Quote:
Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy
Obama worked to have his lasting legacy be healthcare, which against a lot of bad faith obstruction was very difficult. That actually had a very substantial impact on real incomes for a large swath of people, and created a large number of good jobs dispersed across the country in healthcare.
My suspicion is the next Democrat trying to find a legacy is going to focus either on wages or education.
Dems won't get more than one big move per president unless they get a much larger portion of the house and senate than I think is possible in the next decade and a half.
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That's true. Obamacare was a Big Idea. And it did create a number of jobs. That was a very "old school Democrat" move on his part.
But he had to get the support of the insurance industry to get it done. He preferred single payer, but that debate had to be avoided. Couldn't fight the insurers. So, despite there being numerous good economic arguments for single payer (far more than for Obamacare), and everyone knowing we will eventually have single payer and so might as well get it done sooner rather than later, we have the half-step of Obamacare.
I get it. Politics is the art of the possible.
And I understand we can't just launch into bold things because of the law of unintended consequences. But the corporate strangleholds on both parties are so strong that even a master advocate like Obama understood he couldn't engage the debate we should have had:
"HC is taking too much out of the economy and not giving enough back. As a sector, it's too large, too inefficient, and it starves other sectors to our detriment. It's time consider a single payer system."
You might say Obamacare was an incremental step toward single payer, a trojan horse bringing "socialized medicine," as the right called it. Maybe that's true. Maybe that was brilliance on Obama's part. Maybe the public is too stupid to have the frank arguments put before it.
Or maybe we can't do anything on a reasonable time table in this country because sclerotic corporations spend ungodly sums of money to protect their revenue streams, inhibiting good policy and innovation in almost every area except tech.
