Obamacare Would Make Insurance Companies Give Consumers Their $2 billion Back

[BzaDem]

31. The only reason we have Social Security is because FDR IGNORED views like yours.

Plenty of people on the left thought accepting Social Security as passed was folding like a cheap lawn chair. Partly, it was because it didn't include healthcare, and partly, it was because it discriminated against so many people. (There were other reasons as well.)

The only reason we have Social Security is because FDR ignored all of them. LBJ realized the same thing -- even with two thirds of the Senate, Medicare would NEVER have passed if it was for all. It was limited to the elderly because the elderly were PRECISELY the people for whom the political tactics of destruction would be least effective.

Unlike Obama, FDR and LBJ had massive House and Senate majorities. (Obama's were tiny in comparison.) Yet both made a cold, hard political calculation: "if I base my strategy off of views anything like that of MannyGoldstein, tens of millions of people will not get the help we could have given them, and I will have to live with that for the rest of my life."

Our entire social safety net exists today because the kind of "if you want it, it will come" magical thinking has been ignored when it really was essential to ignore it. So it is a bit rich for you to claim that we should revert to thinking that would have put us back to before the new deal, had it not been ignored before.