And it does an impressively good job of it.
Sweeney is the perfect accompaniment to a tough-on-crime comic. I bet the Judge had invested money in the prison industry.
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It is my contention that any politician who runs on a "tough on crime" platform should be investigated for corruption.…
Apologies for the rambling but I have a half-formed thought I wanted to work through here. It feels like a…
Thanks! Done partly for realism, and partly so I'd have one word less to fit in the balloon. :-p
I like the realistic touch where you have the Republican congresscritter say "ban trans from participating in sports," instead of…
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You should post a link to a five-second video explaining that you don’t need to worry about all this stuff, because this law and all the careers of its supporters are a dead letter.
The Affordable Care Act may cost some Democrats their seats, but I don’t think the GOP will be able to overturn it. At the very least, they won’t have the numbers necessary to override a veto.
“Starting September 23, children under 26 will be allowed to stay on their parent’s family policy, or be added to it. ”
Nothing like a little classism, eh? I don’t see any little helpful bonuses for the new college graduates whose parents can’t afford a policy or are unemployed to begin with.
Won’t go too deep into the weeds, Peter, but they don’t need a veto-proof majority to effectively overturn it. All they have to do is defund it.
I think they will have a VPM, at least on some issues. This is one.
@3: Classist or not, 20-30 year olds are more likely than older or younger people to be uninsured. Oddly enough, that same age group also has a lower survival after diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, a potentially curable but very expensive disease. So anything that reduces the number of young adults without insurance is probably good. Though I agree that something more generalizable, like, say, universal health insurance not linked to employment, would be better.
Lasciel: There are enormous subsidies in the ACA for people who can’t afford health care, actually — including a big expansion of low-income-based qualifications for medicaid. For someone like me, the ACA will eventually lead to much lower insurance premiums.
Keep in mind that the bill will take several years to implement, however.
Robert, all of the provisions based in Medicaid or Medicare will, in fact, need a veto-proof majority to change.
And as for the rest, maybe I’ll be surprised, but I don’t think there will be much more than some nibbles around the edges. Republicans are essentially political cowards; they’re very good at giving free goodies away to voters (by passing the bill to the next generation to pay), but they don’t have a track record of doing anything that requires actual political courage.
Will Republicans really vote to take away medical care from the sick children of goodness knows how many voters, for example? That would look great on future Democratic candidate commercials — “Obamacare gave my sick son health insurance, until Representative Whitey voted to take Junior’s cancer medication away.” I don’t see it happening.
(ETA: I should add, I think the Dems are cowardly too – usually even more than the Republicans are. In fact, passing the ACA — as compromised as it is — is pretty much the bravest thing I recall them doing in many years time.)
It takes no courage to repeal a bill that the majority of your voters hate, particularly when that voter anger has just been expressed and you watched half your Democratic colleagues lose their jobs.
You’re out of touch with the public mood on this.
538 currently has the Reps controlling the House by less than 2/3 and the Dems controlling the Senate after the election. Doesn’t sound too promising for a major Republican revolution, especially with Obama ready to veto attempts to undo legislation he just passed.
It’s not about how many Republicans will be there as much as it is about how few Democrats.
This video seems to do a pretty good job at stating the facts. Even though no one ever let facts get in the way of a good argument, I’m really hoping that because most of the law keeps health care within the market and the “freedom” that the market supposedly provides, it’ll be tough to rally against it once it becomes clear that there are no “death panels” out of get grandma (except for the ones that are actually run by the health insurance companies). It’s not state-provided care, it’s state-regulated care, and if Democrats can push that — not that the government will lower your costs, but the government is making insurance companies accountable — then maybe more people will get upset if the GOP tries to take away the measures meant to protect the public.
Here’s some new polling data that shows why it will be hard for Republicans to dismantle the health care bill.
@Robert:
I think you discount how public mood will turn once they hear the ads stating that “<insert Republican here" wants to take away your family's insurance and leave your children/parents to die without medical care." While not all opposition to this is founded in hysteria and there are some rational reasons to oppose this, it wasn't a well-informed conservative agenda that founded the opposition to this. It was scare tactics and hyped-up threats that provided much of the public sentiment behind this. It will be just as easy to scare people the opposite way.