I have no opposition to UHC, in fact I’d support it. But not this bizarre Obamacare monstrosity which is probably the worst way to do it. I don’t even know why someone would try to implement UHC in this way, maybe so they can charge and arrest the inevitable right wing extremists who will refuse to pay taxes to protest it?
:rolleyes:
This is as bad an idea as letting individual homeowners decide whether they will pay taxes for police protection, honey do we want to pay for the military this year?
It’s the beginning. You can see how herculean the efforts have been to get things thus far. You have to start somewhere.
When those the Right have scared into believing this will surely lead to socialism and standing in line for bread, get to see the sky won’t fall, overall health care costs will be significantly reduced, more people will get preventative care, etc. They will lose some of that fear, I think.
Future democratic presidents can tweak it to suit, I should think. Getting it passed with an obstructionist, no compromising Opposition is quite an accomplishment actually.
I am curious to see what Obama will do in his second term when he needn’t concern himself with being reelected. It will be interesting to see.
The ACA (I refuse to use the term “Obamacare” for the sake of denying conservatives that victory) isn’t perfect or ideal. In fact, it’s far from it.
But a tiny reform is better than no reform at all, it’s the most that was achievable considering the lockstep opposition from Republicans and from conservative Democrats in the Senate like Nelson and Lieberman, and it’s the biggest step towards real healthcare reform that we’ve had in this country since the Johnson administration. It’s a step in the right direction, and it would be silly to oppose it on the grounds that it’s “not good enough” when the only alternative is an indefinite extension of the status quo.
The thing I don’t understand, if the insurance industry was the real opposition to UHC, why would they have opposed taxpayer supported healthcare for the poor and uninsured?
Those people weren’t their customers, they would have lost nothing. Even in most countries with UHC there still exist private insurances and private medical care.
A lot of insurance companies support it, including the one I work for. At least where I work, pre-exist, lifetime maxes, and student dependent eligibility are labor intenstive and error prone , and if we can eliminate them without putting ourselves at a competative disadvantage we’re more than happy to do so.
I think the opposition comes from the fact that the prediction is large numbers of people are going to be dropped by their employers and sent to exchanges. Although the end result will be the companies selling individual policies instead of group polices, the latter have been the vast majority of business and thus the change is disruptive to established business model. Also the tax on Cadillac plans is another tax on the industry, and no business likes new taxes.
As for opposition to taxpayer supported healthcare for the poor and uninsured, again some insurance companies support it. It’s actually more business for us since medicaid in Minnesota is primarily administered by commerical insurance companies.
It’s ridiculous that we had to do it like this instead of real universal healthcare which would be so much better, but since there’s no way in hell that would have passed at this time, what else was there to do? It wasn’t this or that, it was this or nothing.
I really wish Obama didn’t compromise with the nutjobs so much, but sadly, he wouldn’t have been elected otherwise (not that the extreme nutjobs voted for him anyway but some “moderates” did). I wonder if he’s actually much more liberal than he lets on. I like to think he is.
I don’t think you need resist the ‘Obamacare’ label. I think the White House is even going to embrace it. Recognizing that, moving forward, it will be his legacy, and, in the end, he will be esteemed and admired for achieving what no one else could. I should think he’d be proud to have his name attached to it, though it’s imperfect.
And, of course, watch for the day, when the tide of public opinion shifts, (including the right), and Romney will be all about it being his idea based on his state’s plan!
I think it is abysmal. Certainly compared to what we have in the frozen north at 2/3 the price. But it was all he could get and maybe, as the right believes and the left hopes, the edge of the wedge. I think that once people see it in action, there will be a move to improve it.
There are two serious problems. First the insurance companies will still be filtering too much out the system. Second, there will be an incentive for some to just pay the “tax” and get insurance when they get sick. If enough do that, it will destroy the bill. I just don’t know if many will.
Because we are a plutocracy it was a fairly weak bill in a lot of ways. there were a lot of giveaways to various industries so they would not oppose the bill, but that will increase costs over time. The mandate is not really enforced and the employer fines are low enough that employers feel impelled to dump their employees on the exchanges.
If in the future they can reduce and change those things. This law was a good first start, but it needs to be changed in the future. Add a public option tied to medicare, do more to lower costs, stronger mandates for employers and individuals, a medicare buy in option, etc.
I suspect OP’s view is the correct one. It’s a real shame that so many concessions were made to the GOP, since they were always opposing it anyway. It appears some Dopers agree, at least in part:
The key underlying problem of U.S. health care is its high cost. I’m afraid industry and right-wingers are laughing their way to the bank. Industry profits may rise, while taxpayers and patients end up hating the system.
That’s the Demo party line. I hope you’re right, but color me skeptical.
I thought the ACA was going to be ruled unconstitutional under the Commerce Clause and that was going to be the end of it. Single-payer UHC wouldn’t have the same problems and could be structured similarly to Social Security without Constitutional issues.
Obama had his moment. It was brief. He had the House and at various times did have 58 Dems + 2 Independents to vote his way in the Senate. And he did not take full advantage to force through UHC.
I don’t think UHC is a good idea, but I do think it would be unquestionably constitutional. The US health care system is nowhere near ready for UHC.
The ACA is what you get when you try to reform the health care system with the Republicans and your own Blue Dog Democrats fighting you every step of the way. Fact is, the ACA arose because the free market is a failure in providing health care to all by the very wealthiest Americans. The insurance companies are corporations, legally defined human beings whose only goal is to get as much money in premiums for their stockholders as possible, which generally means delivering as little in the way of health care as possible for those premiums.
That is, after all, how “pre-existing conditions” got to be a problem. Things were so much more profitable if you did not have to pay for health care for sick people.
The ACA does NOTHING to address the underlying problem of health care insurers feeding like vampires on Americans’ suffering, but it DOES alleviate some of the more EGREGIOUS problems caused by the failure of the marketplace. So, while I think the ACA is horrible for not dealing with the real problem, it’s better than what came before, which was rampant abuse by health insurers.
It’s just that I’m sure the health insurers are working hard right now to come up with new abuses. And with Citizens United giving corporations unlimited economic firepower, it’s gonna be even harder to fight them now.
There is absolutely zero chance UHC would ever have passed in Obama’s first term. There are too many conservative Democrats (and at least one of those “Independents” you mention) who would be against it and would vote to sustain the GOP’s relentless filibusters.
I’m in favor of single payer, and the best I can say about the ACA is that on balance it is likely to be better than nothing. In two or three years it might be more clear whether it was indeed better than nothing, and if so how much. And by “we” I mean people who are looking (or trying at least) at this in an objective way.
The biggest problem is that there does not seem to be any way to rein in the escalation of cost.
I don’t think anyone who is for UHC really likes the ACA. I think that if you could talk to Obama in private he would probably tell you he doesn’t like it. It’s not what he wanted. It was the best he and we could get.
Congress is such a dysfunctional mess that the ACA is what you come up with when everybody has to be bought off. They do the right thing for the wrong reasons and the wrong thing for the right reasons. The ACA is a monstrosity of a bill written by lobbyists.
It’s a start. What the Obama haters fail to acknowledge is that crashing the bill doesn’t alleviate the fundamental problems that led to it in the first place.
I agree with the OP. The ACA is a conservative creation of the Heritage Foundation that even all conservatives reject. Romney publicly supports all of its reforms except the mandate. The mandate is what virtually everyone finds offensive.
The thing is, if the Republican house were to introduce a bill eliminating the tax penalty for the mandate, it would pass both houses easily. But no Republican or Democrat will introduce such a bill and it would never get out of committee. It’s all kabuki theater.
It’s my opinion that health care funding in the US is so broken (e.g. due to bloated costs that throw a few people into bankruptcy and result in everyone else being charged obscene health care costs to cover the people who went bankrupt trying to pay) that true single-payer Canadian-style UHC is the best and most logical solution.
It’s not the beginning. Medicare was the beginning, 40+ years ago. This is a significant conceptual step backwards from the Great Society Democrats of* two generations ago.* So come off it.
The establishment Washington Democrats, since Hillary Clinton in 1993, chose to protect private health insurance instead of replacing it, even if they threw working-class Americans under the bus. And then they wonder why “their natural base” doesn’t trust them. They say, “But we’re on your side!”
Forcing legislation through the Senate is like herding cats.
It was all of about five months between when Al Franken was seated and Ted Kennedy died that Democrats had 60 votes in the Senate. Kennedy wasn’t present to vote for most of that time due to his illness, and Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman both joined the GOP in filibustering the public option. Obama had to take out the public option to get Lieberman’s vote, and Nelson insisted on special concessions for Nebraska (which got cut during reconciliation anyway).
The fact that the ACA got through at all is a miracle, and it did so in the nick of time - if it hadn’t passed the Senate before Scott Brown got in, even the version we got would have been filibustered.