If you have insurance and exect it to continue, it’s not much good to you. If you don’t have insurance and will get some it’s good for you
If you need insurnace and will be dead by 2014 it’s a horrible plan
If you’re one of the 10 -15 million people that will still be left uninsured it’s also a horrible plan.
Remember this is NOT universal health care (UHC), millions will still be left uninsured.
Imagine you are in Manhattan and want to drive to Florida. You have to drive through New Jersey. When you stop for gas if someone asked if you like being in New Jersey you’d say no, of course not, but you are happy you are on your way to Florida.
To carry that analogy further, though, the really salient question is whether the Obamacare plan is actually a step towards a better plan. It’s fine to be in New Jersey for awhile if you’re driving from NYC to Florida, but if you find yourself in Toledo, you’ve made a serious mistake in your long term plans.
I have a conservative buddy who keeps saying “Look, why didn’t they just take Medicare and apply it to everyone? Then it’d be sort of like Canada, which works okay. The system is in place, right? Just make it start at zero years old instead of 65.” It’s a good question.
Are you calling the legislatures compromise plan “Obama’s plan”?
To do that Medicare taxes would have to be increased enormously.
Not that I am utterly opposed to the idea, but for sure that would be extremely controversial.
Your conservative buddy is a rarity. The powers that be on the right aren’t pushing that. They’re pushing outright lies and misinformation. Medicare for All would have been awesome. But because the Senate gives as much power to Wyoming as it does to California and the current crop of Republicans have decided to invoke filibuster twice as much as ever before Medicare for All didn’t stand a chance.
What did pull through is an amazing accomplishment, given the outright lies and filibuster-tantrums on the right. Not every conservative is insane, just the ones running the show right now.
And it is exactly what the most liberal members of Congress proposed. The system is there, it works, it is efficient (ten times more efficient than private insurance) and more people who use it are far happier with it than the folks who have private insurance.
I can provide cites for all of those, but they have been provided thousands of times already in GD.
It is a plan that actual conservatives should be happy with if the supposedly conservative Republican party hadn’t had it’s agenda hijacked.
Even if it were funded with a national VAT, it would still end up costing each taxpayer less than they are currently paying. But the insurance industry and their army of lobbyists do not want the current system to change.
There’s an excise tax on high-cost employer-provided plans beginning in 2018.
[quote=“RickJay, post:23, topic:555026”]
Your buddy can thank the Republicans (and Holy Joe Lieberman) for that not happening. It WAS brought up when the whole reform thing was being debated. The Republicans voted en bloc to filibuster and “Independent” Lieberman joined them, effectively killing it.
ETA: Actually, universal Medicare was not. Lowering Medicare elibigility to age 55 was. And, as noted, was filibustered to death. Does your friend really think Medicare for ALL would have made it through?
I like it. It does the two things that I wanted it to do: provide affordable Universal Converage and cuts long-term costs. If I were designing a system from the ground up to do those things, the ACA probably wouldn’t be what I’d come up with, but thats true of any legislation.
I like it.
I’ve never, in my entire life, had health insurance. Growing up, my parents ran a small business and simply couldn’t afford it. And as a young adult, I only had one job that offered me health insurance (but gave me the pink flip about a week before I was eligible to get it).
I’m thrilled that I’ll be insured come 2014. I’ll be doing my best to stay physically fit until then.
However, my backup plan if I need an expensive lifesaving medical procedure before that date is to commit a (relatively minor and victimless) crime specifically so I would go to jail, and the government would have to give me health care, and I’d call up all the newspapers and media outlets and tell them the lack of UHC in this country is what drove me to do it. 
It’s better than nothing, and it’s more than I expected he’d be able to get done.
No, of course not, he means it rhetorically to illustrate the absurd complexity of the current plan. He’s just expressing frustration.
I never considered going to prison
I’ve heard people staying in shitty marriages because they need their spouse’s employer provided health insurance is a bigger issue than most people realize.
As an end point is has several flaws. Namely it leaves in place the same powerful corporate interests who many of us feel have damaged health care. No medicare negotiations or reimportations of medicine from foreign countries = hundreds of billions in extra spending over ten years. No public option = tens or hundreds of billions lost. I really don’t know anyone who thinks spending hundreds of billions of dollars extra for a good/service because we live in a plutocracy is a good endpoint.
Not only that but the bill was essentially a way to save private insurance companies since their business model would eliminate them within 10 years w/o a government mandate. If costs go up 20-30% a year, all but the sickest drop their plans, which causes another round of 20-30% increases, and another round of dropouts, etc.
It’ll move the Overton window to the left and maybe make more radical reforms feasable in 10 years, but it isn’t a good end point, just an improvement over the current system.
I really like the new feature of keeping my kids under my employer-based healthcare until they reach age 26. If I read the papers correctly that provision just went into effect. My children have mental health issues that will probably keep them out of the workplace for a while, if not forever. Obamacare gives my wife and me more time to work out the health insurance issues. This is a huge relief for me!
You are very likely correct. However, it still would be very controversial, so that’s why they couldn’t “just” do it. Things that are controversial, even things that are good to do, can’t be done easily with the type of government we have.
I’m glad you brought that up, been wondering much the same thing myself. Picturing an unknown number of moms who slept better Thursday night. Anyone have a clue as to the actual numbers? Were the phone lines hot as soon as it became law? How many grateful voting parents does that add up to? I’m guessing quite a few, so I’m not surprised to hear that Republicans are trying to take credit for it.
Looky here, they want to pass a law so that your kids can get your health insurance until they are twenty five! What an exciting and innovative idea! Boy, those Republicans, always full of new and interesting ideas. Must have been that idea guy, Newt Gangrene…
http://republicans.waysandmeans.house.gov/UploadedFiles/HR_5424_short_summary.pdf
(Does it annoy you as much as it does me when people assume that you are really, really stupid? Gets on my nerves.)
They wanted to extend it to everyone, or just lower it to 55? They didn’t do enough PR if it’s the former.
Why not? Ask people what Obama has accomplished and “passed universial health care” is always in the top 2 or 3 items of their lists. If people are going to give him credit for that, they must think of it as “his” plan.