It's been a common Republican rejoinder on sooo many issues, pretty much anything they don't like, to try to find any one little thing that has gone wrong so far (omg, a website glitched, what inconceivable systemic ineptitude that shows!) or even more often... Common for them to say, but we don't know what some costs or results will be. Well, there are lots of things where one doesn't know exactly but you have to take your best guess. Lots of things people pay for because it's not just the right thing, but the thing that might be necessary to keep the rest of the economy together or to keep a growing contingent of your people from giving up, incurring more costs to weather and drag out the issue, doing something individually foolish or destructive, or leaving the country. Of course, if you happen to have an opposition that is doing everything it can to defund the government in general and to enable corporations to make more loopholes in the legislation along the way -- I mean, I find it rather hard to believe Democrats did this all by themselves -- then it's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy, aka plain out sabotage.
And I have to agree with Louise. You don't reasonably throw away half or more of the population's regular needs merely because they happen to be somewhat more expensive in absolute terms. It's particularly nasty to do that when those are people that the society has currently (in practice, despite lip service to the contrary) taken it for granted are being generally exploited -- for example, women bearing the brunt of service industry work, being expected to be the compromising and nurturing ones, generally put up with anything from wallflower jobs to nastiness to harassment, and often being paid much less than their counterparts even in the same exact job descriptions. If we can afford to have half a dozen carrier battle groups or more officially active? Then we can afford to dig up some cash and pay for mammograms and I daresay even at least a couple abortions apiece.
I'm becoming more inclined to agree (with Val) on the point that it would all be more practical if it were closer to a single-payer system, so the particulars of the solution on offer is one problem. But when you start claiming some things are just "too" expensive to require most people to chip in a little so that they can get indirect benefits of other groups in society being supported, I want to see some very careful calculations and explanations about exactly how much it has to cost (that is, in a system where the overall costs are not running away anyway) and how you are going to prove that the people who you think are just "too" expensive, are perfectly dispensable culturally and economically for the rest of the society. To the point that everyone else can really better afford not to care. Otherwise, my default position is more that more people should be willing to trade more effort and benefits across the society in kind, and recognize that caring for other people in the system benefits everyone, regardless of whether one is the immediate and personal beneficiary of a specific coverage or not.
