The purpose of Obamacare

[Oldstyle]

I enjoy the Clean Debate Zone much more than the rest of these boards because the anti-flaming rules typically keep the extremists at both fringes away. Without flaming, we can have real conversations.

I would like to hear your thoughts on what the true "purpose" of Obamacare is/was.

Do you think the purpose was truly to improve our healthcare system and lower costs?

Do you think it was meant as a big step toward a single payor system in the US by getting as many people onto Medicaid as possible??

Do you think it was meant to take over an even greater portion of our healthcare system, fail miserably and thus creating another "crisis" which could only be solved by full implementation of a single payor system?

Or do you have another idea??

I'm conflicted between the three. I don't think President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and their staff are stupid, but perhaps they were naive enough to think that this would actually improve health while lowering costs. On the other hand, I think both of them have said, on the record, that they are FOR a single payor system enough times that this very well could have been their goal in the first place.

What do you think?

Quite obviously it's simply one step towards a goal of socialized medicine. The legislation itself doesn't work and was horribly written. Obama and Pelosi wanted single payer but each was astute enough to realize they wouldn't get it. So they did the next best thing...lie to the American people about what ObamaCare was...pass it...and then when it implodes they will call for a single payer system to "fix" the problem.

 

[Shrimpbox]

I am neither as sanguine or as circumspect when talking about dems reasons for Obama care. This will be inflammatory but Obama and dems do not care about about bettering the healthcare system or the people without ins. How can I have that opinion? When the president has no regard for 6 million(so far) people thrown out on the no healthcare street in order to force feed HIS legacy achievement down the countries throat, this is not a man who believes in the greater good.

Obamacare is and has always been a tool for the concentration of power. Yes this is the alinskys creed but it is the one Obama operates by. If he destroys the healthcare system more people will become more dependent on govt. and more beholden to those in govt that dish out the goodies. If he can keep saying that we just need more time to let obamacare work it will allow the cancer to grow and metastasize until,it kills,the patient. Constant comparisons trying to raise this to the level of social security or Medicare are only efforts to legitimize a scam. Obama and democrats care not about what hurt is visited on the American people under the ruse of compassion,therefore they can expect a lack of respect from this writer.

 

[Mojo2]

I enjoy the Clean Debate Zone much more than the rest of these boards because the anti-flaming rules typically keep the extremists at both fringes away. Without flaming, we can have real conversations.

I would like to hear your thoughts on what the true "purpose" of Obamacare is/was.

Do you think the purpose was truly to improve our healthcare system and lower costs?

Do you think it was meant as a big step toward a single payor system in the US by getting as many people onto Medicaid as possible??

Do you think it was meant to take over an even greater portion of our healthcare system, fail miserably and thus creating another "crisis" which could only be solved by full implementation of a single payor system?

Or do you have another idea??

I'm conflicted between the three. I don't think President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and their staff are stupid, but perhaps they were naive enough to think that this would actually improve health while lowering costs. On the other hand, I think both of them have said, on the record, that they are FOR a single payor system enough times that this very well could have been their goal in the first place.

What do you think?

• By Doug Ross,

The Affordable Care Act consists primarily of taking away many of our liberties by advocating health care for the less fortunate.

The government does not possess the authority to require an individual to purchase health insurance, so why try trick the uniformed into thinking the government knows what is best for them?

The Affordable Care Act is about government control over a large market and the welfare of those people.

As more companies drop their health insurance plans, those individuals will be required to join a government-controlled health plan and be subservient to that ideology.

This is just what the socialistic president wants — more people dependent on government and therefore more control over those individual lives. Again, just smoke and mirrors. Watch this hand while I steal your liberties.

— Jack Jaros, Whiting

Affordable Care Act is about government control

 

[Mojo2]

I love the Heritage Foundation's healthcare law. My conservative friends were all agog when the Heritage Foundation created it in opposition to "Hilarycare." What's wrong with my con friends? Is it suddenly bad because of Obama?

Heritage Foundation: Don't Blame Us for Obamacare


Tim Cavanaugh|Apr. 19, 2010 12:53 pm

"The Obama health-care law 'builds' on the Heritage health reform model only in the sense that, say, a double-quarter-pounder with cheese 'builds' on the idea of a garden salad, writes the Heritage Foundation's Robert Moffit. "Both have lettuce and tomato and may be called food, but the similarities end there." Moffit is objecting to President Obama's citation of Heritage research in support of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act:

It began when President Obama told "Today" show host Matt Lauer on March 30 that "a lot of ideas in terms of the exchange, just being able to pool and improve the purchasing power of individuals in the insurance market, that originated from the Heritage Foundation."

First, Heritage did not originate the concept of the health insurance exchange. Furthermore, the version of the exchange we did develop couldn't be more different than that embodied in this law...

For us, the health insurance exchange is to be designed by the states. It is conceived as a market mechanism that allows individuals and families to choose among a wide range of health plans and benefit options for those best suited to their personal needs and circumstances...

Under the president's law, however, the congressionally designed exchanges are a tool imposed on the states enabling the federal government to standardize and micromanage health insurance coverage, while administering a vast and unaffordable new entitlement program. This is a vehicle for federal control of state markets, a usurpation of state authority and the suppression of meaningful patient choice... This is probably not something President Obama gives a whit about, but we at Heritage do.

The other charge -- repeated on this page and elsewhere -- is that the federal individual mandate in Obama's health-care plan came from us.

For the record, we think that the law's federal mandate is unconstitutional...

Yes, in the early 1990s, we, along with other prominent conservative economists, supported the idea of such a mandate. It seemed the only way to solve the "free-rider" problem, in which individuals can, under federal law, walk into any hospital emergency room nationwide and rack up big bills at taxpayer expense.

Our research in the ensuing two decades has led us to realize our initial idea was operationally ineffective and legally defective. Well before Obama was elected, we dropped it.

Heritage Foundation: Don't Blame Us for Obamacare - Hit & Run : Reason.com

Email this link to those Conservative friends of yours, okay?

 

[dblack]

I love the Heritage Foundation's healthcare law. My conservative friends were all agog when the Heritage Foundation created it in opposition to "Hilarycare." What's wrong with my con friends? Is it suddenly bad because of Obama?

Heritage Foundation: Don't Blame Us for Obamacare


Tim Cavanaugh|Apr. 19, 2010 12:53 pm

"The Obama health-care law 'builds' on the Heritage health reform model only in the sense that, say, a double-quarter-pounder with cheese 'builds' on the idea of a garden salad, writes the Heritage Foundation's Robert Moffit. "Both have lettuce and tomato and may be called food, but the similarities end there." Moffit is objecting to President Obama's citation of Heritage research in support of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act:

It began when President Obama told "Today" show host Matt Lauer on March 30 that "a lot of ideas in terms of the exchange, just being able to pool and improve the purchasing power of individuals in the insurance market, that originated from the Heritage Foundation."

First, Heritage did not originate the concept of the health insurance exchange. Furthermore, the version of the exchange we did develop couldn't be more different than that embodied in this law...

For us, the health insurance exchange is to be designed by the states. It is conceived as a market mechanism that allows individuals and families to choose among a wide range of health plans and benefit options for those best suited to their personal needs and circumstances...

Under the president's law, however, the congressionally designed exchanges are a tool imposed on the states enabling the federal government to standardize and micromanage health insurance coverage, while administering a vast and unaffordable new entitlement program. This is a vehicle for federal control of state markets, a usurpation of state authority and the suppression of meaningful patient choice... This is probably not something President Obama gives a whit about, but we at Heritage do.

The other charge -- repeated on this page and elsewhere -- is that the federal individual mandate in Obama's health-care plan came from us.

For the record, we think that the law's federal mandate is unconstitutional...

Yes, in the early 1990s, we, along with other prominent conservative economists, supported the idea of such a mandate. It seemed the only way to solve the "free-rider" problem, in which individuals can, under federal law, walk into any hospital emergency room nationwide and rack up big bills at taxpayer expense.

Our research in the ensuing two decades has led us to realize our initial idea was operationally ineffective and legally defective. Well before Obama was elected, we dropped it.

Heritage Foundation: Don't Blame Us for Obamacare - Hit & Run : Reason.com

Email this link to those Conservative friends of yours, okay?

I see this whole lame excuse as I kind of "double dog" dare. Republicans (and many blue-dog Democrats) said "No" to single payer, so Dems responded with - "Oh yeah, well take this! (corporatist sellout).

They sure showed us!

 

[Mojo2]

The purpose of ACA was to set up private health insurance companies as de-facto public utilities - permanent middlemen in every single health care transaction. Contrary to the belief of many, on both sides of the left/right divide, the goal is not single payer, but rather to avoid it in favor of a corporatist 'partnership' with Congress.

Here is a column which asks, What if Obamacare was never about our health?

What if Obamacare was never about our health?

By DIANA WEST, Columnist

POSTED: 11/08/13, 11:44 PM EST |

Could Obamacare be the biggest voter registration fraud scheme in the history of the world?

This is the bombshell assessment of a pair of conservative activists: Gregg Phillips, founder of Voters Trust, and Catherine Engelbrecht of True the Vote. Both groups are conservative nonprofits focused on election integrity.

What helped Phillips and Engelbrecht draw this conclusion, which Breitbart News reported this week, is almost as amazing as the conclusion itself: Left-wing groups and media have for some time been openly discussing Obamacare as a vehicle for so-called Motor Voter registration. Motor Voter is the law that makes voter registration a part of driver’s license applications. In fact, the 1993 law also requires any government office that provides “public assistance” to make voter registration part of the process. Since many applicants applying for coverage in the Obamacare “insurance marketplace” -- the infamously malfunctioning healthcare.gov website -- will be eligible for Medicaid (public assistance), not “Marketplace coverage,” voter registration by law must be part of the available health insurance package.

Presto -- 68 million voters, registered with the help of Obamacare “navigators.” Wanna bet whether these new voters will trend Democrat or Republican?

Of course, “presto” doesn’t literally describe the pace of this massive voter registration project, but just give it time. This is the finding, not of conservatives Phillips and Engelbrecht, but of a report by Demos, a left-wing organization funded by George Soros. The report’s title says it all: “Building a Healthy Democracy: Registering 68 Million People to Vote through Health Benefit Exchanges.”

Conservative commentator and former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey has written about this aspect of Obamacare, highlighting similar evidence in the program of a “cynical scheme of enrolling Democratic voters.” Earlier this year, McCaughey noted that the Obamacare law “outsourced” the all-important job of enrolling the uninsured in health plans to community organizations. Why does this matter? McCaughey explained it this way: “Community activists” -- Obamacare “navigators” --- “can say and do things that government employees can’t, such as urging people to register as Democrats.” She continued: “There is nothing wrong with encouraging voting. But a government employee (for example, at the DMV) is legally barred from saying you should become a Democrat. A community organizer can say it and will. ... The Obama health law transforms community organizations into a fifth estate with steady government funding but without government rules.”

Could registering millions of new Democrats always have been the main goal of Obamacare? Phillips and Engelbrecht absolutely think so. They believe “all of those promises about health care were never meant to be true,” Breitbart reports. Instead, they see the massive new program as a means “to collect personal data and voter registration information and share it with the federal government, which would in turn share it with left-wing groups ... to conduct what is essentially a taxpayer-funded Get-Out-The-Vote operation for the Democratic Party.”

If this is so, it certainly would help explain the striking sangfroid of the Obama White House in the midst of the epically hot and sweaty chaos of the disastrous medical program rollout.

So where does “fraud” potentially enter the process? To begin with, the application process includes no mechanism for income verification. An applicant can claim zero income and be automatically enrolled in Medicaid. States are already sorting through thousands of Medicaid applications via Obamacare and, as Breitbart reports, “most of those applications will likely be hastily approved.” After that, a voter registration card is mailed out automatically. In other words, “no human being ever sees the card between the time someone logs onto healthcare.gov to type any information, true or untrue, into the system and when a card is mailed out. At that point, when the card shows up in the mail, whoever receives it just needs to sign it and mail it back to the authorities, and they will have registered to vote without ever being in front of any official person.”

Sounds rife with fraud potential to me.

Phillips notes a big legal loophole. The Obama administration is interpreting an Internet click on the Obamacare website as a visit to a physical government office. “The law is clear,” Phillips said of Motor Voter. “It states that all of this (voter registration) has to happen in an office, face-to-face with an individual.”

Engelbrecht flagged another point. Unlike other Motor Voter provisions, an applicant actually has to opt out of voter registration. The inevitable uptick in voter registrations via community organization “Navigators,” Engelbrecht believes, will allow, as Breitbart puts it, “left-wing organizations to search and target voters using information the federal government collected in a way that has never been seen before.”

Maybe that’s why the community organizer who became president doesn’t seem in any way abashed -- not even about having been caught in the colossal lie he repeated, apparently to lure people into supporting his health plan, claiming Americans who wanted to keep their doctors and their insurance plans, could do so. (Even the Washington Post “Fact Checker” column gave him “four Pinnochios” on this count, indicating “Whoppers.”) There is a weird sense of disconnection from the whole fiasco, as if it were no fiasco at all.

Maybe it’s not.

Diana West’s new book is “American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character” from St. Martin’s Press. She blogs at dianawest.net, and she can be contacted via [email protected]

DIANA WEST: What if Obamacare was never about our health?

 

[FA_Q2]

I love the Heritage Foundation's healthcare law. My conservative friends were all agog when the Heritage Foundation created it in opposition to "Hilarycare." What's wrong with my con friends? Is it suddenly bad because of Obama?

Heritage Foundation: Don't Blame Us for Obamacare


Tim Cavanaugh|Apr. 19, 2010 12:53 pm

"The Obama health-care law 'builds' on the Heritage health reform model only in the sense that, say, a double-quarter-pounder with cheese 'builds' on the idea of a garden salad, writes the Heritage Foundation's Robert Moffit. "Both have lettuce and tomato and may be called food, but the similarities end there." Moffit is objecting to President Obama's citation of Heritage research in support of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act:

It began when President Obama told "Today" show host Matt Lauer on March 30 that "a lot of ideas in terms of the exchange, just being able to pool and improve the purchasing power of individuals in the insurance market, that originated from the Heritage Foundation."

First, Heritage did not originate the concept of the health insurance exchange. Furthermore, the version of the exchange we did develop couldn't be more different than that embodied in this law...

For us, the health insurance exchange is to be designed by the states. It is conceived as a market mechanism that allows individuals and families to choose among a wide range of health plans and benefit options for those best suited to their personal needs and circumstances...

Under the president's law, however, the congressionally designed exchanges are a tool imposed on the states enabling the federal government to standardize and micromanage health insurance coverage, while administering a vast and unaffordable new entitlement program. This is a vehicle for federal control of state markets, a usurpation of state authority and the suppression of meaningful patient choice... This is probably not something President Obama gives a whit about, but we at Heritage do.

The other charge -- repeated on this page and elsewhere -- is that the federal individual mandate in Obama's health-care plan came from us.

For the record, we think that the law's federal mandate is unconstitutional...

Yes, in the early 1990s, we, along with other prominent conservative economists, supported the idea of such a mandate. It seemed the only way to solve the "free-rider" problem, in which individuals can, under federal law, walk into any hospital emergency room nationwide and rack up big bills at taxpayer expense.

Our research in the ensuing two decades has led us to realize our initial idea was operationally ineffective and legally defective. Well before Obama was elected, we dropped it.

Heritage Foundation: Don't Blame Us for Obamacare - Hit & Run : Reason.com

Email this link to those Conservative friends of yours, okay?

Why?

Quite frankly that reads like a whine fest of but but but…

I don’t really care that the heritage foundation wants to run away from Obamacare – I am not going to let them. They want to fall back on the excuse that they designed it as a state concept. And? While that has far fewer constitutional issues associated with it, a shit idea is still a shit idea. They should at a bare minimum man up and OWN the fact that they came up with that travesty and disown it as a piss poor idea. That is the actual truth.

The heritage foundation’s plan is not like a whopper compared to a salad. It’s more like a Whopper compared to a Whopper Jr. One has more crap and is bigger but they are BOTH bad ideas cut from the exact same cloth.

 

[Mojo2]

I love the Heritage Foundation's healthcare law. My conservative friends were all agog when the Heritage Foundation created it in opposition to "Hilarycare." What's wrong with my con friends? Is it suddenly bad because of Obama?

Heritage Foundation: Don't Blame Us for Obamacare


Tim Cavanaugh|Apr. 19, 2010 12:53 pm

"The Obama health-care law 'builds' on the Heritage health reform model only in the sense that, say, a double-quarter-pounder with cheese 'builds' on the idea of a garden salad, writes the Heritage Foundation's Robert Moffit. "Both have lettuce and tomato and may be called food, but the similarities end there." Moffit is objecting to President Obama's citation of Heritage research in support of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act:

It began when President Obama told "Today" show host Matt Lauer on March 30 that "a lot of ideas in terms of the exchange, just being able to pool and improve the purchasing power of individuals in the insurance market, that originated from the Heritage Foundation."

First, Heritage did not originate the concept of the health insurance exchange. Furthermore, the version of the exchange we did develop couldn't be more different than that embodied in this law...

For us, the health insurance exchange is to be designed by the states. It is conceived as a market mechanism that allows individuals and families to choose among a wide range of health plans and benefit options for those best suited to their personal needs and circumstances...

Under the president's law, however, the congressionally designed exchanges are a tool imposed on the states enabling the federal government to standardize and micromanage health insurance coverage, while administering a vast and unaffordable new entitlement program. This is a vehicle for federal control of state markets, a usurpation of state authority and the suppression of meaningful patient choice... This is probably not something President Obama gives a whit about, but we at Heritage do.

The other charge -- repeated on this page and elsewhere -- is that the federal individual mandate in Obama's health-care plan came from us.

For the record, we think that the law's federal mandate is unconstitutional...

Yes, in the early 1990s, we, along with other prominent conservative economists, supported the idea of such a mandate. It seemed the only way to solve the "free-rider" problem, in which individuals can, under federal law, walk into any hospital emergency room nationwide and rack up big bills at taxpayer expense.

Our research in the ensuing two decades has led us to realize our initial idea was operationally ineffective and legally defective. Well before Obama was elected, we dropped it.

Heritage Foundation: Don't Blame Us for Obamacare - Hit & Run : Reason.com

Email this link to those Conservative friends of yours, okay?

Why?

Quite frankly that reads like a whine fest of but but but…

I don’t really care that the heritage foundation wants to run away from Obamacare – I am not going to let them. They want to fall back on the excuse that they designed it as a state concept. And? While that has far fewer constitutional issues associated with it, a shit idea is still a shit idea. They should at a bare minimum man up and OWN the fact that they came up with that travesty and disown it as a piss poor idea. That is the actual truth.

The heritage foundation’s plan is not like a whopper compared to a salad. It’s more like a Whopper compared to a Whopper Jr. One has more crap and is bigger but they are BOTH bad ideas cut from the exact same cloth.

In other words Mr. FA_Q2 says:

"Sscrew the truth and the facts, i prefer to believe the lie. And because i see the media and the Dems and Obama get away with it why can't i? I think America is just fine with millions of idiots like me just makin shit up as if it was the truth. We make up the truth to be what we want it to be."

Thanks for giving us a smoking gun to connect your idiocy to that of your puppet masters.

And a big FA_Q 2 u 2, FA_Q2!