Digby and I have talked a lot about the mandate issue being presented by the health-care bill for months now, and a lot of great blogs have been hitting it too. A new poll done by Research 2000 for the PCCC and DFA says American voters will hate this bill if there are mandates and no public option.
If American voters aren't going to see any immediate pluses to their overall health care and are forced to pay into the mandates of the health care bill then how will the voters feel about the new outlay of cash? A good many will probably just pay the penalty instead of signing up and will be just as pissed, and that's coming from the left. The right-wing crazies will hate it even if it significantly helped their lives. so the debate has really focused on the differences on the left. We have captured the debate.
I know I'm a broken record on this subject, but I do think it's the thing most lacking from the insider conversations on HCR. Not that I really know, because I'm not an insider, but occasionally I get a wee sense of what's actually occupying staffers in various places. "Voters liking this thing" seems to be at best an afterthought.
It's sorta weird, really, because on most subjects it's the first thing they think of, both about the policy itself and the myriad imaginary attack ads that can be run based on the policy. If voters don't like this thing, it'll likely be repealed before most of it even takes effect, either because Republicans take over or because frightened members of a Dem controlled Congress do so. Sure, there's the optimistic view that it could be "made better" instead of repealed, but I'm not really feeling all that hopey.
No matter what the tosser Ron Brownstein says, liberal activists want health-care reform much more than Villagers can imagine, but we don't want it if it does nothing more than enrich insurance corporations and in the end never accomplish much of the goals that the defenders of the Senate bill are saying.
Lieberman and the Villagers are more interested in protecting the DC insider crowd than they are reforming health care for America.
And to show how lacking his argument is, Brownstein tries to paint us as the racists. Brownstein should check out a few teabagger rallies. And to dismiss the complaints we have as "ideological" shows how petty the elitists truly are.
