dagblog - Comments for "Alors, plus ça change..."

Moreover, I'm not sure why

Anonymous PS — Thu, 26 Dec 2013 23:53:33 +0000

In reply to Admittedly and proudly cherry

Moreover, I'm not sure why you'd be "proud" to cherry pick.

Cherry picking is a way to distort--falsify--the truth to further a polemical position.

Propagandize, if you will.

I thought you were against that kind of thing.

The law was repealed a year

Anonymous PS — Thu, 26 Dec 2013 17:22:08 +0000

In reply to Admittedly and proudly cherry

The law was repealed a year after its passage, after angry seniors launched nationwide protests.

Cherry picking your picked cherry...

The fight isn't over.

It would be one thing if one party weren't trying to repeal or otherwise sabotage the implementation of the law, but were working to fix the problems you mention.

But this isn't the case, nor is a working through of the problems instead of a repeal a foregone conclusion. As your quote shows. It could get repealed if 2014 is a Democratic disaster.

The reason to keep repeating stories of the eventual success of programs that were much more daunting (in many ways) to implement is simply to try for the very thing you normally stand for: a balanced, reasoned sense of perspective on how these kinds of things often go. What we can rationally expect.

It is not to say there are no problems. It is not to say that tough problems need to be worked out. It's not even to say that the administration didn't blow it and made a horrible choice of vendor.

If you listen to what Obama says, he's the last person to say things went well or there are no more problems now or to come. He says the opposite.

But if one is trying for balance and perspective, it doesn't strike me as productive to cherry pick in a way that distorts the very article you're posting. In fact, many of the articles themselves start with the most sensational of facts and then, ten inches down, start backtracking and even contradicting the image they've tried to portray in their headline, lead, and personal story, e.g., the Chapmans.

Admittedly and proudly cherry

artappraiser — Thu, 26 Dec 2013 05:14:25 +0000

In reply to Alors, plus ça change...

Admittedly and proudly cherry picking this time from your article for effect

Of course, success stories from Social Security to Medicare prescription drugs represent the survivors — not the failures.

One that completely blew up is the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act, which had broad bipartisan support when it was enacted in 1988 and signed into law by President Ronald Reagan.

Intended to provide new medical benefits for the elderly, including expanded payments for nursing homecare, the program also imposed staggering new costs on those it sought to help — an extra monthly Medicare premium and a surtax for people over 65 with incomes above $35,000. The law was repealed a year after its passage, after angry seniors launched nationwide protests.

I am kind of puzzled why I keep seeing many versions of this story (that Medicare and Social Security had tough starts, too) done over and over and over since early October. What is the point of continually repeating it? To say "stop your complaining"? How is the described process of improving problematic systems after rollout supposed to happen if we are supposed to stop pointing out the problems?

What I see is anti-Obamacare and pro-Obamacare ideologues trying to continue a political fight that they can't admit is over! Both please stop your agitprop, let's move on to problems, complaints and agitating for fixes. And the last thing I want to hear from the people that are running this program is spin about how wonderful it is, much less spending lots of money on spin promotion.

It is for the users to decide how wonderfully they are executing this program. (And that is the stage we are at: execution, the one after the"get out and sell this program" stage.) Good word of mouth takes care of itself, needs no agitprop. That means a little bit more of "the customer is always right" If there is expectation of good results beyond those of the Medicaid expansion winners getting free or very low cost coverage, seems there's a lot more work to do, with complaints not just unmuzzled but addressed.