Notes
[Go to Not Going Back – Guide to 2024 Presidential Election]
[Back to Who Are the Democrats For?]
NOTE 1: Health Insurance Gaps. In 2007, about 45 million Americans had no health insurance. Over two thirds of those families had at least one full-time worker. Over half the families had incomes that were above the poverty level and 4 times the poverty level [Covering the Uninsured: Options for Reform]. In 2024, federal poverty level was approximately $15,000 for an individual, which is raised by about $5400 for each additional family member – about $20,000 for 2, $31,000 for 4 [Federal poverty level]. [Back to Health Coverage]
NOTE 2: Obamacare Description: The Affordable Care Act [another summary here]:
- stopped insurers from turning away or overcharging people with pre-existing conditions,
- created an insurance exchange to improve coverage options,
- subsidized families that had trouble affording coverage, and
- extended Medicaid funding to families above the poverty.
[Back to Health Coverage]
NOTE 3: Republican Opposition to Obamacare.
- Origin and vote: Affordable Care Act.
- Fox coverage of ACA: Propaganda, Persuasion, or Journalism?
- Legal challenges to ACA: Litigation Decade.
- Trump failed efforts to kill Obamacare: Trump had 4 years.
- Concepts of a plan: Trump trips on health care.
[Back to Health Coverage]
NOTE 4: Return of anti-monopoly enforcement. As monopoly researcher Matt Stoller describes:
” since the late 1970s, early 80s, we’ve pursued a policy of consolidating economic power under the guise that would make things more efficient, right? … then you have one entity that is setting prices and usually those prices are high or worse. … Trump administration… brought a [anti-monopoly] case against Google, and they brought a case against Facebook. … Biden administration has supercharged it. They’ve brought it to another level. … They won one of the cases against Google, which is a huge deal. And they’ve also really changed merger policy to say, okay, you really are not allowed to do large, anti-competitive mergers anymore and with really good impacts. … I want to mention that there’s a lot of easy stuff, right, in the competition framework, like for example, inhalers cost $500 in the U.S. and they cost $7 in France and the Biden administration actually took that off. There’s junk fees. There’s a whole bunch of stuff people understand.” [Back to Consumer Protection]
NOTE 5: Republicans led on free trade. For instance, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was originally negotiated by Republican George H.W. Bush, and got more support from Congressional Republicans than Democrats, though the final law was championed by Bill Clinton. [Back to Jobs]
NOTE 6: Are Whites discriminated against? Of course prejudice can go both ways. However, even a majority of Whites (56% to 14%) believe that “when it comes to a person’s ability to get ahead in our country these days, being white helps“. [Back to Helping Minorities]