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Dems on Hill have "buyer's remorse" about health care reform



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Not anything close to the buyer's remorse a lot of us have about them. First this excerpt from The Hill:

“I think we would all have been better off — President Obama politically, Democrats in Congress politically, and the nation would have been better off — if we had dealt first with the financial system and the other related economic issues and then come back to healthcare,” said Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.), who is retiring at the end of this Congress.
Well, we did deal with the economic crisis first. That's what the stimulus was about. And had the administration sold the stimulus harder, and more wisely, to the public, both before and after it was passed, people would, in retrospective, have perceived the stimulus as worthy and effective, and thus would have perceived that the Congress DID in fact deal with economic issues first.

The second problem was the way they handled health care reform. The administration did a lousy job selling the legislation to the public, and an equally lousy job demonizing Republicans and insurance companies (and Big Pharma et. al.), both during and after the legislative battle. So we ended up with legislation that no one understands, that the administration has, at times, seemed almost embarrassed of mentioning, and that the Republicans have outright lied about, continually, and about which the public now believes many of the lies.

The fault, dear congressman, is not in our legislation, but in ourselves.

A lot of us predicted exactly how the health care reform battle, and every other battle, was going to go down if the Democrats continued to refuse to fight.  Yet refuse a lot of them did, especially the administration (and then when the administration backed away, Dems on the Hill were left hanging out to dry, making them less willing and able to fight).

Then there's Barney. Always ripe for an annoyingly certain opinion:
The most recent wave of misgivings from Democrats began with Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who told New York magazine that Democrats “paid a terrible price for healthcare.”

Frank said Obama had erred in pushing the legislation after GOP Sen. Scott Brown’s January 2010 victory in Massachusetts, which took away the Senate Democrats’ 60th vote.
Yes, how crazy of President Obama to actually push for something after one guy won an election against a really bad Democratic candidate, and a race in which the White House refused to help until the last week or two, when all was already lost.

Again, post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning has its flaws. Maybe we didn't lose because we attempted to pass a particular piece of legislation. May we lost because we did it poorly.


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