Pre-ACA, even though I had insurance, I was always terrified of using it, as it was entirely possible that they would find some way of declining my coverage when I needed it most. I changed jobs a bunch, and whenever I had a job that didn’t offer insurance, I had to go out and buy my own policy, which sucked, was expensive, and would probably not actually be there for me if I actually had a medical need. When I did have insurance through a job, it was usually actually worse and cost more, but at least I didn’t have the headache of choosing a provider and a plan, my employer only offered one or two. If those plans weren’t any good for me, then I was free to go get my own, which I did on a few occasions, as the employer based insurance wasn’t worth paying for.
I had a couple jobs that actually had really good insurance, but I left those jobs after the company stopped offering it. (This is way pre-ACA, 2005ish).
As far as jobs, do you really not believe that there are many people out there that only work at the job that they do because of the health insurance it offers? There are many small employers out there (like me) who cannot afford to have a plan for their employees, so without the ACA, I really cannot compete with larger companies that can afford to provide healthcare. I wouldn’t be working for myself either. I would be looking to work for someone who still offers health insurance (something that has been declining since well before ACA days). The ACA plans that you get on the marketplace are superior to many of the employer based health insurance that used to be offered.
I’d like to know how you’re quantifying these things. You said “many Americans” and “a good deal”. How did you reach the conclusion that it was “many” and not just “some” or “a few”? I’m not trying to play a gotcha game, I’m just trying to understand if you have an informed opinion based on facts (and if so, where you learned them), or if you’re just kind of going with your gut feeling, based off a few anecdotes you read in a couple of news stories.
Looking at the personal bankruptcy data, it seems to be all over the map, with no obvious correlation, in my eyes, to the ACA. There was a low in 2006 and highs in 2005 and 2010. It’s been trending down for the last few years, but still hasn’t reached the 2006 level again.
Is there some data that you’re aware of that quantifies “job lock” levels pre- and post-ACA?
On that note, I don’t remember if I saw it here or in reddit, but I remember reading about a case of a starter company that worked with animation or other media.
On the remote meeting they had they began to talk about the fears the workers from the USA had because they could lose their health insurance while other in Europe or even Asia did not had that problem. Some from those nations then suggested to their American co-workers that they should then move… to a more civilized nation…
Knowing that you do not want to deal with the examples and reports pointed at… yes, you are playing gotcha.
My point here is simple, I go for improvements, not a worsening of the situation. You are the one that has to show now that there was no improvement. As pointed many time before here, the ones lying compulsively about making the situation better are the republicans in congress.
Insurance, especially health insurance, is a funny product. I think of it as a pretty car that sits parked in the garage. Except for some minor spins around the black, most people that own these cars have no idea how well these cars will perform. You don’t know if your car will take you where you need to go if you should need it. You don’t know if it will even take you anywhere at all. You just make the payments each month and keep your fingers crossed.
Normally, I would give a lot of weight to people’s opinions about the products they own. But when people claim to love love love this car that they have never driven, I don’t always give that opinion a lot of weight. But the fact that most people pay a lot each month for these cars that can only be driven if there is an emergency makes them one of these products that needs to be highly regulated and is not well suited to free market economics.
And if you’re going to talk about how much cheaper your insurance was before The ACA - well, please remember that a lot of stuff was cheaper in 2009 than it is in 2017 and take that into account.
I agree with all your points, except you’re being facetious at the top. It would only make since to be frozen if you have acne if you had a 100% chance of later revival with the acne fixed. And a society that can revive a corpsicle could fix acne other ways. Not to mention, I don’t know if revival is possible. I am simply assuming that since the brain stores data in molecules that are still present after freezing, if you have a high enough resolution scan, you can recover that data, and then build a brain emulator, a brain-sized brick of 3d circuitry that mimics the entire brain. Philosophically speaking someone who was revived this way could argue they did not survive.
But this would solve our healthcare cost issue quite nicely. Cryonics is much cheaper than long term care for the elderly. We could freeze everyone who is diagnosed with a terminal illness with less than 3 months left, and everyone who is suffering a neuro-degenerative disease.
We could also freeze everyone brought into a hospital unconscious with serious brain injuries. And everyone found who was not breathing. And everyone with brain cancer.
And a bunch of other classes of people who medical science cannot save and the odds of them being doomed in the immediate future are near certain.
Lower cost insurance plans might not cover any treatment but cryonics. If you think about it, government regulators need not require any other service be covered…
We could solve our healthcare cost problem, solve access to care, and even solve human mortality with a single policy!
Amusing thing as, even though I am being semi-sarcastic, if we could actually suspend people and revive them reliably, this would actually be the correct way to go.
I was only facetious with the acne, but then you went and ran with it.
I would think that most people would see getting tossed in the freezer to be no better than death. I certainly wouldn’t think of it that way. If you gave me a choice of 3 months of life, or toss me in a freezer to be possibly thawed out thousands of years from now in a culture and technology and probably even species that I don’t know, I’ll take my three months now, thank you very much.
I am not sure which parts are semi-sarcastic, but every single thing you said there terrifies me.
With all due respect, your situation is anecdotal.
I am defending the freedom to not have to pay your medical bills. You may justify your decision to force me to pay your bills by describing the horrible consequences you claim will befall you if I don’t hand you money, but that doesn’t obligate me to hand you the money, any more than if you came up to me on the street and explained how your heroin habit was so bad that withdrawal would kill you if I didn’t buy you some heroin.
For the analogy-impaired: that’s not a claim that medical care and heroin are the same thing. See, the way an analogy works is not that every element of the comparison is identical. If you’re confused about what comparisons I am making in the preceding analogy, then it’s safe bet you don’t understand the analogy.
Read it again, or just you are telling all that you can not follow cites.
Too late, and once again: I’m alive to tell you that you really have only sad ideals. While I will very likely pay for your Medicare later in your life. Again, you are welcome, even if you do not want to live in a civilized society.
I think that here you are only pushing an obtuse analogy, easy to ignore as it really does not deal with any of the cites or the experiences I had.
…is an anecdote, to the extent that you’re pointing out that you’re alive because of the ACA.
I want to save my own money and pay my own way.
That is civilized. In my view. Your idea of civilization is all kinds of wrong. Again, in my view.
Those are anecdotes.
The difference between us is your apparent inability to understand that your opinion is not fact. Just because a thought settles into your head does not make it true. You can argue for it, of course, but you cannot credibly just assert (“…civilized…?”) that it’s so.
Again, I had access to a doctor that that told me to not ignore the infection that was becoming deadly. The doctor I had access to thanks to ACA told me to go to the ER ASAP. So yes, I still have to say that the ACA did save me, the only effort you are doing here is to tell yourself that I’m lying. Not going to give you that support for your sorry ideology; and besides, it is not kosher for you to say that I’m doing that.
But that was not the point anyhow, the reality is that you can not deal with the cites I made because you can not explain away how feudalistic and with less freedoms the system was before ACA. And it is still in part like that still because Republicans in congress do not want to do the right thing and improve ways to separate health care from employment that is less reliable thanks to many policies that the Republicans also push (like limiting the power of unions).
And what you are telling us here are fantasies. Modern capitalistic nations already learned how freedoms are limited in your sorry ideal “civilization”. What you are insisting is indeed not modern capitalism, but medieval feudalism.
BTW, groups like the Kauffman Foundation or the Council on Foreign Relations and their experts are not much into anecdotes. As noted before you are only showing all that indeed you are not looking at cites.
I have to admit, it takes guts to assert “The United States is right and almost every other first world country is wrong” and firmly believe it.
Though I have to say, I seem to think more of Bricker than he himself does, in that I wouldn’t think that failure to have enough money for every eventuality that befalls him and his family in his life would be his fault, and that society has a duty to support him should that hour of need ever come, and not let him and his loved ones die or go bankrupt just because of random chance.
doesn’t “demanding that all of us share in a risk pool” = “… the Federal government dictating health insurance mandates”? That’s precisely what the ‘individual mandate’ is, isn’t it?
The cites you offered proffer a particular way to evaluate freedom. It’s only necessary to address them if one shares in that rubric. The things you value and the criteria you establish as the metrics for success are not necessarily shared. They may be interesting, but they are not controlling.
The experiences you’ve had are your own. Anecdotes, if you will. Public policy ought not be crafted on the basis of anecdotes.
Maybe, but in other threads on the subject, **Bricker **seemed fine with each individual STATE demanding a shared risk pool. Now it seems like the “forced to share a risk pool” and “pay your own way” have overtaken that position. I was simply asking for clarification.
If I am understanding you correctly a hospital should determine a person’s ability to pay for medical care for whatever it is that is wrong with them and if that person cannot pay they should be denied service and shown the door.
I could defend the freedom from having to pay for your fire and police protection bills. You may justify your decision to force me to pay those bills by describing the horrible ways you could be robbed or your house could burn down, but that doesn’t obligate me to hand you the money.
No, the only way I can understand that analogy is that, as a human, with a body, I am addicted to medical treatment, the same way that a heroin addict is addicted to heroin.
That analogy breaks down in every way. In order to be an analogy, there needs to be at least one comparison that links the two, and I’m not seeing it.
That does sound like a pretty terrible idea of civilization to me. Hoarding your own resources and going your own way is diametrically opposed to any definition of civilization I’ve ever heard.