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Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Bending the cost curve was part of it. But since the days of Ted Kennedy seeking a HC bill, the primary aim was getting HC to those who couldn't afford it. A huge percentage of that category is people who could not make any meaningful payment toward it. So they were near entirely subsidized.
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Your claim was that the Democrats "focus" on the poor. That claim was wrong. What you say here doesn't help.
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If we could have focused primarily on lowering premiums for people able to pay something and willing or already doing so, without using those dollars to subsidize care for people paying nothing, you could have put a lot of money back in working middle class peoples' pockets or given them far more bang for their HC dollar.
Now, of course, there are social reasons not to do this. But the question at hand was whether the ACA was primarily aimed at helping the middle class. I think it was secondarily aimed at helping them.
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The reason that healthcare is one of the leading issues for Democrats is not because they are consumed by a burning passion to redistribute to the poor, something you ordinarily say they are too cynically focused on serving corporate masters to do, but because the issue affects so many people in the middle class. Indeed, guaranteeing that everyone has coverage is a guarantee that means a lot to the middle class, because it removes the threat of becoming uninsured.
But it is delightful to hear you identify a real difference between the two parties, something you are usually hellbent on ignoring. Democrats have a real commitment to trying to use the government to improve the lives of all citizens, and Republicans don't. I feel you.
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That's your view. I think the labor market changes afoot, which I mentioned, were #1, then the economic crisis was #2, then inequality caused by policy reactions to the financial crisis was #3, then the environment was #4, then HC was #5.
You don't get to dictate what is the most important policy issue at any given time. People disagree about that endlessly. You may think HC was in Obama's term. Others, like me, think different issues were more important.
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It's not my subjective view of what mattered, it's a objectively realistic view of what the two parties spend their time fighting about. In retrospect, pandemic readiness was clearly more important than State Department email security, but our late understanding doesn't change what was actually fought about at the time.
