Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.

Mediocre white men think RFK Jr’s pathetic midlife crisis is inspirational. The bar is set so low for them, it’s subterranean.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

How stupid are these people?

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

“Perhaps I should have considered other options.” (head-desk)

They want us to be overwhelmed and exhausted. Focus. Resist. Oppose.

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

Republicans in disarray!

Washington Post Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.

How any woman could possibly vote for this smug smarmy piece of misogynistic crap is beyond understanding.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

You’re just a puppy masquerading as an old coot.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

“Can i answer the question? No you can not!”

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

My right to basic bodily autonomy is not on the table. that’s the new deal.

People are weird.

Fight them, without becoming them!

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

You would normally have to try pretty hard to self-incriminate this badly.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

You are here: Home / 2025 Activism / The ACA is still a BFD

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38Comments

  5. 5.

    JPL

    I still wear my BFD tee shirt.   Someone should tell trump that America was pretty darn good back then.

     

    @zhena gogolia:   OT but I think you mentioned the ending of Anora and  I probably wouldn’t have finished it if I hadn’t seen that comment.   How depressing.

  6. 6.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    It’s thanks to the ACA that I have health insurance through my employer and union (full-time ACA employee). It’s also thanks to the ACA that my parents, particularly my father, has health insurance because of it’s ban on denying people with preexisting conditions

  7. 7.

    Parfigliano

    It’s very popular so the GOP quit calling it Obama Care.  DEMs should always call it Obama Care.

  8. 8.

    zhena gogolia

    @JPL: I shouldn’t give spoilers!

    ETA: I’ve now been sampling the oeuvre of Yura Borisov. Nothing too good so far. I’m going to try his Finnish film. Can’t stomach the Russian ones.

  9. 9.

    TurnItOffAndOnAgain

    @Suzanne: This is why I can’t help but squint my eyes when I see so much praise heaped on Biden. Like, he did good, but Obama got some very important shit done, even as he had to President While Black.

  13. 13.

    bbleh

    It is a HUGE achievement, a HISTORICAL achievement, one that Obama and Pelosi deserve OCEANS of praise for (and one that Republicans railed against for YEARS and got NOWHERE, to the point they actually gave up, and oh boy that still feels good).

    I remember right after it passed (when I still had gold-plated employer-paid healthcare) and I was sitting at my local, and some (obvious yuppie) was kinda pooh-poohing it, and I pointed out (with only a little extra enthusiasm but more than a dash if incredulity) that it was going to make affordable healthcare accessible to TWENTY MILLION PEOPLE, and he was like “so what, who cares?”

    I must have stared real daggers at him because he left after one drink.  What a piece of (well-manicured) scum.

  18. 18.

    Another Scott

    @Baud: John Roberts gets more than that guy’s share of the blame.

    Someone should tally-up the number of excess deaths caused by Roberts’ thumb on the scale –  that Medicaid expansion was “coercive on the states” – (and elsewhere).

    Know-nothing privileged young white guys pontificating at a bar aren’t the problem. People in positions of trust under the United States who throw out the history and the rules and the law to push their pet RWNJ theories conjectures are the problem.

    Grr…

    Best wishes,
    Scott.

  19. 19.

    Ohio Mom

    @bbleh: Over the years I noticed that when people told me Obama was overrated, they were always people I knew had health coverage through their fancy jobs. I always countered with, “The ACA! If he did nothing else, he gets heaps of credit and praise for that!”

    Nobody has bandwidth anymore to think about Obama.

  20. 20.

    Jay

    Now that  anti-abortion Tex-ass Rethugs have first hand knowledge of friends and family dying, being crippled or becoming sterile because of their Abortion Ban, they are introducing “clarifying Legislation” in the House and Senate to allow for proper medical care, (to an extent, kinda, sorta) for pregnant women.

    steady.substack.com/p/women-in-texas-are-dying

  22. 22.

    ArchTeryx

    @Another Scott: A lot more than you ever want to know. I was nearly one of them, until I fled Michigan and headed to New York State – where I will stay for the rest of my life.

  23. 23.

    Miki

    BFD no fucking shit.

    Seriously.

    I will never understand and always hate the MAGATs who benefit from the ACA at the same time they try to dump it.

  24. 24.

    TurnItOffAndOnAgain

    @Suzanne: Save your bandwidth; agree with me! /s

    Not trying to start anything, I just think Obama deserves way more credit than he gets. Especially since he forwent advertising himself with things like stimulus checks (like GWB used) because people were more likely to put money back into the economy if their attention wasn’t drawn to it

    @Miki:

    Pride will kill you faster and more surely than a surprising amount of other, ostensibly more dangerous things. It’s more deadly than, say, sharks; especially since pride will oftentimes be why you’re killed by a shark.

  25. 25.

    Jay

    @Miki:

    You don’t understand, They love the ACA,

    They hate Obamacare.

    They still want to kill Obamacare, but keep the ACA.

    Once you realize that 84% of Americans are functionally illiterate and the median IQ is 7 points below the median ROW, it makes sense. Having an “average” IQ in the US, basically confirms, (aside from racial and gender bias in testing) that one is a moron.

  26. 26.

    Miki

    IMO, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was way better as literature than Apocalypse Now the movie. Sometimes literal visual art moves too far in too little time. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t grab us, but IMO the book did it better.

  27. 27.

    David Collier-Brown

    @Miki: They’re perfectly willing to use the ACA, vaccines or anything else that works.

    However, because they don’t like the other party, they concentrate of attacking them. ESPECIALLY if the other party does anything good. They want their listeners to conclude that everything the other party does is incompetent, vicious or evil.

  28. 28.

    Miki

    @Jay: Oh, honey. I understand just fine. My white, rural, SSD-dependent relatives not so much.

    I am so relieved they’re getting the healthcare they need. I am so fearful of what they’re going to lose. I am livid that they’re willingly ignorant of how politics hit them.

  29. 29.

    Elizabelle

    Does my heart good to see Raven’s Bohdi as calming photo on the sidebar.

    Sweet dog.

  30. 30.

    Kelly

    When Mrs. Kelly and I got together she was had lost insurance due to divorce and was functionally uninsurable due to previously existing conditions. I got her in Oregon’s high risk pool coverage. It was expensive and so crappy our local hospital treated her as a charity case. I had no idea how I’d manage if something big came up. The ACA gave us the stability to buy the house next door to Mom. That was very handy as Mom’s health declined.

  31. 31.

    Gretchen

    One maddening thing is that younger people don’t remember the bad old days, and think that the things that Obamacare gave us have always existed. Haven’t young people always been able to stay on their parent’s insurance until 26? That would be absurd to kick them off at 18! Why, they haven’t even finished high school by then. Lifetime caps, so a preemie could be uninsurable after spending a million in the NICU? That would be so unfair! Being uninsurable because you had a preexisting condition? Doesn’t everyone? Too much is taken for granted.

  32. 32.

    Jay

    When I was young, I worked as a bike messenger in San Francisco. Minimum wage, no benefits, single speed Schwin,  a slight bonus if you out performed the median.

    Got an infected lymph node in my left neck, right by my jugular.

    Swollen up to the size of half a baseball.

    Went to the Hospital. $36,000 USD, (2+ years wages) to drain it and antibiotics.

    Went home to my roach infested apartment, slit my neck open with a straight razor, drained the lymph node, stitched up the incision with sewing thread, installed part of the plastic tube from a Bic pen as a drain. Used a compress of willow leaves and boiled Old Man’s beard as an antibiotic.

    A couple of decades later, when Dynapro/3M wanted to send me down to Milwaukee to run part of the factory, Gold Plated Healthcare was a key requirement I insisted on.

  34. 34.

    sab

    @Gretchen: It is maddening. I am 71 now. When I was turned eighteen I became uninsurable because I was a single women who might get pregnant without a husband’s company insurance to cover all that.

    My father, a doctor, did everything he could to pressure our insurance agent,who came up with a major medical plan with a hundred thousand  of coverage and a ten thousand deductible. So it was pretty much worthless and also expensive.

    This was the norm for young women. Mostly they went without insurance until they married.

    Decades later in my forties I found myself uninsurable again because moving between jobs, unaware that I had an existing condition, I didn’t move aggressively enough to get replacement coverage. (The only thing positive about the Clinton health insurance fiasco was that they tried to require transitional coverage. That only works with insurance companies acting in good faith. You can apply timely, but they can dither on accepting you, and that lost you transitional coverage protection.)

    Without Obamacare/ACA we would have missed taking me to the hospital for my one big medical event of my lifetime, because emergency rooms are prohibitively expensive if you have assets they can go after later. Survive broke or die and leave your family with a house.

  35. 35.

    RevRick

    @Jay: Yikes! I can’t imagine the desperation of slitting open your own neck. I’m glad you survived that ordeal. And I’m glad you now have the peace of mind that great insurance provides for you.

  36. 36.

    Matt McIrvin

    The ACA is essentially dead now, isn’t it? Is there *any* aspect of it that Trump hasn’t defunded in the past couple of months? Aren’t we just running on fumes until those cuts begin to bite

    Edit: I guess the regulations on private insurance companies are still theoretically in effect and being followed, but how long until they realize there’s no enforcement and they can just violate them?

  37. 37.

    The Other Bob

    I am still pissed that there isn’t a public option. (…kidding)

    The ACA has saved lives and careers, allowing people with existing conditions to move jobs without fear of losing coverage.  My sister was saved by the ACA in both ways.

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