Concern Troll is Concerned

I know, someone at S,N! has used that title, but let's face it, they probably didn't come up with it either.

All Health Care Politics is Local:

The latest press packet I'm working off of finally told me how much health insurance costs in NY State, I iz an expert! (Which, as Downpuppy mentions to Megan, here, and at Susan's, means she's confusing union group plans with individual private coverage and is off in her numbers by roughly a factor of 4, making her conclusions completely mistaken.)
Anyway, just because Baucus's plan is arguably unworkable by design, as it sure doesn't seem like he wants reform, doesn't mean I can't use those design flaws as an argument against reform in general.
Also, hahah, unions, you suck, haha, nyah nyah nyah.

Political Theory:

Oh, fuck.

Obama's poll numbers have been improving steadily over the last week. Theory: people like Democrats much better when they are not talking about health care. Corollary: the liberal commentators saying that no, really, health care is in a good position to pass are indulging in wishful thinking. (To be sure, it is possible to level exactly the same accusation at me).

So a rise in Obama's numbers now means Megan is winning. Ok. And Megan, I know you're a terrible writer, but you do realize you just said you agree with those liberal commentators, right?
And folks, this train wreck of a post just gets worse. This won't be shorter.

The Townhall ruckuses were not the end of the Republican opposition on health care. They were the beginning. There is an observed regularity in politics so consistent that I am tempted to dub it Megan's First Law of Politics: intentions are more popular than concrete proposals. As long as there was no one Obama Plan on the table, people could project their fondest dreams onto the president. Once there are plans on the table, Republicans will be able to attack specific propositions that are specifically attached to the president [sic].

So sending armed bullies to shout down anyone who dares not agree with them was only the beginning? Does this mean we are going to see a full scale fascist uprising from the conservative movement? Is she drunk? Once Obama's team gets specific then conservatives can start attacking them, because the deathers claiming he has specific plans to kill your grandma/retarded children/Republicans/vets/your pets/white people/all the pretty girls are just voicing generalized opposition. What the fuck is she talking about?
And Megan? "Megan's law" is already claimed as a name for something, you're from the tristate region, you know that.

For example, polling last year found that a majority of Democratic primary voters were opposed to a mandate to buy health care. Mandates were popular among two groups: people with post-graduate education, and people who made more than $100K. Polls this year are a little more positive--but people aren't paying attention to the details of the debate right now. I'm betting that support for mandates drops once people aren't hearing about them for the first time from a pollster.

She is drunk. Mandates are not universal coverage, which is why Dem primary voters didn't like them so much. Now that the same group is faced with the seeming impossibility of universal coverage, and maybe even the public option, they're coming around to at least moving the ball forward a little with mandates, alas. But Megan knows Dems better than us Dems do, and knows we'll change our minds once we understand an idea that Clinton was pushing a decade and a half ago.

When someone asks you, "Should people have to buy health insurance?", if you haven't really thought about the question, your answer is likely to be different--and more positive--than it will be after you've been musing on the oppo ads for a while.

Once they've been told mandates means they have to be raped by a black person once a month they'll change their minds, so there. Blatantly lying works, so Megan is in favor of it. After all, if they're left to understand this is about money for the already rich versus health care for the poor and middle class then they might support doing something.

Moreover, this mandate will come with a specific price tag on the subsidies, not a fuzzy "should people have to buy health insurance" question. Republicans will be able to find plenty of people who are going to be forced to buy insurance that they can't really afford under the new plan, or taxed heavily for their failure to comply. Even worse, these people will be easier to identify with than the uninsured: at or above the nation's median household income, possibly living in a high-cost area. The lower Democrats cut the subsidies to make the price tag politically powerful, the more dramatic the sob stories will be.

They'll hire (white telegenic female) actors who will read scripts about how they make $2 an hour and Obama wants to charge them $50k a day to be verbally berated by unemployed crack addict welfare queens as a mental health initiative. Megan and her allies will lie, lie, lie and be fucking proud of it, so long as they're defending their masters' profit margins.

This is not the only problem area. The budget deficit is big enough--and projected to stay big enough--that people are starting to care about it again. All of the plans on the table at this point stay deficit neutral only because the program doesn't kick in for four years; after that window, the costs explode. Most of the plans are similar enough to what prevails in Massachussetts [sic] that Republicans can reasonably point to the runaway costs there.

She can't even spell the state's name right, she has to be an expert. And there's the standard conservative argument against the government doing anything; we fucked up, so you can't do anything. Bush's deficits were noble and necessary to enable the killing of brown people, Obama's might save a brown person's life. NO.

Once there is a specific plan to make any cuts at all to Medicare, seniors will go ballistic.
. . . and so on, ad infinitum. Health care reform has not survived the worst Republicans can throw at it. It's survived--barely--the opening volley.

What an asshole. She's proud to be a lying bully who wants to fuck over the public welfare in favor of helping the already wealthy, and is ready to enable an even worse assault on reason in service to her masters. She and Peter's pals at Freedom Works know they'd lose an honest debate, so they're going to do everything they can not to have one. She doesn't care about the human lives involved, she just wants to WIN. She won't even see material gain in the form of a raise, she'll just feel a cheap self-righteous thrill, and isn't that what's really important?