six made a big difference in the ultimate success of the reform, but for other reasons. When Republicans like Hatch and Grassley began to write op-eds and trash the individual mandate, which they had earlier championed, as unconstitutional and abominable, it convinced conservative Democrats in the Senate that every honest effort to engage Republicans in the reform effort had been tried and cynically rebuffed. So when the crucial votes came in the Senate, in late December 2009, Harry Reid succeeded in the near-impossible feat of getting all 60 Democrats, from Socialist Bernie Sanders and liberal Barbara Boxer to conservatives Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson, Mark Pryor, and Blanche Lincoln, to vote for cloture, to end the Republican filibuster, and to pass their version of the bill. All sixty were needed because every single Republican in the Senate voted against cloture and against the bill. Was this simply a matter of principle? The answer to that question was provided at a later point by Mitch McConnell, who made clear that the unified opposition was a ruthlessly pragmatic political tactic. He said, “It was absolutely critical that everybody be together because if the proponents of the bill were able to say it was bipartisan, it tended to convey to the public that this is O.K., they must have figured it out.”
But you pretend this never happened. The end of the article is telling:
Interestingly, even Obama has said that Obamacare was drawn from Romneycare, the Massachusetts plan championed by then-Governor Mitt Romney. But Romneycare was itself derived from the Chafee / Grassley / Durenberger / Hatch Republican alternative to the Clinton plan. The essence of Obamacare is a structure devised in 1993-94 by those Republican senators, then rejected and renounced in apocalyptic terms by Grassley and Hatch. (Durenberger, retired from the Senate and a genuine expert on health policy and reform, took a very different tack from outside the body.)
Thanks in part to the overheated rhetoric demonizing the plan, guerrilla efforts to undermine its implementation and disrupt the delivery of its services continue apace. Perhaps they will end as it becomes clear, in the aftermath of King v. Burwell, that the law in its fundamentals is not going away. It may help a bit if more Americans, including prominent commentators, stop repeating a false political narrative about the genesis of Obamacare.
Because, Joe, that's EXACTLY what you've been doing. You've been lying and putting forth a false narrative of what actually happened.
Cuz we didn't get much else on the Dem agenda after 2011. Just a lot of Grand Bargains, which were not very art of the deal deals. This is really mostly what Woodward deals with in Price of Politics; it barely mentions Obamacare. He also has some really bad things to say about Boner, err, Boehner, and Eric Cantor, too. Basically, everybody was asleep at the wheel. According to him, anyway. Without a little bit of soap for the opera, he couldn't sell more books.
