Tag: failure

Robert Reich: Why the New Healthcare Law Should Have Been Based on Medicare (And What Democrats Should Have Learned By Now)

robertreich:

So what do Obama and the Democrats do if the individual mandate in the new health care law gets struck down by the Supreme Court?

Immediately propose what they should have proposed right from the start — universal health care based on Medicare for all, financed by payroll taxes. The public will be behind them, as will the courts.

This is utterly wrong on all counts. It utterly and willfully ignores the year of political sausage making that only managed to barely result in a marginally workable plan that squeaked by under reconciliation rules. The law enacting Reich’s paragraph couldn’t have passed a majority of Democrats at the time, and you’ll recall there were commanding majorities in both houses of Congress then. Aren’t now. And this wouldn’t even see the floor, no matter how passionately Obama or Bernie Sanders or Nancy Pelosi or Jesus Christ Himself argued for it.

What, then, needs to happen if the mandate section of the ACA is struck down? The death spiral needs to happen is what. The ACA without a mandate will destroy the private insurance companies within a decade. But,long before that happens, when the moment arrives that the mega-rich can no longer afford premiums, the party in power on that day, whichever that may be, will be forced to enact Medicare for all. Immediately. Not because they want to, but because it will be the only way forward. And that is the one and only way it ever gets passed. Not through rousing speeches or acting tough or with anything less than a 70-80 seat majority in the Senate and a few hundred in the House coupled to a far more progressive Democratic President than is currently serving.

And until the moment that we as citizens, they the politicians, they the DCCC (and like groups that run the party, its messaging, goals, and determine its candidates), and especially they in the form of the broader media internalize this and begin to act on it accordingly, we and they will fail. Period.

Robert Reich: Why the New Healthcare Law Should Have Been Based on Medicare (And What Democrats Should Have Learned By Now)

This Is Who We Are

Another example of why we fail:

As it happens, Ford, the struggling American car company (in certain ways, probably more centrally “American” to most citizens than even longtime industrial titan GM, nay “The General”), has a new model of the Fiesta coming out that seats five (well, five people the size of Winona Ryder, anyway) and gets 65 mpg. You’re saying “wow, they’ve finally gotten the message and are going to deliver ‘Mericans a car that is relatively inexpensive and gas efficient.”

Except that you’d be wrong. Only selling that car in Europe. You see, it runs on diesel. Ford doesn’t think it can sell enough of the engines (they put the break-even number at 350,000/yr) to warrant building an engine plant (in Mexico, natch); the dollar is just too much of a banana republic currency to merit the importation of the engines/cars from England where they’re made.

All quite sensible. Except that Ford is going to go out of business (at least as we know it today) with this model. Time to bet the company, gentlemen. You are not going to be in a better position to do so next week or next year. As the article notes, VW and Mercedes are investing heavily in clean diesel, as is Nissan. They’ll be first to market in the US, and it is they that will reap the rewards. Create your market. Engage in risk. Figure out a way to sell those 350,000 motors. Otherwise you’ll be a division of Tata motors before you know it.

It seems clear now that it will take the utter obliteration of the US auto industry to save the US auto industry. And, in the not-too-distant future, Silicon Valley will be more associated with cars than Detroit. That’s where people are taking the chances, after all.