Obamacare

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Or maybe the other Republican hopefuls simply self-destructed - - because they were NUTS!! !!

Nope...it was a RNC-blessed media hatchet job in every situation. Romney had nothing to excite the conservatives (note, not REPUBLICANS) to come out and support him. The RNC made it so conservatives had no choice...and we saw the result on election day. Obama, the sequel, or Obama-lite...that was the choice, and a lot of conservatives decided it wasn't worth the effort to go out and vote.

Are you telling me that Michele Bachmann, with her talk about how the HPV virus inoculation causes mental retardation in children not otherwise ret*d wasn't nuts? Or that Newt Gingrich, with his plans to establish the 51st state on the moon wasn't nuts? The RNC didn't need to shoot them or the others down, when they were doing such a great job at it themselves.

Two out of what....five...six people who were floating to the top BEFORE Romney. I'm impressed.

The pizza man, and the governor of...of... you know, that state with all the Texans in it, certainly demonstrated that they came complete with self destruct buttons - and each of them were leading the pack at one point.

Sorry for the long post....

Remember that the ACA has NOTHING to do with providing health care. It's about government power and control. That's what makes it so evil. It does NOTHING to improve health care for America as a whole. Indeed, it makes it even worse. For every "benefit" you can name, it does 10 times the harm in other ways.

COMING SOON, THE INSURANCE BAILOUT....

And, from another forum, some insight into those big, evil, 1% employers you love to hate....





Remember, it's not the government who will put a paycheck in your hand...it's ordinary people who take on the task of starting a business, and what HURTS THEM ultimately will HURT YOU.

As someone struggling to get a decent job, I am outraged at how this law (and the buffoon(s) who support it) have decimated my chances of finding ANY job nonetheless a GOOD job. The jobs are disappearing and the competition for the few remaining is getting tougher each day. People with good jobs are holding out on leaving if unhappy or even just retiring until they know they won't need another job...because there are just so few GOOD jobs out there.

^^^
What about people who previously had no health insurance, and with no chance of otherwise having any due to poverty or preexisting condition? The ACA certainly is the best thing since sliced bread for them. Now, if private business would have shown some interest in responsibility toward their fellow Americans instead of just raking in the dough, and had tried to help the uninsured get coverage, I might very well have a different opinion about this matter. But instead they have shrugged off any sense that they owe something to the country that had made them a success, and some have even embraced a social Darwinism that the weak deserve to die off.
And as far as disappearing jobs are concerned - sure, it's easy for them to blame the Affordable Care Act, or regulations for jobs going over seas. But the fact remains, big business doesn't have to really leave if they didn't want to. They're more interested in dollar signs than with investing long term in their own country. And it ought to be remembered, they are the same ones who have used the excuse of too high of wages and benefits as the reason for their closing down American plants. So I hardly think they are particularly interested in the welfare of the common American.

Anything to back this statement up? At all?



He is a contributing editor to the Weekly Standard and a nightly panelist on Fox News' Special Report with Bret Baier. Not exactly a person motivated by objective journalism. Most of what he says is pure speculation. Those sections HAVE NOT and WILL NOT be repealed. The re-insurance fund collections of $63 dollars per person only apply to employers with 50+ employees, just like most of the rest of his criticisms. And those are only collected from employers who do not insure their employees. The payouts actually come from the cost-savings built into the long term structure of the plan, not taxpayer money that would be going elsewhere. Yes, the enrollment numbers are behind the goal, but the pace of enrollment has been rapidly going up. As for the rules changing, EVERY SINGLE CHANGE originated from the right's demands and concerns. Every single one.

Kathleen Sebelius encouraged insurers to cover more. It is not a requirement. Insurance plans are only required to cover TEN minimum standards.

Insurance companies are not required to cover anyone for free. Stripped down plans are also not required. In fact, stripped down plans came from the insurance companies and will result in higher profits as they gobble up chunks of the new market by undercutting the consumer cost of their rivals.

As for premium increases, they have been rising way faster than inflation and cost of living expenses by far for the better part of a decade. You can't use the fact that premiums will rise as an argument, as they almost always rise. Mine actually went DOWN for the first time on January 1st. Granted it is only down by a tiny bit, but that is better than the ridiculous increases I have been faced with every year prior to now. Insurance companies can pull out of exchanges, which seems unlikely as they would lose out on huge revenue streams, but they cannot pull out of Obamacare.

A bailout has ZERO basis in reality. It is speculation based on generating fear and further attempts to stem the tide of conservatives jumping the sinking Republican ship.

It is ppointless for you to be citing anecdotal evidence from 2 individuals making blog posts. There is no validity. And the claims of jobs disappearing is absolute bunk. Jobs have been steadily added every single month for several years now, whether you want to admit it or not.

Do you bother to do any research or even read the news? Tens of thousands of policies cancelled. People forced to pay a tax because they can't afford the "affordable" health care policy available to them, or forced to pay more for less coverage AND still have medical bills. It's all there in black and white, but you don't seem to acknowledge it's there or that the volume of the pain outweighs the minor benefits conveyed by the ACA.



Typical liberal strategy...attack the messenger and not the message.



I've heard the same claim time and time again....about stuff that happened anyway. Both under liberal and conservative administrations. Denial isn't just a river in Egypt.



These are real people in the real world with real experience. Jobs being added each month? Have you been factoring in the TOTAL JOB LOSS under Obama's reign? We aren't adding jobs (sic) enough to deal with the needed increase for the population. We certainly are not adding enough jobs to make up for how many were lost since 2008. The real unemployment numbers are outrageously high...to the point that the administration cooks the books to come up with an artificially low number. We're on the road to economic recovery...or so they claim...all the while saying it's imperative that we raise the minimum wage...again...perhaps to $15/hour because of HOW BAD it is for low-earning Americans. That doesn't sound like an economic recovery to me.

Liberals...gotta love them. They can propose totally contrary positions at the same time and say it makes perfect sense.

Around 500,000 policies were cancelled. As opposed to over 2 million enrolled through the federal exchanges SO FAR. You can thank the insurance companies for cancelled policies. The only reason they couldn't keep them under the grandfather clause was because they would not have been allowed to raise the rates. It is more profitable to just cancel them and force them to buy policies at a higher cost. Do YOU bother to do any actual research? Have you poured over the bill in its entirety? Do you realize that almost every single insurance policy has MORE benefits, not less?



I don't pay attention to Fox News any more than I pay attention to the BS spewed by MSNBC. They are entertainment industries, not journalism.



So your argument is that it is possible, therefor it must be inevitable? Or is it someone is denying it, therefor it must be true?



How do you even know if they are telling the truth? Anyone can post anything they want. If you dislike Obamacare, then you have plenty of motives for exageration or outright lies. You do realize the economic collapse began under W, don't you? Do you realize that unemployment continues to drop and that the number of jobs continues to rise? Check the numbers for yourself instead of watching it on TV. It is public information. The minimum wage should be indexed to cost of living, which it is not and never has been. It is somewhat independent of economic conditions. Of course it is bad for those in poverty. Continued slashing of public welfare programs continues to decrease their quality of life and the affordability of things as basic as food, heat, and shelter. Yes, recovery is slow, which is to be expected. But at least it is actually possible for more people to find jobs than 2008. And unemployment numbers do not come from the Whitehouse, so your claims of "cooking the books" is entirely baseless. The U.S. had 133,561,000 total jobs when Obama took office in January 2009. There were 136,765,000 jobs in the US in November 2013. As for keeping up, the annual monthly average of new people entering the job market is 70,000/month. We have exceeded this number by quite a bit. Check for yourself.



Have you bothered reading your own posts? Many of the things you say are completely and provably false with some very basic reading of publicly available information. You may also want to go to factcheck.org to see if what you are claiming is even remotely true. It is a pretty basic and simple to understand format, if you don't want to read lengthy reports from agencies or organizations who specialize in analyzing information.

I judge what will happen by the track record of history.

The US government has failed to do a single thing without serving its own interests before everything else. I know of not one government program that is cost effective and actually IMPROVES anything it supposedly set out to make better.

So, yeah, I can tell you where the ACA is headed...especially since the vast bulk of it has NOTHING to do with improving health care in America.

The ACA and its follow on will destroy the system of private medical care in the U.S. What will be left is government-care run on tax loot and super care for the very rich. They will be able to buy first rate medical care and pay for it out of their will stuffed pockets. The rest of us will get what the government chooses to provide.

Think of they folks on Elysium. They got first rate medical care. The poor suffering bastards down on the ground got crumbs and sh*t. That is what is in store for us.

ruveyn

Can you honestly say that civil rights legislation on the part of the government has somehow been a bad thing?

How is that even remotely different from what we have now?

So you would prefer that there are no safety regulations for your food or medication? You think that having no limitations on the chemicals and toxins in your air, soil, and water are A-OK? You don't think that food assistance feeds any children? You think that civil rights legislation made things worse? You don't believe that reducing our risk of getting diseases like hepatitis B, measles, mumps, tetanus, rubella, and diphtheria by 95% and the elimination of small pox is an improvement? Do you believe the interstate system was a step backwards? How about the Federal Housing Authority, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the GI bill, Medicare and Medicaid, OSHA, student financial aid, basic research funding, voting rights, curtailing discriminatory hiring practices, and minimum education standards? How about the military (while bloated and overfunded) that ensures you are allowed to make all these complaints?



The ACA was NEVER about improving healthcare. It has always been about access to healthcare.

Are there problems with it? Absolutely. Many, many problems. But even as it stands now it will benefit far more people than it hurts. It already has. Things would be much better if both sides started working together to fix the problems instead just digging trenches and shouting at each other about how the other side sucks monkey balls. Both sides have views that need to be addressed instead of attacked.
If the far right would stop spending the majority of their time, effort, and money into trying to eliminate something that they know damn well is not going to go away (42 purely symbolic votes in the House to repeal so far, plus filibusters, wasted floor time, and a government shutdown) and started proposing viable solutions to the problems inherent in the law as written, maybe they could get something accomplished other than political grandstanding and finger wagging.

SORRY FOR THE LONG, MULTI-REPLY POST....

Obama said FLAT OUT before the ACA was passed that ultimately a "single-payer" system was going to be the goal. People screamed against the ACA before it was passed because what was being debated clearly would not work and would force everyone onto a "single-payer" system. Then, as now, anyone paying attention understood that "single-payer" was the PC term for saying "government run," which Obama was lying and promising was not the goal of the ACA.

As a side comment, I saw Elysium and came to the following observations:

1. So the ultra rich built a space station for themselves. What's bad about that? They had the vision, the will, and the money to make it happen. All the tech the people on Earth wanted existed ONLY BECAUSE they pursued their vision.

2. The Earth was left to the "99%." What did THEY choose to do with it? Pollution, poverty, overpopulation, etc. This was not the doing of the "1%." I may sound misanthropic, but humans are no better than rats in this regard. Being poor does not mean you have to stay in poverty. Poor people have entrepreneurship ability (consider the guy selling tickets to smuggle people onto Elysium. The "masses" chose to live in poverty and did little to nothing to improve the Earth they now dominated. The result is their own fault, not those who chose to leave.

3. While perhaps the people on Elysium could share the benefits of their technology, nothing in the movie addresses the COST of what this technology requires to do what it does. NOTHING operates for free. There is no magic machine or magic pill that cures all ills. Even if you accept the ending they showed, if the Earth was overpopulated, and we're at 6+ BILLION now, there is no way a handful of medical shuttles could meet the need of everyone on the planet. Surely those machines needed something to do what they did (if only a large sum of energy). Surely those machines needed serious maintenance after X cycles of operation. Surely those machines required components that could not be mass produced to meet the need of BILLIONS of people. The ending was unrealistic.

4. While the people of Elysium probably abused the technology to preserve their youth and unnaturally extending their life spans, what do you think people on Earth would do with it? If we made it possible to live 300 years but did nothing to curtail reproduction, we'd have an ecological and economic nightmare within a generation. Too many people, not enough jobs, not enough resources, etc.

If the movie was intended as a commentary for the need of "universal health care," it was an epic fail if you stopped to think about the details.

***



It was a good intention that had a lot of bad effects.

This is fact, not racism. The idea of minority hiring and promotion is nice when you say you want to make up for past social injustice, but here's what happened....

1. Employers were SUED for not having a proportional number of minorities in their workplace. It did not matter that the employer required any worker to have the needed competence at the job to be considered for employment. The ruling of courts was that if your standards of hiring were too high for minorities to get the job, then you were deliberately discriminating against their lack of education or educational opportunity.

2. Employers started hiring minorities who could not do the job and had to lower standards so they could not fire these minorities for substandard performance. We saw a whole generation of incompetence in corporate and government employment because people were more often hired based on COLOR and not ABILITY (so much for MLK's dream).

3. It took decades before the court finally recognized that there was sufficient "equality" in the workplace and the school that to deny a white person opportunity solely because you want to hire a minority is also illegal. Up to then, a disadvantaged white person who in no way benefited from the practice of racial discrimination under Jim Crow could consistently be discriminated against for opportunity because of his white skin (again, so much for MLK's dream).

This is no different than the issue of welfare. A private charity can decide who gets help and who does not. A government has to do everything by strictly defined standards. Make one penny more than the limit, you get no help...no matter how real your need is. Learn how to hide your resources, and you get benefits you don't deserve, and even if you know the person is scamming the system, trying to investigate to prove they are scamming the system might get you sued...especially if the scammer is in a protected class.

Laws based on good intentions rarely have good outcomes. HOW you implement the law is as important (if not more so) than the intention or goal of that law.

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The REALITY you MUST accept is that the "rich" will always have it better. Every nation with socialized medicine still has a wealthy group that can go wherever to get the medical care they desire with no restrictions.

CHOICE is what matters. Even if you had a government-run system, you want one that preserves individual CHOICE. I deal with most medical matters via holistic and natural remedies BEFORE I'd go to a doctor for a pill or a surgical procedure. The government plan does not intend to protect that. The push has been ongoing to force any VITAMIN over a specified IU dosage to be available only by prescription. As mega doses of vitamins have been proven to treat many conditions, it's denying a CHOICE to the health care consumer.

Lasik, for a long time, was NOT covered by insurance. It was expensive and experimental. Now, it's common, better and quite affordable. WHY? Because doctors had to be COMPETITIVE for the patients. Making it better and cheaper was the ticket to growing their business. Competition, time and time again, has been proven to improve things for consumers. It's UNFAIR competition (e.g., monopolies) that HURT the consumer. Government-run health care creates a monopoly. Even with oversight committees, government operates too slow, and often without any business acumen, to properly protect the interests of the consumer.

As someone posted in a video, a big part of the US health care system is that we pay too much for everything. We want competition for health care products, but that there isn't more scrutiny on what a patient will be charged for a product or service is a big reason why were are overcharged so much. I'd not want only one option for a replacement knee. The company that wins the bid for my state might not have an overall superior product, and I'd want to be able to buy from the provider of my choice, even if I have to pay a premium out of pocket for what I judge to be the better product.

Certainly, you CAN NOT fix this mess with one all-encompassing piece of legislation. The economy is too elastic to work that way. You pass laws to address key issues and see what effect they have in improving the situation. Based on those results, you repeal, amend or create new laws to address other issues. You stick with what works and eliminate what does not work. A 10,000+ page bill drafted by nobody with any real medical expertise is not going to work...period.

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Frankly, you are seeing only the benefits and not the liabilities.

Environmental laws, good intention, often lousy implementation. You can be fined and charged for filling in a "wetland" which is defined as standing water present more than seven days regardless of if there is any actual ecosystem going on.

Every government entity FIGHTS to justify their ongoing existence. This isn't just a US problem. It happens everywhere. If your job demands that you prove you should be kept on the payroll via production of work product, then the policy maker has to find things to draft policy for or he's out of a job, the code inspector must find violations or it looks like he's not needed, etc. Government gets bigger and more intrusive because a bunch of employees need to justify their paycheck...even though having NOTHING to do because the program is working could be proof that their jobs are worth keeping.

It's the same BS I saw in welfare management. You were expected to be a "good steward" with the funding your got. So, we tried to do as much as we could via cost-effective means. This, however, often left us with a surplus left over. If we didn't spend it, it was sent back. If we didn't spend it, the justification was that we didn't need so much money next year. Doing one thing (being a good steward) was punished by the assumption that failure to spend it all = lack of need. The latter presumption was counterproductive to the former. If we paid top-dollar to ensure we spent our budget, we would be unable to help more people, and while we'd get more funding because we ran out of money, ultimately, we were costing the taxpayers because we were wasteful.

Catch-22.

Every program you mention, for all the good they might have done, are outweighed by the EVILS they unleash as a result of government bureaucracy. Workers more interested in propagating their continued employment than serving the people results in a lot of bad laws/regulations, a lot of "violations" against individual liberty not needed to meet their agency's stated goal(s), and an expansion in both size and expense of what is supposed to be a limited government.

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You are asserting something that has not been proven to any extent. All the numbers I've seen says the exact opposite.



The problem is that the ACA was passed solely by one side, and once passed, their attitude to the other side is to go bugger off. Nothing short of the threat of full repeal over a presidential veto brings the passing side to the bargaining table.

Obama said hit himself with his very first visit with Republican leaders, "I won." He made it clear that he WOULD NOT work with the other side even though the custom of every administration post-election is to try and put partisanship behind them and work together. Obama came in with a Democrat majority in both houses of Congress. He felt he didn't need to work with the Republicans, and that's been his position to this day as evidenced by what he actually does...not what he says. Only when he is over a barrel and needs something from the Republican-controlled House does he become cooperative.



You know something, I've not met ONE PERSON who wants the ACA. Before it came into effect, anyone who had to deal with the DMV (although in my region they are pretty decent and efficient if you catch them at the right time of day) or the post office DREADED what would happen to health care. The evidence of what happens when the government takes over was plain to see.

The local political rag (er...I mean newspaper), did a whole expose on the implementation of the ACA. Story after story of how people who hoped to benefit were really going to have to opt to pay the tax rather than get a policy because they weren't poor enough to get coverage for free, or even with a subsidy, the out-of-pocket for the policy would (a) cost more than the tax and/or (b) have to come from what they'd still have to pay for needed medical care. THIS IS FROM A PAPER THAT HAS CONSISTENTLY CARRIED WATER FOR THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION. They couldn't even find ONE person who found the ACA to be an answer to their prayers.

All the ACA does is mandate you buy an insurance policy, and most of the offering SUCK. Myself, my coverage is becoming MORE expensive (not cheaper, and I'm not anywhere near "rich"). More so, to get something similar to what I have right now, I would pay a good bit more...and still be having a reduction in benefits. To keep the price about the same, I'd take a severe cut in benefits. Hooray for the ACA (that's sarcasm...in case you don't notice it). I'm unemployed right now, and I can't afford my health insurance, but (a) I can't afford to give it up as I have my old policy for another year rather than the ACA policy, and (b) I STILL CAN'T GET ANYWHERE WITH THE EXCHANGE TO SEE WHAT OPTIONS I HAVE. I can go to the insurance provider and do something, but you only get the subsidy if you go through the central program. I WILL NOT spend hours on the phone for someone to attempt to get me through...especially as the outcome could be to push me onto Medicaid (which could involve legal complications I don't need in my life).

PEOPLE WANT OBAMACARE REPEALED. The people rooting for it have NO CLUE what's actually coming and are incredulous when you try to tell them what is actually in the law. They still think it's about health care, and even the Democrats who voted for it are trying to find a way to amend or repeal it because when the poop hits the fan and the masses get outraged at what the ACA really does and DOES NOT do for them, they can't blame the Republicans for the mess because of those 42 "purely symbolic" votes to try and repeal the ACA.

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There is no question that America needs to reform how we approach health care, but the ACA was never about fixing the problem. It was an opportunity to seize power over 1/6 of the nation's economy and to further destroy individual liberty. The War on Poverty and the War on Drugs both seemed like a good idea...and indeed may have been based on very good intentions, but both have made things worse. Anyone who studies political science will learn that the whole welfare program is really designed to PRESERVE a permanent class of impoverished workers for cheap labor...not to bring people out of poverty. Anyone who studies the War on Drugs can see that it only made the drug market worse, not better. Then you have the War on Terror, which has led to a large number on atrocities committed against people who in no way could be terrorists while real terrorists are often ignored for fear of "racial profiling."

People paying attention who appreciated history saw the push for the ACA for what it was. These were the same type of people crying out against the passage of the PATRIOT Act and its later ilk. None of these things were for the good of the populace...they were for the good of the state.