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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (17281)	4/23/2010 1:07:35 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

The problems were out of control medical costs for both individuals and the country and the difficulty of getting medical treatment for uninsurables. Except for that last part (and I suppose some Republicans addressed it as well, but I agree is was not a major theme or addressed in any prominent way), the Republicans did address those issues, and in fact those issues where part of their reason for opposing this bill. Poor excuse. Governance is tough. Poor excuse? Maybe. But a good reason. Giving that issue a lot of attention would have been foolish. "they proposed alternatives and argued the issues." Not cohesively and forcefully and comprehensively. Yes forcefully. Not cohesively because different Republicans had different ideas. I don't really consider that a strike against them. Not comprehensively, and I consider that a plus. I don't want comprehensive solutions from government here, or in most other areas. I didn't think you had the "do something" bias. I don't think I do. I have a strong "be constructive" bias. "Be constructive" seems to be very similar to "do something", with the difference being that you have to do something positive. Often the most positive thing you can do is nothing, or it can be to oppose change. Digging in was exactly the right thing to do. Had it worked I might have looked at it more charitably... <g> (I know you put a grin in but...) 1 - You complained of their tone and their lack of being constructive, and commented about how this made them look bad. That seems to be different than "the execution of this plan didn't get them the goal they wanted to get". 2 - It was more likely to work than just about anything else they could have done. Purely digging in with nothing else would have been less likely to work, but that wasn't what they did. They didn't just say no and shut up. They argued and debated, they proposed amendments, and they proposed other ideas, while they where digging in against this one. If you don't dig in, that would seem to imply that you either join in, or you engage offering up your acceptance for what tidbits you can get. I don't think either would have been good for the Republican's image, or for the results in terms of what gets passed. Yes if they engaged they may have made the final bill slightly better, but that tiny improvement wasn't likely to have been worth giving up all hope of stopping the plan. To make an extreme analogy for the point (recognizing that the stakes here aren't nearly as bad), if a powerful force tells you to surrender so it can kill 95% of your people, and let the other 5% go free, and you decide to fight against it, and every person in your group gets killed, in hindsight it might be considered better to have accepted the deal, but I don't think I'd find myself accepting it or recommending that others do. Once again its not like Obamacare is going to kill everyone. That's not the point of the analogy (as I'm sure you recognize but some others might not). All that's needed in for the analogy is for Obamacare to be bad, and for the deal Republicans could have gotten to not be much better.