Topic A: What does the Supreme Court’s health-care decision mean?
Published: June 28
RACHEL MADDOW
Political commentator and host of MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show”
The policy upheld in Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling is a rough approximation of the Republican Party’s 1993 federal proposal for insurance reform and of then-Gov. Mitt Romney’s bipartisan insurance reforms in Massachusetts five years ago. It’s fun to denounce it as socialism or the “end of America” or whatever, but in reality the Affordable Care Act is a small-c conservative reform that preserves the private insurance system. Without reform, that system has produced outcomes that no one should have been satisfied with — compared with other well-off industrialized countries, we’ve been getting lousy outcomes, for twice the price, with tens of millions of Americans left out of the system altogether. Scuttling Medicare isn’t going to fix that system, nor is doing nothing. But these reforms might. Beyond the bloodthirsty partisanship that is so desperate to deny this president anything that looks like a victory, I think history will view this ruling, and this policy, as simple affirmations that the country can and ought to use policy to try to come up with practical solutions to even our big, complicated problems.
Other contributors include Donna Brazile, Howard Dean, Tom Daschle, Drew Altman, Neera Tanden, Dan Schnur, Karen Ignagni, Tony Fratto, and Douglas Schoen.
As usual, Rachel’s gone to the heart of the matter. I spent 33 years in the medical-insurance industry and watched bad outcomes multiply as the system became increasingly convoluted. The Affordable Health Care Act is as good as we’ll get until a popular WHITE President encourages single-payer or Medicare-expansion.
I’ve run out of ideas to appropriately describe the prevalence of Republican disdain for the American progressive culture which, incidentally, is the majority of the population moving the country forward. This said, as the Healthcare constitutionality ruling has been passed down and the extreme political right gears up its (hopefully) final, desperate fear machinery to keep the country terrified of its own inevitable evolution away from the right, I gotta say it’s mold spores. We’ve got to blame something, no? I think if this phenomenon would have been discovered and fixed decades ago, the power elite of the Republican Party would have long ago managed to keep clean their coffee pots and makers, therefore reducing their brains being invaded by the same mold spores, I’m assuming, that may or may not have contributed to the Salem Witch Trial “burn her because she’s crazy” nonsense of history. And while we’re on this subject, why don’t we take back that condescending word–for so long used against women–”hysteric”, and attach it to the power white male construct of the right wing that is furiously fighting to choke out the possibility of a bright American future. “Douchebags” is dismissive and inadequate. And “dangerous” isn’t used enough.
Damon Ferrell Marbut
Author, Awake in the Mad World