Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Sunday, November 17, 2013

Be Prepared

Nothing works perfectly, nothing works all the time. The Republicans are going to declare the healthcare.gov website a failure even when it no longer is a failure. They regard its working a failure as well as its not working a failure. This is perfectly predictable. The Obama administration and Democrats more generally need to prepare effective responses to the inevitable charges well in advance. These responses should not hum and haw, they should not delve into robotic acronyms and bureaucratise, they should not be qualified and give opponents the benefit of the doubt. We have just observed the right reduce the ACA to a website's functionality, we have just observed the right focus on 3% of the population in the private healthcare insurance market who think they like their crappy plans instead of the 40% potentially accessing Medicaid and regulated markets that would once have excluded them, hell, we have observed the right pretend that healthcare is establishing death panels when the ACA's regulations functionally eliminate the death panels of exclusive and misleading junk insurance profiteering. The right will tell lies, the right will fixate on minor problems to distract from major benefits. Democrats need to memorize their concise, confident, righteous, unified, fighting stance right now. Democrats succeeded by doing it during the shutdown, you can succeed again by doing it again. Democrats, do it.

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