Sen. Ron Johnson says Obamacare should be repealed if GOP wins power back Via @amybwang https://t.co/9nO0LLfjpH
— Felicia Sonmez (@feliciasonmez) March 7, 2022
The big Republican challenge is that the ACA is getting itself embedded every time someone signs up for coverage. It is getting itself embedded every time a red state expands Medicaid. It is getting itself embedded every time that a person does not fully recover from a “mild” case of COVID and needs guaranteed issued coverage. But at the same time, there are intense elite GOP policy demanders that got a run at Repeal and maybe Replace in 2017 that still have a tremendous amount of capacity to dictate agendas in the case of a GOP trifecta in 2025.
So just be aware that this is on the plausible agenda again.
Baud
First step to single payer. /Defunct Russian Bot
debbie
We’re in an endless loop. 1980 to 2020. Repeat, repeat, repeat, over and over.
Mathguy
Just your occasional reminder that Ron Johnson is the second stupidest f*** in the Senate.
Kay
I love “and replace”. Yeah, right.
rikyrah
Phucking clown ??
Yarrow
It’s always on the menu with Republicans. Always.
Yarrow
@Kay: Oh, it’ll be replaced alright. With magic free market solutions where anyone with any pre-existing condition can’t get insurance, goes bankrupt and dies.
Geminid
It’s good to warn of the effects of a Republican “Trifecta” after the 2024 election. I’m curious, though: if the Democrats have a trifecta after 2024, what additional healthcare reforms do you think they should pursue?
Eolirin
Hopefully they campaign on that. The attacks on ACA really helped us in 2018.
Baud
@Geminid:
Ideally, we have a better trifecta after 2022, although that will be a heavy lift.
Baud
@Eolirin:
We already have Rick Scott’s agenda for 2022.
Also, hopefully Wisconsin does us a solid this November and tosses Ron Jon to the curb.
Geminid
@Eolirin: After his reelection in 2018, Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey said that protecting the ACA was his best issue. Casey won Pennsylvania that year by 650,000 votes.
Kay
@Yarrow:
Preexisting conditions coverage was really politically powerful for Democrats because college educated people with private health insurance drove the whole debate, to the exclusion of everyone else really, but Medicaid was the giant expansion. I cannot tell you how embedded Medicaid is in counties like mine. They can’t get rid of it. Honestly it pisses me off though, because Democrats get zero political benefit from it. I’m tired of that. I know it’s ungenerous but one of the most expensive pieces of BBB was subsidies for red states for Medicaid with federal subsidies and I want a political benefit for that. They can’t pass the shit anyway unless they have more Democrats, and Medicaid doesn’t get them any.
Betty Cracker
@Eolirin: Yep. I see that Rick Scott’s 11-point plan for smearing poop on the walls is also getting lots of media play. Good
ETA: What Baud said at #11!
Baud
@Kay:
Agreed. Tired of being taken for granted.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Typical elitist lib. Looking down on working class poop smearers.
debbie
@Kay:
Wouldn’t that be a benefit to their Democratic opponents to raise over and over again in their campaign speeches?
SFAW
@Kay:
At the risk of sounding like the “Dems are incompetent” crowd: I’m wondering if there’s a way to overcome that. A targeted ad campaign — no, I’m not creative enough to come up with one — might change some minds? Or at least get the red-staters and non-insane voters to “get it” that Dems really are the Party of the working class, and really are the ones trying to improve, not destroy, their lives.
Yeah, I realize that a lot of them are in thrall to the idea that “if others get the good things that I also get, I can’t stand it.” [Those “others” generally having darker complexions, of course.] But it still might be worth a try.
Someone should try posting stuff on Truth Social, just to have Devin Nunes’s non-cow ban them for double-plus-ungood thoughts.
Baud
@SFAW:
I think the bigger problem is Democrats themselves. We have told ourselves that the only thing that’s important is what the Dems do next. And by telling ourselves that, we are telling the rest of the voting public that too.
SFAW
@debbie:
The Rethugs would bring it up to give their MAGAt base something on which to focus their hate. But for the non-MAGAt/non-insane electorate, it will probably work to Dem benefits.
SFAW
@Baud:
Not sure I follow. Who’s the “we” and “ourselves”? We jackals? Run-of-the-mill Dems? And I’m not sure I know “what the Dems do next” means. Not trying to be a wise-ass; it’s just that I think there are things implied/unstated that I’m not getting.
Baud
@SFAW:
The Dem collective. Our general culture.
WereBear
@Baud: MAGATS proudly declare themselves seccessionist from that culture.
SFAW
@Baud:
OK.
So is your point about “what the Dems do next” that we don’t highlight what Rethugs continue to do to try to make life worse for non-wealthy Americans?
Betty Cracker
@Baud: Interesting theory. It could also drive the media default framing that only Dems have agency — or maybe that’s a chicken/egg question.
jonas
Really? We’re still on repealing the ACA? Do these numpties not remember the drubbing they took in 2018 when Democrats across the country basically ran on — and won — with one basic message: we will protect your health care?
Baud
@SFAW: I don’t have a good strategy to propose. Experts say negative campaigning works best, but our voters say they hate it and that it leaves them uninspired.
Eolirin
@Baud: I think this is basically a deep human problem. Our nervous systems are tuned to recognize rates of change, not to really pay attention to things that aren’t changing. So we accomplish something, it gets normalized, and then we ignore that it exists because it’s normal and thus not worth, in a physiological sense, cognitive resources to pay attention to.
It’s only when something is changing that we’re really able to pay attention easily. And we’re also wired to be loss averse. Which unfortunately makes it easier for the right since they can focus on loss of culture or white dominance regardless of circumstance, where we need an actual credible threat to something people care about to make our case.
Healthcare is an easy one for us. I think the overreach on CRT may make education an area that we can float as being under seige. If they take out Roe or Griswold we’ve got rights we can bring up to defend.
But accomplishments are tough to run on. They get normalized really fast. So there’s a short shelf life on using them to rally the bulk of the population. I think they can be more effective with minorities or specific issues voters, since that’s more about having a relationship and showing that you work for them.
Kay
Given a choice between climate change efforts – important to younger voters- and more Medicaid expansion I’d pick climate change
I think we’re allowed to practice politics
Our commitment to providing health care for rural areas in red states is admirable but it doesn’t get us a single new voter
Geminid
@SFAW: At least the prospect of Medicaid can be a vote getter for Democrats. Or so it seemed in Virginia’s 2017 election. Northam and Democratic legislative candidates ran on Medicaid expansion. Northam won by 8 points, and Democrats picked up 15 House of Delegates seats, on a Republican drawn map. House of Delegates Majority Leader Kirk Cox reacted to this massacre by leading 10 other Republicans across the aisle to help pass expansion. Three Republican Senators also voted for expansion. By the time the pandemic began, 400,000 Virginians had been added to the Medicaid rolls.
Some of the Republicans who voted for expansion retired or were knocked out in primaries. But the Democrats did even better in the 2019 election.
Baud
@Eolirin:
That makes a lot of sense to me.
Yarrow
@Kay: @SFAW: Elderly people have been by far the largest group of people on Medicaid. I don’t know if that’s true now, but it doesn’t really matter. Ads targeting their adult kids saying things like, “Republican cuts to Medicaid mean grandma will get kicked out of her nursing home” and images of sad, elderly white people looking confused might work for some demographics.
Fear works. Middle-class people don’t want their elderly parents having to move back in with them. Taking care of the elderly is hard work and someone won’t be able to work in many cases. Play on that.
Kay, who are the new people on Medicaid that the expansion reached in your county? There has to be a way to target them.
SFAW
@Baud:
The only time I felt less-than-positive about Michelle Obama was her “when they go low, we go high” thing in 2016. Yeah, it’s a nice sentiment, but voters haven’t generally rewarded messaging/campaigning and candidates that only “go high.” Rethugs have proved that relentlessly attacking their opponents works a lot more often than not. [Well, that, and lying about what they’ll do when elected, or what they’ve done.]
cmorenc
@Geminid:
Replacing several Troglydite SCOTUS Justices seized with fervid dreams of interpreting the Constitution to enshrine total free market and reject anything even remotely smelling like socialism, even super=lite versions.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I think Johnson is being nostalgic of the good old days with Obama because he knows by 2025 the culture wars will have warped into a demand from conservatives to ban traffic lights as the Head On Collision Skeptics, complete with bumper stickers that say “This car self drives by Jesus!”, or something equally batshit insane becomes a force in the GOP base.
Fake Irishman
@Kay:
One thing to remember about those BBB subsidies for Red states that didn’t expand Medicaid is that they would be paid for by gutting the slush funds paid to red states for uncompensated care. They were supposed to be cut off by the ACA, but the Trump administration handed out waivers like candy to states like Texas and Florida.
That’s part of practicing politics, like you mention later.
Other ACA tweaks in BBB would keep the expanded subsidies of the American Rescue plan in the exchanges, those are the ones with the high price tag, but broadly benefit large swaths of voters, not just poor rural whites. (And remember that Medicaid expansion in red states helps poor rural blacks and Hispanics in places like Mississippi and Texas, not just rural whites who we have no chance with)
@Kay:
Kristine
I love “Repubs in Disarray” for a change, but my concern is that enough folks will vote for them if gas prices remain high in the fall, as one oil analyst opined this morning. The knee jerk saying is that voters vote their pocket books. Hanging Scott’s Multi-point Destitution Plan around every R’s neck could counter that I would hope.
Link goes to Apple News, which may or may not let you read, depending. The quote I’m highlighting:
kindness
Ron Johnson. I have a really hard time believing he will win his Senate re-election race this year. Except this is Wisconsin, and Wisconsin isn’t what it used to be. Too many good people there turned to the dark side of the force.
Betty
@SFAW: Medicaid is considered welfare which is for those others so never a popular issue with voters. That more beneficiaries are white and often working doesn’t seem to penetrate the conventional wisdom. Media could help correct that if they wanted to.
Brachiator
I had almost forgot about this. But this is the natural and common GOP goal. It’s just that under Trump they tried to hide it. His big lie was “repeal and replace” even though neither Trump nor any other Republican ever offered any replacement.
The GOP will probably offer a health voucher. And prayers.
When Republicans talk about this, I always want a reporter to challenge the GOP to repeal health insurance for members of Congress first. This would also apply to state officials.
SFAW
@Brachiator:
Or the Alan Grayson Plan.
artem1s
Good. Ask ZEGS Paul Ryan how repealing ACA worked out for the GOP in the 2018 midterms.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/24/us/politics/health-care-affordable-care-act.html
That horse is as dead as a door nail but please proceed Senator. Go on and beat it some more.
Matt McIrvin
@jonas:
People were allowed to vote in 2018.
Tehanu
I really hate these mfrs. And I hate them even more because they make me spend time hating. Evil bastards, every one.