The Republicans labeling the affordable health care act "Obamacare" and attacking it from day one was a significant propaganda victory, as we can see. In fact the law is very pro-corporate and could have been written by a moderate Republican - was very similar to the Massachusetts health care program instituted by Mitt Romney.
Another very significant propaganda victory, about half of people in the US who think global warming is not caused by humans, or not happening.
Isn't it a common practice to find nicknames for pieces of legislation? In that case, the Republican found one that stuck. The name "Obamacare" is nothing more than a portmanteau of "Obama" and "Health care", and as such it does not entail any political message per se, except that it's supposed to name an health care legislation in which Barack Obama was particularly involved.
So, calling the use of this word "propaganda" seems highly incorrect.
In fact, IIRC Barack Obama himself appropriated the name and said something like "I don't mind this to be called Obamacare, because I do care" (I'm paraphrasing).
It seems to be increasingly common to make the name of the legislation propaganda in itself. Naming the ACA 'affordable' would be an immediate example - a less contentious example would be "USA PATRIOT" (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act), as attacking PATRIOT immediately sounds politically worse than attacking state surveillance.
Countering 'Affordable' with 'Obamacare' was a very successful propaganda win. Affordable sounds good, Obama sounds bad (to the intended audiences). That you can realistically ask people to take sides between the two (whether they prefer Obamacare or ACA) illustrates this perfectly (if Kimmel is a source, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6m7pWEMPlA)
For a large portion of the population, "Obama" is/was an inherently negative word.
While it's true that the word simply indicates it was "his" plan, this is also intrinsically linked to extreme negativity and calling it Obamacare was extremely loaded.
I can understand why this could be seen as propaganda.
In response to your edit, I think this was a good way for Obama to take things in stride. But it doesn't change the inherent negativity for most.
if you define propaganda as any effort to be convincing of anything then there's nothing left that isn't it anywhere, in which case the point was not to point out propaganda but to be right about everything
A lot of the failures of the law I put on Republicans. They knew it was going to pass, and yet they decided to ignore it for political reasons instead of working to fix some of its broken provisions.
That place you get your information from. It stinks.
Look up: Gang of Six affordable care act.
The HCR bill included 6 core planks of previous Republican health care bills, and the Democrats accepted and incorporated 161 amendments to the bill from Republicans.
The article you quote is from a month before the final version of the bill was even prepared (H.R. 3590), let alone submitted for vote.
Bills in progress mean nothing, especially to that Democrat leadership, who often used the gut-and-amend procedure to completely redo legislation on the fly, avoiding rules regarding which committee(s) a bill must traverse.
Interesting, so the law passed with zero Republican support but yet it is their fault for all of it's problems. Maybe the Democrats should be responsible for its failure?
> Interesting, so the law passed with zero Republican support but yet it is their fault for all of it's problems.
"a lot of its failures"
And yes, I think that if you're the counterparty and rally all your members to oppose anything that is put up for a vote then you absolutely share responsibility for what comes out.
Not least because by withholding your vote you forced them to find a vote elsewhere. So instead of your opinion, they had to cater to someone else's.
I don't necessarily blame Congressional Republicans for the choice. In the political calculus of a toxic and rabid media campaign to its base and primary challenges from the right, I understand why they did what they did.
But they still don't get a pass by saying "Oh, we voted against that. Therefore we have no responsibility for it."
Why would you consider it a failure? And don't forget that the stubbornness of Republicans is the reason the single payer part of the law was dropped, even though that would have had a much larger effect on the cost of healthcare. Additionally, several Republican governors _refused_ federal money for Medicaid expansion, directly making healthcare less affordable for their constituents purely for the political optics of being able to say they stood up against "Obamacare".
Zero Republican support was baked-into it from the start. Repubs that did work with the democrats, and had their feedback incorporated (161 amendments) were threatened by House leadership (see: Chuck Grassley, Gang of Six).
Obamacare is largely a success. Even the current CBO report shows that it has been working well. The program is only a few years old and needs some tweaking. Its main shortcoming is that it is slightly underfunded, and needs more enrollments from younger people. Also pretty shitty that 19 states would rather see their constituents suffer than to allow the federal government to expand Medicaid for them.
Because the implementation effectively just gave the insurers a locked market.
Want a real ACA do what most of the world did - take profit out of the healthcare business.
Put in a 5 year plan that insurers have to convert to non for profit orgs.
Single payer won't work in the US most of the world doesn't use it but has some sort of hybrid system.
The common ground is that private providers are often non for profit or have to invest a substnetial percentage of their profit back into health services they provide for free or at highly discounted rates.
And non for profit doesn't mean they can't make money it just means they don't pay dividends to shareholders and invest their profits back into healthcare.
The other big succesful 'dark PR' campaign I can think of was the tabacco companies' attacks on health research on smoking. Probably this is a perenial strategy in societies that require the consent of the populace for government actions.
Actually I suppose almost all wars fit this model.
Leaving it to a states is great in theory but the one thing that I think needs to be done is something that only the federal government has the power to do. Which is open up competition across borders for insurance companies and pharmaceuticals.
Including international borders but I'd be happy just to be able to buy insurance from the state next door.
Of course. So, for those states that are better run, people will generally migrate there. Similarly, people who seek greater publicly-funded benefits will migrate to those areas that provide more.
If every state had its own FDA, it'd be as hard for a restaurant / fast food chain, a brand of groceries, etc. to start selling in a new state as for them to start selling in a new country. Same with drug manufacturing.
If every state had its own immigration standards, you'd have to have border checkpoints between states as you do between countries. Even, e.g., Canada and the US have serious border checkpoints. Apart from the inconvenience, it would kill the economy of cities on state borders. (Imagine people from New Jersey commuting into work in Manhattan!)
If every state had its own DMV, you wouldn't necessarily be able to drive between all states.
Every state definitely does have its own DMV, with its own regulations (for instance: some states have Graduated Drivers License programs for teenagers).
The situation with interstate recognition of licenses is interesting: neither the full faith and credit clause nor the dormant commerce clause actually require states to recognize each other's drivers licenses, and in fact many don't recognize each other's learners permits.
There's lots of effort to harmonize laws across states. No reason that Minnesota would do much other than rubber stamp a drug approved in Wisconsin (assuming Wisconsin was not famously bad at approving drugs).
Also, is your last paragraph sarcasm? Every state does have its own vehicle regulations. The feds use project funding as a carrot to get states to do things, but the regulation is mostly at the state level.
Customs, water rights, environmental protections, trade agreements, equal rights, bill of rights, sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health...
It's not perfect, no. But the 1965 act is specifically the part that protects voting rights of minorities. Would voting be better without that? Especially given that one party has turned voter suppression into an integral part of their strategy for winning elections?
If it were left up to states, a large portion of them would deliberately not have these rules. And the nonstandardization of rules across the other states would mean that even in cases where they existed, the laws and associated court precedents would be a gigantic mess, making it a lot harder to litigate cases.
For reference on situations where minority voting rights are still a problem:
There are a lot of things worth leaving to the states, but the way insurance works, the financial feasibility depends a lot on how big the buying group is. It's why healthcare bought on behalf of a company is cheaper and better than healthcare bought by an individual, and it's why PPACA created marketplaces for individual insurance buyers.
It's almost certain there are things that are feasible when the US has a certain healthcare policy that aren't feasible on the state level. I'd guess that single payer is one of them.
+ a huge percentage of people who think global warming is caused by humans and happening do nothing about it. the sales of cars are rising, the gas is being bought, the whole USA is under a 24/7 air conditioning, the gluttony is at its highest, the production and consumption of chicken and beef too, etc.
From my perspective the difference between believers and non-believers is invisible.
Eh, changes like that don't happen at the individual level. Crime is at historic lows not because people decided to be less violent, but because of socioeconomic changes (and possibly the elimination of common sources of lead).
Rivers stopped catching on fire in the US not because individuals decided to stop dumping chemicals into rivers, but because Americans took collective action in the form or regulations and fines to force better behaviour through financial consequences.
The reality is pollution is an externality, and a very invisible one. Individuals are unlikely to make decisions that impact it because they don't directly bear the costs. And the reality is our societies aren't structured to make it easy to avoid polluting. Try living in an average American city without burning gas in a car, or oil/gas to heat or cool your home. It's an impossible ask for a typical middle class family, let alone someone lower on the socioeconomic scale.
There's a reason things like carbon taxes and green subsidies are very attractive: it allows you to incentivize the behaviour we want to see by baking in the cost of those externalities into people's decisions.
A lot of people are demanding it. Heck, some countries like Canada are actively passing things like carbon taxes.
But when a large portion of the populace (and thus elected officials) doesn't believe there's a problem in the first place, it's a little tough to take collective action, which brings us back to the original point.
"Inheritance tax is double dipping"- if you inherit a fortune in unrealized capital gains, the government essentially forgives that tax debt. I.e. if you were to cash out at that value, you wouldn't have to pay anything.
"Americans are obscenely litigious"- This, as far as I know, started with the McDonald's case. Since then there has been a steady stream of headlines of people successfully suing businesses for things that were seemingly ridiculous. None of these cases were as ridiculous as they were made out to be.
"The income tax credit on mortgage interest makes it cheaper for americans to buy a home"- The average monthly cost for a home is whatever the market says the monthly cost for a home is. And in fact, because the tax brackets are stratified, and the mortgage interest deduction is mutually exclusive with the standard deduction, more expensive homes rose in value more, as a result of the legislation, than less expensive homes.
Another very significant propaganda victory, about half of people in the US who think global warming is not caused by humans, or not happening.