Distressed/grousing over a glitchy Obamacare website? Think ACA is doomed because of a fix for 5%? [View all]

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You've been reeled in - hook, line, and sinker - by a determined pack of republicans and their supporters in the press and elsewhere who are working overtime to discredit the law.

In the long run of this important legislation, this invented tiffle will be long forgotten (probably replaced with another distracting tiffle). That's politics, and, it didn't begin with Obama or Obamacare.

Take the beginnings of Social Security. FDR was bold and progressive, but he left a lot of people out in the cold on Social Security:

from wiki:

____ Most women and minorities were excluded from its benefits of unemployment insurance and old age pensions. Employment definitions reflected typical white male categories and patterns.

Job categories that were not covered by the act included workers in agricultural labor, domestic service, government employees, and many teachers, nurses, hospital employees, librarians, and social workers. The act also denied coverage to individuals who worked intermittently.

These jobs were dominated by women and minorities. For example, women made up 90% of domestic labor in 1940 and two-thirds of all employed black women were in domestic service. Exclusions exempted nearly half the working population.

Nearly two-thirds of all African Americans in the labor force, 70 to 80% in some areas in the South, and just over half of all women employed were not covered by Social Security. At the time, the NAACP protested the Social Security Act, describing it as “a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through.”

. . . just a reminder that most legislative progress has been historically incremental (and progressively evolving), even with passage of sweeping initiatives. FDR also had problems with his 'rollout'.

from Reuters:

Created in 1935, the program took 40 years just to include all working Americans in its basic coverage. When the old-age insurance program launched in 1937, barely more than half the labor force participated.

A series of amendments to the Social Security Act gradually expanded coverage. By 1979 it finally reached 90 percent of American workers. Over the decades, Congress repeatedly retrofitted Social Security: adding dependent and survivor benefits; balancing payments between early participants and later retirees; including farm workers, domestic laborers and the self-employed, and introducing annual cost-of-living adjustments.

Social Security’s first baby steps proved especially uncertain. Of course, opponents denounced the pension plan as the leading wedge of a socialist revolution. One senator warned that the nationalization of wheat fields would soon follow. Former President Herbert Hoover suggested the law would reduce once-hearty Americans to servile passivity. “Our people are not ready to be turned into a national zoo,” Hoover warned, “our citizens classified, labeled and directed by self-approved keepers.”

But it was not just dissident conservatives who issued ideological censure. Even friendly critics disparaged the program for its incompetent personnel, confusing procedures and widespread abuses. One watchdog group particularly disapproved the rapid hiring of thousands of untrained, ill-qualified workers to staff the program.

In response, the fledgling Social Security administration launched a massive PR campaign to educate Americans about the intricacies of the program and broaden support for it . . .

Sound familiar? Perspective.