Some pundits are describing last week’s election as an extinction level event for Republicans. I have heard that once before. In 1974, Democrats swept into office at the state and national levels. They had 291 U.S. House members and 60 Senators. They did so on the heels of Nixonian corruption, rising gasoline and fuel prices, and an unpopular war. Democrats believed that they were on the cusp of generational changes. They had a mandate to root out government corruption, lower fuel costs and pursue progressive energy policy, and usher in both peace and prosperity. That feels eerily similar to today. But it all collapsed a few years later. Republicans took back the Presidency and the Senate and dismantled many Democratic policy initiatives. What went wrong? And what must Democrats do to avoid a repeat of history? First, they must recognize something about last week’s vote. It was more an anti-Trump vote than it was a pro-Democrat vote, just as the 1974 vote was a referendum on Nixon. C...
There's a simple reason why (after more than a decade) Donald Trump and the Republicans have no plan to replace Obamacare. I'll explain in a few minutes. But first, some background. When the Affordable Care Act (or Obamacare) was passed in 2010, it was an effort to expand health care coverage to a lot of people who needed it, while controlling their costs. It had certain key provisions, not the least of which were that people couldn't be denied coverage for pre-existing conditions, that all chronic diseases needed to be covered fairly, and lifetime coverage caps had to be lifted. The problem was that if you left matters to insurers to set insurance premiums based on what this would cost, the price of insurance would rise dramatically. So the government took a look at three different programs and ultimately put them together into one system. For people whose income was so low that they couldn't afford any real cost-sharing, the government expanded Medicaid. For elders...