Boehner admits Obamacare should be fixed, not replaced.

[debbiedowner]

ACA is the law, all plans are written by insurance companies. There was not a government health insurance plan.

That's the irony of it. Most of ACA was designed the insurance companies. We're letting corporations write the laws. What a fucking mess.

Nope, you still don't understand, the govt came up with the Law and the insurance companies had to design plans to comply with the law. It was the insurance companies that came up with the mandate or they wouldn't play.

Are you really that naive?

Obamacare architect leaves White House for pharmaceutical industry job | Glenn Greenwald

Is the pharmaceutical company now an insurance company?

Did you read the article? Do you think Glenn Greenwald would just make it up? How about Bill Moyers?

Washington’s Revolving Door Is Hazardous to Our Health | BillMoyers.com

Yes I did and I did not see where at the time it was crafted that she was an employee of the insurance company. She may have come from one, but you implied insurance companies put this together.

 

[JimH52]

The best Democrats could come up with was a bad Republican plan?

No, the best Democrats can come up with is single payer, but because Conservatives are married to their dogma we are prevented from getting it.

There are only two ways our health insurance industry can go from here:

1. Back to what it was before, where pre-existing conditions caused some people to have prohibitively high premiums and deductibles

or

2. Single payer

There are no other paths forward on insurance reform. That's it. Obamacare does something really well; it exposes how extraneous, pointless, and expensive private health insurance is. Without pre-existing conditions, there is no sustainable business model for private insurance. That's why it needs to be abolished completely and replaced with single payer.

IT may be the best Democrats can come up with, but that means they think the worst possible system is the best.

You mean compared the Republican plan, "Let them Die!"

 

[debbiedowner]

American Health Care Act (AHCA) Quiz

 

[dblack]

That's the irony of it. Most of ACA was designed the insurance companies. We're letting corporations write the laws. What a fucking mess.

Nope, you still don't understand, the govt came up with the Law and the insurance companies had to design plans to comply with the law. It was the insurance companies that came up with the mandate or they wouldn't play.

Are you really that naive?

Obamacare architect leaves White House for pharmaceutical industry job | Glenn Greenwald

Is the pharmaceutical company now an insurance company?

Did you read the article? Do you think Glenn Greenwald would just make it up? How about Bill Moyers?

Washington’s Revolving Door Is Hazardous to Our Health | BillMoyers.com

Yes I did and I did not see where at the time it was crafted that she was an employee of the insurance company. She may have come from one, but you implied insurance companies put this together.

I see. "Plausible deniability". Got it.

 

[Cellblock2429]

Boehner: Trump's presidency so far is mostly 'a complete disaster'

But the Repubs are power hungry and will screw the country, rather than admit the ACA will work well if amended.

/---- Funny that libs spent 8 years mocking Boehner now they quote him like he is their god. Bwhahaha bwhahaha bwhahaha

 

[Cellblock2429]

America. THE most incarcerated and surveilled population in the history of empire, with the shittiest, most expensive and inefficient healthcare system on the planet amongst advanced post industrial nations. We choose to occupy the planet to further the interests of Wall Street and the "job creator" class instead.

/---- And yet they come from around the world for our inferior healthcare. Imagine that.

 

[dblack]

/---- Funny that libs spent 8 years mocking Boehner now they quote him like he is their god. Bwhahaha bwhahaha bwhahaha

Why wouldn't they? They passed a Republican health care law.

 

[Cellblock2429]

Boehner: Trump's presidency so far is mostly 'a complete disaster'

But the Repubs are power hungry and will screw the country, rather than admit the ACA will work well if amended.

/---- Obozocare was designed to fail so Dems could usher in single payer. Trouble is it failed too soon and Hildabeast lost.

 

[debbiedowner]

When it comes to pre-existing conditions, divided we fall

Now that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has released its analysis of the House healthcare bill, the Senate is reportedly starting from scratchon its own version. Here’s a suggestion from one health insurance CEO for where they should begin: Reject the idea that health insurers could, under any circumstances, charge more for individuals with pre-existing medical conditions.

Our nation is already struggling with enough division — economic, racial, geographic, and political. It would be both tragic and unnecessary to create a new divide between those who are seriously ill and those who are healthy. Rather than trying to fix the pre-existing condition provisions in the House bill, the Senate should take them off the table, permanently.

Anyone who tried to buy individual health insurance before the Affordable Care Act (ACA) remembers the problem. In most states, if you had a pre-existing condition, you could either be denied coverage or forced to wait for months or years before treatment for the condition was covered. You could also be charged a much higher premium.

So, for many people with serious medical conditions, the anxiety of illness was compounded by financial insecurity. Some were forced to sacrifice family savings or run up large debts; others went without needed care.

Since 2010, the ACA has guaranteed that individuals with pre-existing conditions are eligible for the same coverage as everyone else, at the same cost. My state, Massachusetts, is one of seven that had pre-existing condition protections in place even before the ACA became law. It’s arguably one of the ACA’s most popular provisions, and it has maintained broad, bipartisan support. Unfortunately, a last-minute addition to the House-passed American Health Care Act (AHCA) reopens the issue by giving states the option of once again allowing insurers to charge higher premiums for individuals with pre-existing medical conditions. The CBO found that, in states choosing this option, “less healthy people would face extremely high premiums.” The Senate should settle the matter by rejecting this provision as unnecessary and divisive.

Rather than allowing pre-existing medical conditions to again divide us, let’s acknowledge that illness is actually a great equalizer. From birth to death, no one is immune from the risks of disabling injury or chronic illness. It may befall you, your spouse, your parent, or your child.

If it’s not your family, it’s your coworker, your friend, or your neighbor. That’s one of the reasons individuals and families so easily bond with people facing similar medical challenges, regardless of their political beliefs or economic background, and it’s why tens of millions of people join together to donate and raise money for efforts to find cures and support treatment. We’re all in it together.

A return to charging higher premiums for people with pre-existing conditions would also reinforce the mistaken notion that serious illness stems largely from personal choice. Most illness and disability is due not to choice but to bad luck and bad circumstances — the accidents of birth and life, including genes, economic and social factors, workplace conditions, and exposure to infection and toxins.

Even for those illnesses where personal choice can matter, chance still plays a big role. Some people manage to avoid serious illness and live long lives despite unhealthy habits and poor choices, while others who lead much healthier lifestyles may not be nearly as fortunate.

A fair, stable health insurance system requires an adequate number of both sick and healthy people who contribute to the pool of funds available to pay medical claims. That’s not the case in some of the state marketplaces where individuals can buy coverage — too few healthy, lower-cost people have enrolled to balance the higher costs of their sicker population.

So it’s perfectly legitimate for Congress to consider better ways to encourage healthy individuals to buy and maintain insurance and there are a variety of available mechanisms to achieve this goal. What Congress must not and need not do, however, is return us to the days when insurers could increase premiums for individuals with pre-existing conditions. We should take this option out of the policy conversation and out of our healthcare system for good.

There are other substantial problems with the House bill in addition to the pre-existing conditions provision, including deep cuts to Medicaid funding, the uncoupling of individual health insurance tax credits from personal income and regional medical costs, and a change in how much more older people could be charged for coverage.

The net effect of these provisions would be to make health insurance unaffordable for many of the older and poorer Americans who are currently insured under the ACA. Bipartisan solutions to these problems should be within reach and may emerge in the Senate. But before we tackle these problems, we should agree that, whether we are healthy or sick, we are all created equal, and our health insurance system should reflect this American principle.

Andrew Dreyfus is President and Chief Executive Officer for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, one of the largest independent, not-for-profit Blue Cross Blue Shield plans in the country.

 

[The Derp]

Nope. Doesn't fly. No Republicans voted for ACA. Democrats got exactly what they wanted

If you say so...I see why you have to frame the conversation as thus. No matter how bad the ACA is, it's much better than the plan Conservatives took 7 fucking years to come up with that barely passed the House, that only 24% of people support.

There is always more than "two ways".

No, there isn't in this case. If there were other ways, surely the 7 fucking years Conservatives had to come up with a replacement would have produced them. But after 7 fucking years of posturing, Conservatives don't have shit to show for it. You all voted to repeal Obamacare 60+ times, and you didn't think to have a viable replacement plan ready? What the hell were you doing all that time?

 

[The Derp]

/---- Obozocare was designed to fail so Dems could usher in single payer. Trouble is it failed too soon and Hildabeast lost.

How did Obamacare fail? 24 million people have insurance now who didn't have it before. The failure is the Conservatives' who took seven fucking years to come up with the shitty AHCA.

 

[The Derp]

IT may be the best Democrats can come up with, but that means they think the worst possible system is the best.

If single payer is so bad, how come every other first world nation routinely beats us in every single health metric there is including life expectancy and infant mortality? How come every other first world nation gets better outcomes while spending half as much of a % of GDP as we do? It would seem that the current and previous systems are the worst possible since our health care metrics are worse than those of single payer nations.

 

[Cellblock2429]

IT may be the best Democrats can come up with, but that means they think the worst possible system is the best.

If single payer is so bad, how come every other first world nation routinely beats us in every single health metric there is including life expectancy and infant mortality? How come every other first world nation gets better outcomes while spending half as much of a % of GDP as we do? It would seem that the current and previous systems are the worst possible since our health care metrics are worse than those of single payer nations.

/---- Maybe if they paid their fair share of NATO they wouldn't have the $$$$$ for all the free stuff. Three examples but plenty more: Buyer Beware: The Failure of Single-Payer Health Care

• The head of trauma care at Vancouver's largest hospital announces that they turn away more cases than any other center in North America. He's quoted as saying this would be unheard of in the United States.
  
  
• In Manitoba, which is my former home province, the premier--the political equivalent of a governor--concedes that his pledge to end hallway medicine has fallen short. Hallway medicine is the phenomenon where the emergency rooms are so filled with patients that people are forced to lie on stretchers in hallways, often for days. Overcrowding is a periodic problem. In fact, the overcrowding is worse than last year. The community is rocked by the death of a 74-year old man who had waited in the emergency room for three hours and had not been seen.
  
  
• New Brunswick announces that they will send cancer patients south to the United States for radiation therapy. New Brunswick, a small maritime province, is the seventh to publicly announce its plans to send patients south. In the best health care system in the world, the vast majority of provinces now rely on American health care to provide radiation therapy. Provinces do this because the clinically recommended waiting time for treatment is often badly exceeded. Ordinarily, oncologists suggest that there should be a two-week gap between the initial consult by the family doctor and the referral to the oncologist, and then two weeks more from the oncologist to the commencement of radiation therapy. In most Canadian provinces, we exceed that by one to two months, sometimes three.

 

[Darkwind]

IT may be the best Democrats can come up with, but that means they think the worst possible system is the best.

If single payer is so bad, how come every other first world nation routinely beats us in every single health metric there is including life expectancy and infant mortality? How come every other first world nation gets better outcomes while spending half as much of a % of GDP as we do? It would seem that the current and previous systems are the worst possible since our health care metrics are worse than those of single payer nations.

Cherry picked health care metrics that do their very best to ignore other factors. The biggest problem is not the actual care received. Our actual care is second to none. The real problem is when people say health care, they are really talking about payments, not healthcare.

Single payer systems work ONLY on societies that have been conditioned to believe that government largess is good, and the confiscation of wealth is a necessary end. Couple that with the government that has coopted other nations to pay for other basic needs, like defense, and they can manage the corruption to a degree. However, the costs always increase to the point of unsustainability. Just take a look at all the runaway money going into mandatory retirement programs that are run by state governments. The costs exceed the ability to pay and the system will eventually crash. Single payer will not be any different, and the corruptions and greed in government will accelerate the demise of this nation if it ever comes to single payer.

No thank you.

 

[The Derp]

Maybe if they paid their fair share of NATO they wouldn't have the $$$$$ for all the free stuff.

Not free stuff if you are paying for it with taxes. So I don't know from where you get this very childish and amateurish ideas.

As for the anecdotes below...I'm not sure what they're supposed to prove. The United States has among the worst wait times of any first world health care system.

* Canada had the highest percentage of patients (36%) who had to wait six days or more for an appointment with a doctor, but the United States had the second highest percentage (23%) who reported that they had to wait at least this long. New Zealand, Australia, Germany, and the U.K. all had substantially smaller numbers of people reporting waits of 6 days or longer. Canada and the United States, in that order, also had the lowest percentage of persons who said they could get an appointment with a doctor the same or next day.

Also, right now 24,000,000 people do not have health insurance. So their wait times are forever.

 

[The Derp]

Cherry picked health care metrics that do their very best to ignore other factors. The biggest problem is not the actual care received. Our actual care is second to none. The real problem is when people say health care, they are really talking about payments, not healthcare..

I agree that people do not know the difference between health care and health insurance. Health insurance is just the mechanism by which your health care is reimbursed. It does not benefit you as a patient to have a profit motive tied to the administration of reimbursements from the pool of premiums you've already paid into to your provider. There is nothing about that transaction that is improved or enhanced by having a profit motive. In fact, many insurers already use Medicare as the template when devising their own processes for reimbursement. To this day, no one has been able to provide a clear reason as to why how our health care is paid should have a profit motive tied to it. The reason is because there is no clear reason for it. Insurance companies are parasites who do nothing to improve or enhance your health care. All they do is restrict it. Not sure how paying what amounts to as much as a 20% service fee for some person in Hartford to push a button improves your health care. Conservatives have never been able to make the case that it does. So if it costs us as much as 20% of our premiums, if it doesn't improve or enhance your care, and if it's excluding 24,000,000 people now, why not just abolish it entirely and expand Medicare for everyone?

Single payer systems work ONLY on societies that have been conditioned to believe that government largess is good

All a single payer does is administer reimbursement of your premiums to your provider. It does nothing else. And those single payer societies have healthier citizens who lead longer lives and experience less wait times than patients here. This is undeniable. So when you said I was "cherry picking" health metrics, I'm wondering why you think that? If life expectancy is not a viable health metric, what is? Because we aren't tops in anything other than cost.

 

[Darkwind]

Cherry picked health care metrics that do their very best to ignore other factors. The biggest problem is not the actual care received. Our actual care is second to none. The real problem is when people say health care, they are really talking about payments, not healthcare..

I agree that people do not know the difference between health care and health insurance. Health insurance is just the mechanism by which your health care is reimbursed. It does not benefit you as a patient to have a profit motive tied to the administration of reimbursements from the pool of premiums you've already paid into to your provider. There is nothing about that transaction that is improved or enhanced by having a profit motive. In fact, many insurers already use Medicare as the template when devising their own processes for reimbursement. To this day, no one has been able to provide a clear reason as to why how our health care is paid should have a profit motive tied to it. The reason is because there is no clear reason for it. Insurance companies are parasites who do nothing to improve or enhance your health care. All they do is restrict it. Not sure how paying what amounts to as much as a 20% service fee for some person in Hartford to push a button improves your health care. Conservatives have never been able to make the case that it does. So if it costs us as much as 20% of our premiums, if it doesn't improve or enhance your care, and if it's excluding 24,000,000 people now, why not just abolish it entirely and expand Medicare for everyone?

Single payer systems work ONLY on societies that have been conditioned to believe that government largess is good

All a single payer does is administer reimbursement of your premiums to your provider. It does nothing else. And those single payer societies have healthier citizens who lead longer lives and experience less wait times than patients here. This is undeniable. So when you said I was "cherry picking" health metrics, I'm wondering why you think that? If life expectancy is not a viable health metric, what is? Because we aren't tops in anything other than cost.

So, you lament the evil of health insurers and then advocate to turn government into a health insurer.

I see no reason that a health care provider should not be allowed to make a profit for their skills and services and to recoup costs in investment in training and equipment. If you remove the motivation for health providers, you'll soon find that we won't have any at all. If you then say, we will just have to force people to provide their services for the greater good, you are advocating slavery. This is your choice I suppose.

In truth, people cold afford health care if we did away with health insurance. A health provider who charges more than their customer base can pay will soon find themselves out of business. They would then be forced to charge a reasonable and competitive rate for their services while still being able to profit from their investment.

 

[dblack]

Nope. Doesn't fly. No Republicans voted for ACA. Democrats got exactly what they wanted

If you say so...I see why you have to frame the conversation as thus. No matter how bad the ACA is, it's much better than the plan Conservatives took 7 fucking years to come up with that barely passed the House, that only 24% of people support.

Yep. I never expected anything from the Republicans other than tweaking ACA to better benefit the insurance industry. As the Democrats have been so proud to point out, ACA was Republican style legislation - ie a corporate feeding trough. Don't expect the Republicans to radically alter it. And they certainly won't repeal it outright.

There is always more than "two ways".

No, there isn't in this case.

Of course there is.

If there were other ways, surely the 7 fucking years Conservatives had to come up with a replacement would have produced them. But after 7 fucking years of posturing, Conservatives don't have shit to show for it. You all voted to repeal Obamacare 60+ times, and you didn't think to have a viable replacement plan ready? What the hell were you doing all that time?

I've mostly been trying to wake people up to the corporatism inherent in ACA. But you persist with your premise that I'm a Republican. I've told you, that's not the case.

 

[The Derp]

So, you lament the evil of health insurers and then advocate to turn government into a health insurer.

Health insurers first and foremost must make a profit. The government does not have that weight hanging over its head. When you have a system like the one we have here, the bargaining power lies in the hands of providers and drug companies, who use the fractured market to play insurers (payers) off one another in order to get higher fees. That's why we spend close to 20% of our GDP on health care when the next closest, first-world nation spends about 10% of their GDP. When insurers/payers/buyers outnumber providers, who has the leverage in negotiating? When providers outnumber insurers/payers/buyers, who has the leverage in negotiating? Why do you think Conservatives prevented Medicare from negotiating for cheaper drug costs as a part of Medicare Part-D? Because if Medicare were allowed to bargain for cheaper drugs, its leverage as the largest payer in the marketplace would give them that ability, and we'd have cheaper drug costs. The consequence of that is that drug companies wouldn't make as much in profit they are making now. So we have a choice to make. What is more important; corporate profits or health care affordability?

I see no reason that a health care provider should not be allowed to make a profit for their skills and services and to recoup costs in investment in training and equipment.

We aren't talking about health care providers, we are talking about health insurance administrators. There exists absolutely no benefit to patients to have the administration of reimbursement be tied to a profit motive. Doing so only restricts your access to care. The administrators push a button to send payment from the pool of premiums you've already paid into to your health care provider on your behalf. The insurer and the provider are two completely separate entities (lone exception being Kaiser Permanente). For this service and this service alone, insurance companies can take as much as 20% of your premium for themselves. Care to explain exactly how privatizing that transaction -that you aren't even a part of- benefits you as a patient when Medicare does the exact same thing for a fraction of the cost? Private insurance is a rip-off and only restricts your care.

If you remove the motivation for health providers, you'll soon find that we won't have any at all. If you then say, we will just have to force people to provide their services for the greater good, you are advocating slavery. This is your choice I suppose.

You are conflating health care with health insurance. Let me be perfectly clear; health insurance is the mechanism by which your health care is paid. It is a transaction you are not even a part of. It has no bearing on the quality of care your provider gives you. All health insurance does is administrate reimbursement to your providers. Now how exactly does having a profit motive tied to that administration benefit you as a patient or as a taxpayer? The answer is that it obviously doesn't. Insurance companies have nothing to do with your health care other than paying the doctor for the care they performed, or restricting which doctors you can and cannot see. In a single payer system, you can go to any doctor you want. In our current system, you can only go to a doctor within your network unless you want to pay very high fees for out-of-network providers. And all these networks fragment the health care market, which lets drug companies play insurers off one another in an effort to maximize profits at your expense.

In truth, people cold afford health care if we did away with health insurance. A health provider who charges more than their customer base can pay will soon find themselves out of business. They would then be forced to charge a reasonable and competitive rate for their services while still being able to profit from their investment.

No, people cannot afford health care on their own. The average cost to treat lung cancer is near $1M for someone's lifetime. No one except the very rich can afford that. The idea of insurance is a viable one...but the problem is that when you fragment the insurance pool into hundreds, thousands of different payors, the handful of drug companies and/or providers (relative to the number of insurers), you give the patients absolutely no bargaining power to negotiate for cheaper fees. And don't you want cheaper fees?

 

[The Derp]

Yep. I never expected anything from the Republicans other than tweaking ACA to better benefit the insurance industry. As the Democrats have been so proud to point out, ACA was Republican style legislation - ie a corporate feeding trough. Don't expect the Republicans to radically alter it. And they certainly won't repeal it outright.

Right, because they have no alternative plan. Because no alternative exists aside from returning to pre-existing conditions and rescission, or going full single payer. That's why in the seven fucking years Conservatives had to come up with an ACA replacement, they have nothing. Obamacare did exactly what it was supposed to do; show how pointless and costly for-profit insurance is. If there was a Public Option in Obamacare, we would have come to this revelation much sooner. But this country is so determined to do things the hard way, and thus here we are.

Yf course there is.

No, there really isn't. If there was, surely Conservatives would have come up with something in the last 7 years they were vowing to repeal the law. Unless you're now saying that they were full of shit that entire time. In which case, why even listen to them today? Why take anything they say seriously? 7 years of promising to repeal Obamacare, but no replacement plan to speak of? That's just irresponsible.

I've mostly been trying to wake people up to the corporatism inherent in ACA. But you persist with your premise that I'm a Republican. I've told you, that's not the case.

As long as there exists a profit motive tied to health insurance, you will never be able to get rid of corporatism in health insurance. That is why I advocate for single payer, Medicare-for-all. There is nothing that privatizing the administration of reimbursements does to improve or enhance your care. Not one thing. All it does is restrict your access to health care and protect profits of drug companies at your expense. It's a complete rip-off.