Why exactly are you unwilling to pay for other people's medical care?

[dblack]

Lame Straw Man. No one has ever claimed "there was nothing wrong with the old health insurance system" but O-Care is a poorly conceived and poorly launched stab at fixing the problem.

Shoving Obamacare down the throats of Americans has not only had serious negative unintended consequences, it is running into resistance, rejection and cost-overruns at its most basic level.

Furthermore, early data shows many of those who have bought into it already had health insurance meaning many of those it was intended to help - the uninsured - are still uninsured.

Shoving Obamacare down the throats of Americans has not only had serious negative unintended consequences, it is running into resistance, rejection and cost-overruns at its most basic level.

Furthermore, early data shows many of those who have bought into it already had health insurance meaning many of those it was intended to help - the uninsured - are still uninsured.

"Nearly half of the 23 non-profit insurance plans created under Obamacare in 2011 at a cost of $2.4 billion have announced they will close by the end of the year.

Utah’s Arches Health Plan on Tuesday became the 10th health insurance co-op to announce that it was closing its doors. The move comes soon after the Obama administration’s decision on Oct. 1 to provide just 12.6 percent of the $2.87 billion that insurers were seeking to offset losses caused by unexpectedly high coverage costs."

Nearly half of Obamacare co-ops are closing

Obamacare as promised has reduced the number of uninsured, 18% to 12% over the last 2 years. The CBO estimates it will level out at about 9% in a few years.

There are a number problems with Obamacare that can be fixed and eventually will be.

5 Ways Obamacare Can (And Should) Be Fixed

It's the basic premise of ACA that needs fixing, namely that the way to goal of health care reform should be to force everyone to buy insurance.

There're only two ways of achieving full or near full coverage, a mandatory insurance requirement or government provided universal coverage. There wasn't sufficient support in congress for government provided universal coverage.

Right. The basic premise of ACA was that the purpose of health care reform wasn't to address health care inflation, but to get everyone on the sinking ship of "insurance". Insurance (in particular, too much insurance) was, and remains, the problem. It isn't the solution.

If we want comprehensive healthcare available to everyone, then I don't see any alternative to insurance, either private or government.

If...

If we want basic health care available to the poor as a government service, there's no need for insurance. We could do it locally, with local control and local taxation, like we've done with primary education. But this belies the true purpose of ACA - to bail out the insurance industry.

It is an unspoken fact of our federal government that major policy initiatives don't go anywhere unless powerful lobbying interests make them happen. That's why nothing happened to address health care "reform" until the largest insurance companies saw an angle.

 

[Arianrhod]

If we want basic health care available to the poor as a government service, there's no need for insurance. We could do it locally, with local control and local taxation, like we've done with primary education.

We already have something like that in terms of Medicaid, which is handled statewide. Drill down to the local level, and you'd have the same chaotic patchwork that you have in public education, with Texas, for example, trying to revise its textbooks to make Moses one of the Founding Fathers.

Do you have enough faith in the honesty of your local politicians to think none of them would skim those funds?

The problem was what to do about the middle-class patient who found their cancer treatment capped at an arbitrary level and who ended up in bankruptcy, and the middle-class patient whose asthma or diabetes or MS cost tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and the middle-class patient who was denied insurance because of preexisting conditions. And even those middle-class patients who didn't face anything that extreme, but who found their premiums going up and up and up because in many states there was only one insurer, and they ended up dropping their coverage because little luxuries like food and clothing and the mortgage and the utilities got in the way.

Single-payer would have solved that, but the lobbyists yelled "socialism!" and the media picked it up and too many Americans bought it, so we ended up with the PPACA. All the Republicans seem to have been able to come up with since its implementation is some vague reference to "vouchers."

So what's the answer? "Anything but this" is not helpful.

 

[dblack]

So what's the answer? "Anything but this" is not helpful.

The answer depends on the question. If the question is, "what do we do about out-of-control health care inflation", the answer is very different from the answer to "how do we make sure everyone gets all the health care they need?"

In neither case is the answer to sign ourselves into permanent debt to insurance corporations.

 

[Arianrhod]

So what's the answer? "Anything but this" is not helpful.

The answer depends on the question. If the question is, "what do we do about out-of-control health care inflation", the answer is very different from the answer to "how do we make sure everyone gets all the health care they need?"

On neither case is the answer to sign ourselves into permanent debt to insurance corporations.

Not sure what you mean by "permanent debt." You pay your premiums, you get coverage. You switch to another carrier, you don't owe the first one anything.

As for lowering costs, that would have been great. But the triad of pharma, insurance, and the medical community has more lobbyists than anyone else in D.C. You can't break all of them at once, so you chip away at them a little at a time.

Doing away with insurance caps and preexisting conditions was a start. There are other changes down the line baked into the law that nobody seems to want to read.

 

[dblack]

So what's the answer? "Anything but this" is not helpful.

The answer depends on the question. If the question is, "what do we do about out-of-control health care inflation", the answer is very different from the answer to "how do we make sure everyone gets all the health care they need?"

On neither case is the answer to sign ourselves into permanent debt to insurance corporations.

Not sure what you mean by "permanent debt."

That's probably not the most accurate term for it. Debt is something you enter into voluntarily. This is something more like extortion. The insurance industry is, backed up by the coercive violence of government, telling ALL health care consumers, "Pay us or else!"

You pay your premiums, you get coverage. You switch to another carrier, you don't owe the first one anything.

You tell the insurance industry to fuck off, and you are punished by government.

This law takes away the most fundamental right a consumer has: the right to say "no" to a product or service if they don't think it's worth the asking price.

As for lowering costs, that would have been great. But the triad of pharma, insurance, and the medical community has more lobbyists than anyone else in D.C. You can't break all of them at once, so you chip away at them a little at a time.

Of course we can break them. We simply stop doing business with them. That's what was beginning to happen before ACA. That's why their little game was breaking down. That's why premiums were going through the roof and sales of new policies were plummeting. That's why they chose to act. And the whores in Congress were all-too-willing to oblige.

Doing away with insurance caps and preexisting conditions was a start. There are other changes down the line baked into the law that nobody seems to want to read.

The rancid poison "baked into" ACA is only beginning to come to light. I'm not sure how anyone can be naive enough to believe it will be good when we recognize who the chefs were.

 

[Arianrhod]

[
Of course we can break them. We simply stop doing business with them.

Always easy to say when you're healthy and have no dependents.

And, yes, I snipped this out of the rest, because we've been over all that a dozen times and neither of us is going to budge. So sue me.

 

[LOki]

Obamacare as promised has reduced the number of uninsured, 18% to 12% over the last 2 years. The CBO estimates it will level out at about 9% in a few years.

There are a number problems with Obamacare that can be fixed and eventually will be.

5 Ways Obamacare Can (And Should) Be Fixed

It's the basic premise of ACA that needs fixing, namely that the way to goal of health care reform should be to force everyone to buy insurance.

There're only two ways of achieving full or near full coverage, a mandatory insurance requirement or government provided universal coverage. There wasn't sufficient support in congress for government provided universal coverage.

Right. The basic premise of ACA was that the purpose of health care reform wasn't to address health care inflation, but to get everyone on the sinking ship of "insurance". Insurance (in particular, too much insurance) was, and remains, the problem. It isn't the solution.

If we want comprehensive healthcare available to everyone, then I don't see any alternative to insurance, either private or government.

If...

If we want basic health care available to the poor as a government service, there's no need for insurance. We could do it locally, with local control and local taxation, like we've done with primary education. But this belies the true purpose of ACA - to bail out the insurance industry.

It is an unspoken fact of our federal government that major policy initiatives don't go anywhere unless powerful lobbying interests make them happen. That's why nothing happened to address health care "reform" until the largest insurance companies saw an angle.

Indeed.

If you had asked the typical ACA advocate what the quintessential Republican dick-move would look like, they'd describe legislation that guaranteed revenues to Wall Street banksters by establishing a system that attempts to made their financial services a necessity, and then making criminals out of anyone who refused to do business with those banksters.

These assholes have no business criticizing the Kochs or the Waltons.

 

[dblack]

It's the basic premise of ACA that needs fixing, namely that the way to goal of health care reform should be to force everyone to buy insurance.

There're only two ways of achieving full or near full coverage, a mandatory insurance requirement or government provided universal coverage. There wasn't sufficient support in congress for government provided universal coverage.

Right. The basic premise of ACA was that the purpose of health care reform wasn't to address health care inflation, but to get everyone on the sinking ship of "insurance". Insurance (in particular, too much insurance) was, and remains, the problem. It isn't the solution.

If we want comprehensive healthcare available to everyone, then I don't see any alternative to insurance, either private or government.

If...

If we want basic health care available to the poor as a government service, there's no need for insurance. We could do it locally, with local control and local taxation, like we've done with primary education. But this belies the true purpose of ACA - to bail out the insurance industry.

It is an unspoken fact of our federal government that major policy initiatives don't go anywhere unless powerful lobbying interests make them happen. That's why nothing happened to address health care "reform" until the largest insurance companies saw an angle.

Indeed.

If you had asked the typical ACA advocate what the quintessential Republican dick-move would look like, they'd describe legislation that guaranteed revenues to Wall Street banksters by establishing a system that attempts to made their financial services a necessity, and then making criminals out of anyone who refused to do business with those banksters.

These assholes have no business criticizing the Kochs or the Waltons.

Shhhhhhh!!!! (they don't wanna talk about that)

 

[Flopper]

Obamacare as promised has reduced the number of uninsured, 18% to 12% over the last 2 years. The CBO estimates it will level out at about 9% in a few years.

There are a number problems with Obamacare that can be fixed and eventually will be.

5 Ways Obamacare Can (And Should) Be Fixed

It's the basic premise of ACA that needs fixing, namely that the way to goal of health care reform should be to force everyone to buy insurance.

There're only two ways of achieving full or near full coverage, a mandatory insurance requirement or government provided universal coverage. There wasn't sufficient support in congress for government provided universal coverage.

Right. The basic premise of ACA was that the purpose of health care reform wasn't to address health care inflation, but to get everyone on the sinking ship of "insurance". Insurance (in particular, too much insurance) was, and remains, the problem. It isn't the solution.

If we want comprehensive healthcare available to everyone, then I don't see any alternative to insurance, either private or government.

If...

If we want basic health care available to the poor as a government service, there's no need for insurance. We could do it locally, with local control and local taxation, like we've done with primary education. But this belies the true purpose of ACA - to bail out the insurance industry.

It is an unspoken fact of our federal government that major policy initiatives don't go anywhere unless powerful lobbying interests make them happen. That's why nothing happened to address health care "reform" until the largest insurance companies saw an angle.

There has to be either private or government insurance to cover catastrophic events and chronic healthcare costs. A healthy person may live for many years with only a few hundreds dollars a year in healthcare cost. Then a disease or accident can bring on hundreds of thousands of dollars in cost that can go on for years.

 

[dblack]

It's the basic premise of ACA that needs fixing, namely that the way to goal of health care reform should be to force everyone to buy insurance.

There're only two ways of achieving full or near full coverage, a mandatory insurance requirement or government provided universal coverage. There wasn't sufficient support in congress for government provided universal coverage.

Right. The basic premise of ACA was that the purpose of health care reform wasn't to address health care inflation, but to get everyone on the sinking ship of "insurance". Insurance (in particular, too much insurance) was, and remains, the problem. It isn't the solution.

If we want comprehensive healthcare available to everyone, then I don't see any alternative to insurance, either private or government.

If...

If we want basic health care available to the poor as a government service, there's no need for insurance. We could do it locally, with local control and local taxation, like we've done with primary education. But this belies the true purpose of ACA - to bail out the insurance industry.

It is an unspoken fact of our federal government that major policy initiatives don't go anywhere unless powerful lobbying interests make them happen. That's why nothing happened to address health care "reform" until the largest insurance companies saw an angle.

There has to be either private or government insurance to cover catastrophic events and chronic healthcare costs. A healthy person may live for many years with only a few hundreds dollars a year in healthcare cost. Then a disease or accident can bring on hundreds of thousands of dollars in cost that can go on for years.

Right. That's the sane way to utilize insurance. But we've been sold a different bill of goods. The insurance industry, and the regulators they've managed to manipulate, have steered us into the delusion that insurance is a way - indeed, the only way - to finance regular health care expenses. That's not sane, and it's the fundamental problem with our health care market right now.

The really frustrating thing is that markets, even those impeded with ill-considered regulation, tend to correct for such idiocy. And that was beginning to happen. The scapegoat in all the ACA propaganda was young people who were refusing to fall for the insurance sales-pitch. Younger, financially savvy people - especially the growing number of freelancers and self-employed - began to realize that using insurance to pay for routine health care was foolish, so they stopped doing it.

This is what shook up the insurance industry. Their house of cards couldn't continue to stand if the expanding base of new policy holders failed to grow, or shrank. That's what had them "ready to deal" and why they, under a ruse of "B'rer Rabbit's Briar Patch" wailing, sent in their lobbyists to DC with a reform bill for Congress to pass. PPACA is their final bulwark against real health care reform.