Affordable Care Act has many conservative ideas at its core

[SHRED]

I think this article explains pretty well the whole irony of the conservative angst against "Obamacare".

By GUY BOULTON — Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

MILWAUKEE — Supporters downplay the notion. Opponents ignore it. Yet at the core of the Affordable Care Act are many ideas backed by conservatives and decried by liberals.

The law makes use of tax credits, partially relies on commercial health plans and enables people to shop online for a plan of their choice - all concepts championed by conservatives.

It also puts an emphasis on personal responsibility, a conservative mantra, in requiring most people to buy plans with high deductibles as well as in requiring people to have health insurance.

Three and a half years after it was passed, however, a standoff between conservatives who want to overturn the law and liberals who want to uphold it has brought portions of the federal government to a standstill.

"The huge irony is that Democrats are trying essentially the Republican idea," said James Morone, a political science professor at Brown University who has written extensively about the politics of health care reform. "These marketplaces are efforts to reframe health care competition."

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/10/13/205225/affordable-care-act-has-many-conservative.html

[supernova]

1. The conclusion I've come to

It works with any republican idea: The big secret is TRP aren't a governing party. They are a marketing/glossy brochure party. They want ideas and talking points they can sell at fundraisers and make pretty speeches with on the House and Senate floors. They don't actually want to govern anything. These policy initiatives aren't designed to be implemented, they're just designed as rhetorical thought experiments to contrast with Democratic ideals. Anything to impede the Democrats at governing, that's the Republican mantra in a nutshell. So, when what they "propose" gets made into law and has to actually function in the real world. Well, no we really didn't mean it.

[MisterP]

3. those six fatal Beltway words: "we need to sell this better"

[Igel]

2. Yes and no.

The Democrats in Washington are trying their version of a Democratic interpretation of the ideas of some conservatives.

Different Democrats would have a different interpretation. The generic Republic interpretation of those conservative ideas was not the same as the interpretation chosen, but at least most of the Republicans tried to understand the idea as presented by the originator. Even then, many conservatives disliked the "conservative ideas," just as many progressives dislike some of the "Democratic" ideas on entitlement reform. In short, the implementation is so far from the ideas' originators' intentions as to constitute free-standing, independent ideas. Oddly, many Democrats don't want to claim these ideas as their own.

I once took a Fortran IV programming class where the compiler was a simulated compiler running under Snowball. It was a standard sophomorish trick to take advantage of the way the computer assigned values to variables to mess up freshmen projects the day before they were due. "m = 5" would assign the value 5 to the symbol "m". However, "4 = 5" would assign the value 5 to the symbol "4". A single card would cause the program to return value x = 7 for an expression like "x = 2 + 4". It redefined how the computer iterpreted the symbol.

We've shifted terms' meanings and redefined them so that on the surface all the words line up and our claim seems plausible. Score one for rhetoric. But underneath there's a semantic mess. Screw logic and good will. (Both sides do it and always have done it in public; now both sides do it in private, and we wonder why communication has broken down and there's such ill will.)

Language is all symbols. As long as we confuse form and meaning in this way, we're easily manipulated--especially when the manipulation is entirely in accord with what we have a psychological need to believe, anyway. What's beginning to scare me isn't that this manipulation occurs and people fall for it, but the suspicion that it's no longer intentional manipulation, that those employing this kind of deceit don't even see it as deceit any more but are convinced their claims and reasoning are sound.