Democrats Better?

Let me say up front that I despise everything about the way Trump is running his presidency, and most vehemently how he divides the country.  Even more than him, though, is the contempt I have for the Republicans in Congress who back him up.

But was it better when the Democrats had the White House and Congress?

Let’s look at the signature legislation, the Affordable Care Act (ACA).  Obama said he was in favor of nationalized health care for all.

Congress said, that’s not the way we roll.

Here’s the main issue, if you want to subsidize health care for some portion of the population, then some other portion of the population has to bear the cost.  This is a very reasonable issue to debate, who benefits, and who pays.

One way is to fairly distribute the costs over everybody, like with Social Security, or Medicare.  A tax pays for health care for all.  But that’s not what they did.

The cost falls on companies, most painful for the small ones, and self-employed healthy individuals, mostly in the building trades maybe?  Just think about that for a second.  Who are those people?  Well, most likely they’re Republicans.  Great!  Get Republicans to pay for it!

Who benefits?  Low income people without jobs that cover them.  Who are those people?  Well betcha that’s mostly Democrats.  Yay!

So instead of national health, that’s what they did.  And guess what.  The people paying for it were bullshit.  It totally divided the country.  And the corporations brought all their money to bear to fight it.  And recruited all the angry young men who were suddenly asked to subsidize health care.  And we got Trump.  And a Republican Congress.

I’d really love to see some way to break up our two party system, or, maybe more practically, get enough people behind Bernie’s agenda, which is to forget the Democrat vs. Republican thing, go Independent, and campaign on two issues — universal health care and free college education.  Issues that would benefit people on all sides of the political spectrum.