Your boss providing terrible insurance isn’t the ACA’s fault. You can just go to an exchange and get reasonable insurance.
The ACA has helped millions of people. Your situation being bad is an anecdote, not a substantive policy observation.
So you’re angry that your employer gave you substandard insurance, and then angry that the government ruled it substandard. :rolleyes: Got it. (It does sound like your employer screwed you; how hard was it for him to verify whether that insurance was acceptable or not?)
Either way, pronouncing it “a failed experiment” is premature. Millions are better off; but you picked a dumb employer.
Wouldn’t the general welfare of the Constitution cover this? Any scholars out there want the weigh in? Yes, I know you said “explicitly”. Is your only opposition that it isn’t explicit? Because that would strike me as a bit silly, assuming you are an advocate of the whole Constitution, and not just the parts you agree with. And I stress that I am making an assumption, since I don’t know you. 
Do you then agree that if someone who doesn’t buy health insurance and has no means to pay for health care, be denied emergency room services, whether in case of an accident or just general care?
I recently had a conversation about UHC (rather than Obamacare per se) and the NHS in particular in the comments section of a libertarian blog, and it seems to me that the main complaint is that it’s not perfect.
Then, by all means, we should wait until we can implement a health care program that IS perfect.
The pre-amble has never been used as a source of government authority, except where that authority is mentioned elsewhere in the constitution. Otherwise, that would provide a blank check of federal powers since anything can fall under “the general welfare”.
Cite?
No, your employer CHOSE to do so. There was no mandate or law or regulation that compelled them to do so. Instead, they made a business decision. It may or may not have been a good business decision for them; it wasn’t a good decision for you and your fellow employees, but focus your blame on the correct party.
Okay, now this is just plain incompetence on the part of your employer’s HR department, or possibly their insurance company. Again, this has nothing to do with Obamacare; HR could just as easily have screwed up your retirement contributions or withholdings or payroll taxes (in fact, you should probably check to make sure they didn’t). It’s not like the minimum standards were some great mystery to insurance and benefits administrators, and yours should have known no later than the late summer of 2014 if their 2015 plan was going to be acceptable. If they didn’t bother to check, or didn’t bother to communicate their findings to you and your fellows, blame them for their failings.
FTFY.
So your idea of how to evaluate single payer is to see how it’s working out in a country in deep financial crisis, teetering on the brink of insolvency, which has been severely underfunding its public health care system for years? How about looking at financially stable countries that have had successful single-payer or equivalent public UHC for at least half a century if not a century or more?
That’ll earn you a warning. It’s specifically against the rules to alter text in quotes tags to disparage other posters.
Don’t do it again.
You’re missing a word in the second clause here in a way i can’t tell what your question is. Should, could, would? I’m not sure. If you clarify your question I can answer it.
Which is an entirely valid thing for Shagnasty to be angry about. The ACA sets complicated and arbitrary standards for what health insurance is “substandard” and what isn’t. Even health insurance that’s objectively quite good and provides coverage for everything that a person needs can be ruled “substandard”. And then, as Shagnasty informed us, the government can punish people for having “substandard” care even if they didn’t know that their health care was substandard.
Is that not something that Shagnasty can reasonably be angry about?
So your response is to basically say that Shagnasty should blame his employer rather than the government. But surely you’re aware that under Obamacare, most people are stuck with whatever insurance their employer sells them, if their employer sells them any. Technically Shagnasty could buy insurance on the individual exchanges or elsewhere, but if his employer sells insurance then he won’t receive any subsidies. That’s how Obamacare was set up. Prices on the individual exchanges were sky-high to begin with and are rising sharply so Shagnasty and those like him don’t really have any other options beyond what their employer is offering.
Shagnasty’s blame is correctly placed. The ACA included mandates and regulations which forced the cost of employer-sponsored insurance upwards. As a result employers had to choose between spending a lot more (which means cutting back on other things such as salary and pensions), charging their employees a lot more for health insurance, or giving their employees lower-quality insurance. Shagnasty’s employer chose to cut the quality of insurance by raising the deductible.
He’s not alone. I work for a very good, employee-ownded company that takes good care of its employees. Before Obamacare, low-deductible insurance was provided to every employee for free. Today, the company looks at the enormous cost increases imposed by Obamacare and sees that is no longer feasible. Now the employees choose between either free, high-deductible insurance or paying a lot for low-deductible insurance.
When the government forces employers to either raise prices or cut quality, that’s the government’s fault. Blame lies squarely on the government. Trying to blame employers for what the government forced them to do will not go anywhere.
His employer is, I would assume, liable for a penalty because they didn’t provide usable insurance. So, they likely made a stupid business decision.
Providing no insurance would be better than providing half-assed insurance, since the employees would be eligible for subsidies (depending on pay), and could get reasonable policies on the exchanges. Also, providing no insurance wouldn’t leave the employer paying a penalty, and paying for shit insurance. Or at least that’s what it seems like at my first glance. Am I wrong?
I don’t identify as Republican these days, but my objections to it are twofold:
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As I suspected they would, my costs more than doubled and the quality of my coverage went way down.
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I think our health care system was badly broken and in need of reform before Obamacare. What obamacare seems to have gone is entrench those worst aspects of our healthcare system rather than fix them.
It’s nice that a lot of people who didn’t have coverage now do, but I font think our healthcare system is serving us well or sustainable in its current form, and this just makes it harder to ix
Your own cite says that these new regulations and fees and mandates will cost $4,800 to $5,900 per employee over ten years. That’s $480-590 per employee. The average cost of family coverage this year is over $17K per employee, so we’re talking less than ten percent, AND this amount includes the cost to employers who never previously provided health insurance and now have to. In the grand scheme of things, this isn’t “a lot more.”
From your cite: “Eventually, large employers may opt to pay the fine for not providing health insurance and leave their workers to get coverage in the exchanges. Doing so might even save them money.” Um, this was going on for years before Obama ever took office; the percentage of employers offering health benefits declined every single year from 2000 to 2010, and most likely peaked sometime during the Reagan administration How is that the fault of the ACA?
The average annual premium increases over the past several years (since the implementation of the ACA) are LOWER than the average annual premium increases over the preceding decade. Why are employers suddenly unable to cope?
I don’t recall saying in my post that I was going to vote Republican–or at all. And really, what are you so angry about? I hardly think my post was inflammatory. Whatever your issue is, you shouldn’t let it get the best of you.
Cite?
Well, Portugal, Italy and Spain aren’t out of the woods yet either. And the root cause is debt. And that debt is largely social programs and taxes that lead to tax evasion. All four have big problems is this area.
If, and this is a giant if, I believed that the U.S. could implement single payer and not end up like Greece I might be ok with single payer even though I do not believe it is the governments job to provide health care.
Hell, I would be ok with higher taxes if the debt ratio went down.
But the farce seen in Greece, where the citizens riot because the Germans wouldn’t just give them more money even though they couldn’t pay back what they already owed, seems like a much more likely outcome. Except we won’t have anyone to bails us out.
Slee
You appear to be trying to blame the economic problems of southern Europe on health care. This is clearly not accurate since every advanced country in the world has universal health care either in the form of single-payer or a publicly funded or subsidized and regulated equivalent. Germany, the UK, France, Sweden, Denmark, Australia, Canada … it’s a very long list, and all are doing just fine. Costs are rising, but not nearly as fast as the costs of US private coverage.
The “tax” aspect seems to be irrelevant because if you or your family spends far less in total for health care due to the elimination of a vast and almost unimaginably wasteful private insurance bureaucracy, it seems fairly immaterial who these much lower health insurance costs are paid to. The net result, it seems to me, is a population that is healthier and also more productive. More people can afford to go to the doctor, especially for preventive care, and there are fewer bureaucrats engaged in and paid for the totally useless job of moving pieces of insurance paperwork around, or collecting bonuses for how well they can deny claims.