you know the Democratic Party has a problem.
From his going away interview (almost) in New York Magazine (italics added)(h/t @ByronYork):
You think Obama overinterpreted his mandate with health care?
The problem with health care is this: Health care is enormously important to people. When you tell them that you’re going to extend health care to people who don’t now have it, they don’t see how you can do that without hurting them. So I think he underestimated, as did Clinton, the sensitivity of people to what they see as an effort to make them share the health care with poor people.
I think we paid a terrible price for health care. I would not have pushed it as hard. As a matter of fact, after Scott Brown won, I suggested going back. I would have started with financial reform but certainly not health care.
And if you’d done it with that sequencing, you could have still gotten health care before 2012?
I’m not sure, but I think you could have gotten some pieces of it. And yeah, if we’d held the House, we could have gotten it.
Barney has it pretty much correct here. There could have been health care reform if Obama started with points of agreement, accepted small gains, and worked with Republicans.
Instead, Obama flush with victory in 2008 and nursing a massive ego and misplaced sense of history, took an “I won” attitude just like on the Stimulus Plan. Except that on Obamacare, he couldn’t even pick up the Republican stragglers he picked up on Stimulus (Arelen Specter defected shortly after Stimulus).
It was a trap of Obama’s and the Democrat’s own making. I noted just over two weeks before Obamacare passed in March 2010:
The health care fight has drained the Obama administration and agenda, and the entire Democratic Party. Right now, the Democrats are pushing forward only because they are in too deep. Having continued the battle despite the lack of popular support, Democrats have left themselves no way out.
There is no path to victory for Democrats in this battle. To fail to pass “something” will be a mortal blow to Obama’s prestige; to pass “something” will be a mortal blow to Democrats in Congress in the November elections.
For Democrats, health care defeat has become defeat, and health care victory has become defeat.
If only the Democrats had listened to the voters of Massachusetts in January 2010. And to Barney Frank.
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And they actually should’ve known this from HillaryCare in the first Clinton term and the 1994 election results.
When Barney Frank gets something right, you know you’re in deep do-do.
Whatever works for a nation works. I do not see many peeps in western nations falling dead in the streets. However the number of elderly unclaimed bodies in French morgues after the Big Heat Wave a few years ago is a canary.
Something is not right -but their hospitals are excellent & health care pretty good.
For America -it is now what you can afford.
It is not 1994 with an unlimited financial horizon -which may have pulled hillarycare by.
Why not ask some of these recently unearthed superhousewives who astutely manage family budgets?
Put them in charge & apparently all will be solved. Or at least set them free so they can contribute to the discussion.
That is an interesting statement to me. It implies that, once again, he wasn’t interested in working with Republicans on health insurance reform; instead he was worried that the Democrats were losing support and he wanted to shore up that support before again heading into health insurance reform without Republicans.
So, while he was correct that proceeding with Obamacare in 2010 was bad; he was still focused on the ends and not the means.
This is a prime example of why I like to see one party controlling the White House and another controlling (an evenly divided) Congress.
Isn’t Barney Frank technically an Independent and not a Dem? LOL.
Are you suggesting he’s a switch-hitter…?!?!?
Shame!!! He is true to his man.
I think maybe you were thinking of Bernie Sanders, a Socialist.
Ah, my mistake. Thanks.
It was a trap of Obama’s and the Democrat’s own making.
A trap, yes, but for whom? Barring the Supreme Court throwing the whole thing out, the likelihood of ObamaCare staying the law of the land is extremely high. Even scenarios where the Supreme Court throws out the mandate but leaves the remainder of the law intact tend to result in keeping all the bad effects on liberty but financed with even larger deficits.
Bottom line, barring a complete reversal by the Supreme Court, well, I’ll quote Bill Paxton, “It’s game over, man, game over”.
Barney’s analysis is dead on. Health care is vital to people and few are stupid enough to swallow that you could expand easy access to 30 million or more people while not intruding on existing coverages or increasing costs. The unpopularity of Obamacare was utterly predictable after the experience with Hillarycare.
Still, I’m not sure Barney shared this insight in 2009-10, much less pressed it. His comments are likely in the category of “if only they listened to me.”
Are you implying that a politician might LIE about their position on legislations in the past? Especially if said LIE might make themselves look more knowledgable?
I’m shocked. Shocked.
OT
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2012/04/we-are-all-george-zimmerman.html?
Amen
Bwany also acknowledged that the MASSIVE market distortions by the Federal government were maaaa-by not the best idea, either, and miiiiiiii-ght have caused some trouble in the…you know…economy.
Could be he’s having trouble keeping the lies straight.
Still the $64,000 question, was Bill Clinton serious when he advised them to go ahead and pass the bill? He did not seriously believe he lost the House because he failed to pass the bill.
He was caught campaigning in PA for the Dem primary for Attorney General. Get that? A former President came out to campaign against one of the first guys to endorse Obama over Hillary. Bill has a looooooooong memory, lol.
Here is a link to that story. It was right in my area too. I would have gone to see that spectacle.
Meanwhile, Axelrod et al., have been stumping for my former Congressman Patrick Murphy who not only endorsed Obama, he led the effort to repeal Clinton’s Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell. Murphy has never tried a case in PA but he wants to be Attorney General. If I had known I might have pulled an Operation Chaos maneuver just to vote against Murphy in this primary.
They set up this campaign appearance right in Murphy’s neighborhood too. Kaine(who Clinton endorsed) claimed she found Clinton’s phone number on Bill’s website. There is no phone number on the website. He cooked up this endorsement. I think it is a priceless story.
Everyone is thinking Wisconsin . I have pegged PA as the canary. Look forward to your posts on PA .
Amazing. Frank gets it right as the heads for the door.
Frank can say it because he’s retiring from his congressional district. At least I thought he was retiring when his current term is up.
Frank’s a fraud, but that’s nothing new. This radical wanted a single-payer system. He wanted something even more radical than Obamacare.
And now he’s engaged in revisionist history.
Ok . It looks like a bad bill full stop even if it is /is not Constitutional.
However in 3 years i have not seen an alternative.
The issue is $$$ -though I see the number of dislikes I got upthread suggests you guys can’t get to grips with this. Hello -to be a fiscal conservative means acknowledging the numbers.
SuperhousewiFe Mrs Robinson sees this & decides that she needs more pie ( get a job ) a cheaper pie (change habits ) or either cut smaller slices for her family or some get none at all. (survival of the best prospects )..
So The challenge is to come up with something . Can’t just criticize . Conservatism means to conserve – it does not mean never change .
Funny thing about hubris, it’s only evident when using 20/20 hindsight.
Romney might not be the most effective messenger about repealing Obamacare, but 527 groups (or whatever their legal status number is now) can run ads to prop up Senate and House candidates, and build a high “floor” for Romney.
It turns out elections really *do* have consequences.
Except that Frank DIDN’T get it right, as he is now engaging in revisionist history.
Frank actually wanted to shove something even MORE radical down the nation’s throat — a single-payer fascist monopoly. He wanted to take EVERYBODY’S private plan away and force everybody into a government run system. And it’s all on film.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3BS4C9el98
So for him to claim that he wanted to reverse course is not only disengenuous, it’s an outright lie. He wanted to spring in the other direction — full bore radical.
[…] blogosphere who are grabbing onto the first Barney quote and proclaiming Barney a “voice of reason,” but we should be careful and read the entire interview. Barney Frank is still as radical as […]
Barney Frank was right to regret ObamaCare but for the wrong reason. His given reason is just liberal spin, i.e. the selfish voters are too cheap and stingy to care for the poor. As always, the liberal agenda item is never at fault, Obama is blameless it’s the uncaring majority who needs to be tricked into what we determine is good for the country. Where does the money come from is the red herring Frank wants you to look for.
The real reason has only tangentially do to where the money comes from. The real reason is who are the 15 million that were lacking health insurance in the first place in 2007/2008 when the whole thing was being sold… Do any of you really think that the 12 or 13 million illegal aliens in this country had health insurance?
IF you are a liberal, honestly answer the question, NO they did not and not only that they typically stiffed the emergency room operators on payment. Now where do you suppose that money had to be made up? You think doctors and nurses work for nothing? You think the utility companies provide phone, electric and water for free? You think the x ray machines, CT scanners and bandages cost nothing? Come now, that lost billing has to be made up by those who pay their bills. Hence, the unnatural rise of healthcare above the background rate of inflation. The government mandated that every person who walks into an emergency room must be treated without consideration of payment and then lied to everybody that they would pay for it via Medicaid. LIE, LIE, LIE like liberal Democrats frequently do. Medicaid under pays the healthcare providers for the services they render and as a result many emergency rooms closed their doors to limit the financial losses to the hospitals. Why do you think urgency care centers (Doc in a box) are cheaper than emergency rooms…DUH?????
ObamaCare is about allowing a future block of Democrat voters to be paid for their votes to keep the likes of Pelosi, Frank and Obama in power. There is no other reason, the rest is merely rationalizations and mitigations. You know a liberal is lying when see their lips moving, Barney Frank is dissembling.
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