“This poo-poos the AM talk radio theme that Obamacare was specifically designed to make Americans demand single payer.
Its amazing how what they say gets repeated here over and over.”
While it has some obvious holes, the theme is seductive. This whole thing has gone and continues to go down in a way which was truly unbelievably incompetent...or nefariously clever. It is truly difficult to see people who can accomplish anything mess things up SO badly. While it was generally understood that this was a complicated endeavor, who doesn’t substantially test a program before releasing it as your signature achievement? Who goes ahead and releases it after it failing even the most basic tests...having forced millions to use it and be forced to recognize its failure? Who puts, with nomair cover, a hundred thousand soldiers in armored vehicles on a road across a plain with landlines on both sides during a war? (OK, that last was Sadaam, not Barak)
They did, after all, knowingly do many devious things along the way, like their “grandfathering” clause while knowing that it was largely inapplicable and for good measure making nearly universally inapplicable. That they inserted the cutout for unions shows they had just that in mind.
So how could they then turn around and be somspectacularly inept? The simplest explanation is that they couldn’t and it was a trick...but it seems that they in fact could.
Comprehensive Health care reform was a major campaign promise to the lib base so Obama had to get something passed into law to get them to get out the 2012 vote, and it worked quite well in swing states esp with Hispanics.
Sure they wanted a single payer public plan, but the dynamics of GOP naturally attacking anything Dems passed was what Obama needed to get his base in line behind him (’get out the vote’).
So Obama just had to pass whatever he could to make it work(get re-elected).
None of this meant they could run anything this big anymore than GOP could.(As I said, look what a mess Iraq was)
Obama’s position is simple now.
Even if Dems get beat up in midterms as this disaster unfolds he can still stand with Obamacare and characterize the calls for repeal as ‘GOPs want to take away your health care’
So GOP has a great chance to use Dems own weapons against them, repeat and repeat :"Obamacare took away your health care"