Interesting twitter feed today after I made a little comment correcting a mistake about the historical record, read it here:
Medical debt isn't federally owned. If any is, he should cancel it. He only has the authority to cancel federal loans. He won't do shit about health care. Obama lied about a public option when he had a super majority and Joe literally said he'd veto m4a during a pandemic
— ⚡️Bolty⚡️ (@Mikeroyce34) August 30, 2021
It’s pretty ludicrous. If you follow the rest of the thread, you will find how people simply don’t understand the history of what happened. Long story short, I was incorrect that Pelosi removed the public option, it passed the Senate in November 2009, was removed from the Senate version which passed in December 2010, and then the House signed onto the bill on March 21, 2010, which was signed by President Obama two days later on March 23rd. Joe Lieberman demanded the bill should not include a public option, his demand was met, and then the bill was sent back to the House. At that point,
After the Senate passed the bill the House knew the bill would probably die if it went back to the Senate, and all progress would be lost. The best option at that point was to pass the bill as is, since filibuster abolition was off the radar before Elizabeth Warren entered the national spotlight.
This Twitter thread is rife with misunderstandings of what is actually happening in our congress, and these lies are frequently spread by far left leading to accusations that the ACA is actually a tool which was pushed for the insurance industry. Now this is obviously not true, the insurance industry actively continues to fund opposition candidates to every candidate who wants to introduce health care reform, and the Heritage Foundation actively opposes expanding Medicare, and want to see the Affordable Care Act repealed. The right wing pro-corruption wing of American politics did everything they could to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and if John McCain hadn’t been in the hospital days before the final vote they would have succeeded.
This is where we end up where a lot of people who call themselves “socialist” and want Medicare for All (which actually isn’t socialist because it doesn’t turn the entire health care sector into a publicly run entity, but what do I know, I’ve already probably read more Marx and Lenin than these people will read in their entire lives, and I plan on reading more because its important) will make up these elaborate conspiracy theories about how Obama was in the hands of the pharmaceutical and insurance companies (FEC records beg to disagree) and there is an elaborate secret agreement between Democrats and Republicans to keep health insurance companies afloat (which must be why the AHCA which would have been a massive cash grab for insurance companies failed and didn’t get a single Democratic vote in 2018) despite all of the evidence to the contrary! If Democrats really were in the grips of the insurance industry, it would have taken just one Senator to change their vote, perhaps Joe Manchin of West Virginia, and the ACA would have been repealed. If Democrats were indeed that corrupt then it would have been very easy to have Manchin vote in favor of the AHCA and the bill would have become law. But not one of them did. I might be incredibly annoyed at how New Democrats effectively oppose filibuster abolition, college affordability, the public option, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, and other necessary laws… but I must give them credit where credit is due… not one of them broke party line to vote against the ACA in 2018.
These people who believe these complex conspiracy theories about Obama is worse than his actions appear tend in my experience to be the same people who believe Bernie Sanders is the one who will save America from corruption!
Give me a fucking break. After reviewing the history and checking my facts, it is very obvious to anyone who has lobbied a single day in their lives and has actually studied how the Senate works that If it wasn’t for the filibuster, the public option would have passed the Senate in 2010 rendering the maneuver to label a bill as budgetary bill totally pointless. In 2013 there was a very important vote to reduce the power of the filibuster, and that was one of the few times where Sanders and Warren split on a vote. Sanders voted to keep the filibuster, despite the fact that the filibuster is the reason the public option failed despite 58 Senators being in support of it.
In his defense of the filibuster, Sanders and friends rendered the biggest gift to private insurance insurance industry they could possibly ask for, because as long as the filibuster exists there is almost no way to pass significant health care reform, or many other bills such as voting rights.
This is a very weird scenario where a group of people will make up elaborate schemes where Obama is an evil corrupt man with a black heart who is out to get the common man based on elaborate backroom deals which there is absolutely no evidence in favor and loads of clear evidence to the contrary, and Bernie Sanders is a perfect politician who is out there for a common man, despite the fact that until very recently he openly supported the one and only very bizarre parliamentary maneuver which prevented most progressive legislation from passing Congress over the last 50 years, consistently voting in favor of the one parliamentary procedure which enables minority rule to this very day.
DSA is a very strange organization.
Joe Lieberman is a total complete piece of shit.
Not everything is a backroom deal. Sometimes the evidence is staring at you in plain daylight on the public roll call.
This is one of those times.
Abolish the Filibuster…
Save America.
https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2010.0363
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordable_Care_Act
https://newrepublic.com/article/73683/the-public-option-still-dead