Was HCR as big a clusterfuck in 1993 as in 2009?

[JVS]

I don't remember 1993 much because I was busy with puberty.

[cliffordu]

1. Slacker.

:rofl:

[kudzu22]

29. 1993/94 never even got out of committee

The bill was similar -- state-based exchanges, mandate, subsidy, etc. It didn't get nearly as far as this one did. There was never a vote on the floor of either chamber. This one has passed both, but was probably still doomed because of the differences between the two bills (and because of Scott Brown).

[DrDan]

2. I seem to remember a lot of criticism for Hillary from the right

not being up to the task . . . .

[eridani]

19. Yes. And there was no defense of her from the left because--

--her secret legislative task force didn't give a shit about us.

[truedelphi]

26. yeah they really did not give

A shit about us.

In fact, HillaryCare came out with a program that would have allowed a family of four living on 24,000 bucks to spend only $ 4k on insurance.

Which might have been possible if you were living in Arkansas, but in any almost other state in the Country, who would have that 4K if their income was that low?

I guess Hillary thought the low incomed could just cancel that summer trip to the French Riviera or something. But she really bragged on how great her program was on C Span back in those days.

[notesdev]

3. Pretty much

You'd think they'd have learned that closed-door sessions and mind-bogglingly complex plans don't sell well to the public.

[Robb]

I don't think it was even that complicated

...the picture was painted that Hillary wasn't in any way qualified to even talk of such important, worldly things.

IIRC the whole debate centered on her qualifications, somehow. We didn't even get a chance to discuss the issues, the red meat being fed at the time was sexism, and the public and press ate it up.

[Raster]

28. The for-profit vampires attacked fiercely and early, and not at the actual issues.

No, the issues didn't actually merit any discussion until the vampires and their lackeys the American Main Stream Media had dragged the Clintons--especially Hillary--through the mud, slandered the Clintons in every possible way, and made sure that fair and dynamic discussion would never see the light of day. Many of the high-end :rofl: conservative :rofl: commentators :rofl: made their bones attacking the Clintons over healthcare. And to be fair, the Clintons were a tad arrogant and made a few mistakes and grossly underestimated the "vast right-wing conspiracy." In reality, the Clintons had targets painted on the *ENTIRE* family from the moment they foot in DC. The Clinton White House was always under siege. See "The Arkansas Project." Once the vampires had the Clintons in a purely defensive position, they controlled the entire health care debate, and have worked tirelessly to maintain control over the national health care scenario ever since.

[theoldman]

4. It was killed very fast by false TV ads.

[treestar]

7. Was that the Harry and Louise crap?

I was kind of politically out of it then. I worked for Clinton and left him alone after he was elected, lol.

I was happy with his being President and didn't bother with the details.

[Hippo_Tron]

5. The bill ran into mostly the same problems

Actually 1993 was seemingly more optimistic. The big controversial provision in Clinton's bill was an employer mandate which was the mechanism by which universal coverage was supposed to be obtained. The thing is that this looked like it would be no problem because Bob Dole was a co-sponsor of a bill that created an employer mandate. It looked like it should pass with no problem. The thing that happened was that Gingrich convinced his fellow Republicans that it was more important to defeat Clinton than it was to have an impact on the health care bill. The Senate Republicans proposed a series of amendments that senators felt they had to vote for for political reasons. But these amendments made the bill unfeasible and thus it killed the bill.

Given that this strategy worked in 1993 Obama should've probably realized they were going to repeat it. I think his biggest mistake was wasting time with Snowe, Grassley, Hatch, etc.

[WeDidIt]

6. Bigger clusterfuck

It didn't get anywhere near as close to passing.

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

17. That misses the point of clusterfuckery

The fact that we had it passed then dumped it because we saw our shadow is the biggest clusterfuck since the Iraq War.

Clusterfuck isn't the same as failure... it connotes utter confusion and rudderlessness.

[Warren Stupidity]

31. This is close to a Total Goat Fuck. nt.

[Maru Kitteh]

8. Way bigger.

[JVS]

11. That's hard to imagine. How many months did they spend and how watered down did the bill get?

Or did it follow a different path than this one.

[Posteritatis]

14. This one got watered down; that one got flushed. (nt)

[flyarm]

9. yes and we had the Harry and Louise commercials as well..eom

[marmar]

10. Obviously, seeing as how we never got it.

:think:

[JVS]

13. Considering the deterioration of this bill, with pre-existing conditions for people other than...

kids approaching the chopping block, I don't think that the passage of a bill is a guarantee that it's not a bigger clusterfuck.

[Imajika]

12. Much worse this time...

The Democrats had far more power and good will from the public going into 2009. Obama could have gotten near anything done had he and the Democrats gone about it properly.

Instead, 1 full year has been utterly squandered. 1 full year of incredible opportunity pretty much wasted.

It's really even worse than it sounds. The public is just as agitated, only now they are losing faith in left of center governance which means they are very likely to turn to the opposition. That opposition is becoming more far right, more extreme as evidenced by the Teaparty movement. The Gingrich Republicans were very conservative, make no mistake, but the country was not willing to give them near as much leeway to push through their more reactionary policies as perhaps they may give the GOP next time around. People are grasping at almost anything right now. It is in this type of atmosphere that truly significant change can occur, and the Democrats are very quickly ceding the territory to the Republicans.

The 1993 HCR loss was a setback, but not the monumental failure 2009 HCR looks to be.

[Ruby the Liberal]

15. 93 was much worse

No pre-legislative negotiations with pharma, insurance, devices, etc meant they dropped bucketloads of cash in attack ads that ran 24/7.

Hillary's bill never made it out of committee and she was positively demonized over it.

[OHdem10]

16. There was criticism but fortunately Hillary had kept things under

wraps so there was not the daily coverage. As it was
completed and the GOP saw it. It was a wild attack.
The Democrats in Congress decided they would not go
the mat. Pres. Clinton withdrew the plan. We moved
on. From time to time they would attack Hillary as
a way to attack Health Care.

[SoCalDem]

18. The people out to get Clinton, used Hillary as the flashpoint

and ranted *& raved about how SHE was not elected..HE was..and how dare he appoint his WIFE to set up something that important.. and remembeer..that was PRE-Fox News...of course Foxnews was in-the-making- at that time, and once they were up and running, we all know what happened next..and for the rest of the Clinton term:(

[laughingliberal]

20. The biggest problem for me was we never really had much information about it

before the saturation advertising from the industry killed it.

[Joanne98]

21. Clinton threw his base under the bus by passing NAFTA!

Then AFTER that the "market based solution" for HCR failed. The AFTER THAT he lost because he turned to the right and the Republicans stole the election with rigged optical scanners. (Something we didn't know about till 2003)

Then he turned to the right again and became the best Republican President we ever had!

NAFTA, deregulation of banking, energy and telecom, China into the WTO, welfare reform....

AND THEN THEY STILL IMPEACHED HIM ANYWAY!

[Aramchek]

22. no, it never had a chance in '93. clusterfuck is bigger now because it's about to pass

clusterfuck is the GOP's only chance at stopping it,
and they'll still fail

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

23. The current fiasco is more humiliating

The case for reform was much weaker in '93.

The debate was more substantive... the cigar-chomping crowd was lying, but lying about actual health policy, rather than death panels and such.

The process was fairly straightforward. A plan was advanced and it didn't get enough votes. There was much clusterfuckery along the way but it was essentially "WH proposes policy. Folks don't go for it."

Much could have been done better in '94, no doubt.


But the current fiasco of tossing the thing in congresses lap to fuck with for a while, then actually passing a bill but dumping it because people got scared... this has been well beyond mere failure. This is psycho-drama.

And, most of all, this time we had the example of 1994 and seem to have learned all the wrong lessons. Actual regression.

[lunatica]

24. Dick Armey was on the Committee that questioned her on health reform

In those days Committee hearings were televised. He invited her to meet privately with the committee members. Hillary laughed and said, "Sure, you and Dr. Kevorkian right?" Everyone laughed, including the Dick Armey.

It was long before they really got out of hand with their screeching at the Clintons. But they really hollered about her being qualified. She's been a lighting rod for two decades.

At least that's my memory. I try not to think about those things much because as bad as they got it was only a practice warm-up for what's happening now.

[groundloop]

25. Well, both are blown opportunities. I may be wrong, but my take on how Obama handled this ....

is that he threw a few of the special interests a handful of carrots to keep them quiet while the legislation was getting drawn up. It seemed to be working for a while too. I remember in '93 those damned Harry and Louise ads were everywhere, all you saw were special interest propaganda flooding TV, radio, and even billboards. By throwing out a few carrots to big pharma (as much as many people hated to see that) they stayed on the sidelines and this thing almost got done until the Senate screwed it up. I'll add to that though, that I think President Obama should have done a lot more cheerleading than he did, and possibly tried to exert as much influence as possible over the Senate committees.

That's my take on it anyway, other's may see it differently.

[Turbineguy]

27. The stakes were not as high

as they are now. On both sides. The wingnuts had already started accusing the Clintons of murdering their political enemies. There were very few who were forward thinking enough to extrapolate what would happen and they certainly were not republicans.

[Warren Stupidity]

30. Yes. This is a replay of 93. Not identical. But close.

It will be effectively equivalent when our Democratic leadership lets all the bills die and then takes the party into a massive defeat in 2010.

[WhiteTara]

32. the senate gave Hillary a standing ovation

and promptly killed health care reform.