How quaint! An article in which the ACA, which was passed by Democrats without any appreciable Republican support, is praised as a “bold” reform that had a “transformational impact” on America, then, only a few lines later, reads,
“In truth, partisan clashes rarely result in meaningful legislation — rather, Congress’s most enduring legislative achievements have been bipartisan.”
Of course, its praise-singing of the ACA is nothing more than a con-job — touting that the legislation “extended coverage to nearly 20 million previously uninsured Americans” without ever noting that it left just as many with nothing and or that wide swathes of even those newly “insured” consumers are, in effect, just as uninsured as before, as things like sky-high premiums make their insurance entirely inaccessible to them. The ACA wasn’t “transformational”; it was just an effort to prop up a private insurance industry — and, more broadly, a for-profit model — that has failed, collapsed and is bleeding us dry. The article refuses to acknowledge the relentless rapaciousness of industry or any of the very real problems this causes when it comes to something like healthcare, preferring to present a cartoon version of progressive complaints about abusive elites as merely part of a “yearning for combat” by those progressives “against a demonized other”; that’s what, we’re told, really drives progressives’ “hardline crusades against ‘big business,’ ‘greedy drug companies,’ ‘the wealthy’ and so on.”
One also finds Medicare For All described as “a single-payer health care system that would destroy the system of private insurance relied upon by 176 million Americans and has no chance of becoming reality.” While this uninspiring, utterly defeatist rhetoric dutifully parrots Donald Trump’s attack on M4A, it hardly comports with the rest of the article’s praise of “moderates” — M4A is a policy supported by most of the public and thus is, by definition, the “moderate” and “centrist” view. That public support includes an overwhelming majority of Democrats and all of the serious 2020 Democratic presidential contenders. The kind of Republican-talking-point hostility to the policy expressed in the article, on the other hand, places it among a small-and-shrinking fringe-right faction of the Democratic party. Trashing M4A, the article praises, instead, what it calls the “far more practical plan for shoring up the Affordable Care Act” devised by “members of the ‘moderate’ New Democrat Coalition,” without ever explaining how a policy opposed by both Republicans and progressive Democrats is in any way more “practical” or has any better “chance of becoming reality.”
But then again, the article is taking the view that it’s impossible for Americans to enact a policy enjoyed by the peoples of every other advanced industrialized nation on Earth.
The above piece from the “Progressive” Policy Institute presents itself to any moderately attentive reader as merely a confused mess of an article — straight-up right-wing Reaganite “anti-government” rhetoric under the rubric of a “Progressive” Policy Instutute?; the right’s wet dream of defunding public education in favor of charter schools for the elite described as “moderate”? — but the more informed reader will immediately recognize its bizarre contradictions as merely the product of that org’s corporate financiers. It isn’t earnestly debating ideas; it’s just acting as the mouthpiece for entrenched interests who don’t want progressive policies that, while significantly beneficial to the public, are harmful to their bottom line.
No sale.
