this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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Agreed on the 100% part, but this absolutely isn't specific to political parties. They both love giving corporate handouts with no strings attached. I suspect this has more to do with campaign donations than anything else. It's the same with defense spending where we regularly just can't account for millions of dollars.
Even with the PPP, which was fully bipartisan, they claimed to have strings and then just forgave 10 million of them, even though we know many workers never saw the money intended for them. Slightly different situation, but similar things happened with rural internet initatives in the 90s as well
My super generalized statement wasn’t so much saying that dems were the only corporatists, but that just that they espouse social good and use that as the means and justification for their inevitably corporatist actions.
One of my favorite ones was Obama care, making insurance companies record profits. Where did that money come from? Us… taxpayers. The ones it was supposed to save money. I’m sure there were some outliers that were really helped with the whole pre-existing conditions protections, but the rest of us got shafted.
That's a terrible example, and generally not much of your post is true. Most people aren't actively paying for the ACA through taxes, only the richest 20% of americans (>281k /year) src, and in fact it saved many Americans money even without pre-existing conditions. Plus the ACA has saved many lives.
The cost and concessions made to pass it are more a reflection of how awful capitalism and the american healthcare system are. Those companies were always going to make record profits regardless of whether the ACA passed or not, just like many other companies, and you always foot the bill for the uninsured/underinsured anyway through other methods like ER visits and cascading illness through inability to pay for services. You also pay for them when they have medical emergencies and file for bankruptcy and when they become homeless because of medical issues or the payment of medical goods and services.
Also remember, many democrats were pushing for single-payer which would've skirted most of this by expanding medicare and forcing insurance companies to compete.