In an alternate universe, President Obama signs Ron Fournier's dream bill into law, known as "Obamacare."
The nation's most stubborn and willfully ignorant pundit, Ron "why won't Obama lead and make Republicans like him" Fournier,
strikes again.
On health care, we needed a market-driven plan that decreases the percentage of uninsured Americans without convoluting the U.S. health care system. Just such a plan sprang out of conservative think tanks and was tested by a GOP governor in Massachusetts, Mitt Romney.
Honestly. He wrote that. In November, 2014. Four and a half years after the Affordable Care Act—
modeled after a Heritage Foundation proposal and Mitt Romney's Massachusetts law—passed. After a presidential election in 2012 that featured Mitt Romney going through
insane contortions trying to differentiate between Romneycare and Obamacare because they are almost exactly the same.
Why does Fournier refuse to see that they are the same fucking thing? Why else? No bipartisanship.
Instead of a bipartisan agreement to bring that plan to scale, we got more partisan warfare. The GOP resisted, Obama surrendered his mantle of bipartisanship, and Democrats muscled through a one-sided law that has never been popular with a majority of the public.
And it's all Obama's fault!!!!! Why, oh why can't he lead those Republicans into not resisting?
He also writes this: "We need a so-called grand bargain that would raise taxes and reduce the rate of growth of Medicare and other entitlements." He's apparently completely missed the memo on the dramatically reduced rate of growth in Medicare spending. He seems to have missed not just the memo, but the last four or five years.
There's a lot of really bad punditry out there. Then there's Fournier. What a masterful mix of both phoning it in and total disregard of anything approaching reality. Congrats, Fournier, it's only Monday, and you've already won the week of suckitude.