How Obama and the Democrats failed to defend the universal right to healthcare

[jeff47]

20. If that were true, the insurance industry wouldn't be giving their political contributions

to the party that wants to repeal the ACA - why repeal the law that is making them "more entrenched"?

The ACA is a short-term plus for the insurance industry. It will destroy them long-term.

We're talking about an industry who's long-term planning abilities are so poor that they let us get into this situation - they demanded ever higher profits, making insurance so expensive that some sort of reform became politically inevitable.

Smart long-term planning would have kept the costs about where they were in the 90s when they successfully stopped reform efforts. They didn't do that. They decided to goose their stock price in the short term, because that made the executives a pile of money now.

How, exactly, do you think the insurance industry would be able to avoid public options taking over in blue states? Vermont's already setting up to go single-payer and the insurance industry does not appear to be able to thwart that effort. Politicians in CA and NY are already talking about public options in those states (can't do it until 2017, so no concrete action yet in those states.) We only need one or two successful examples to start a large wave.