The problem is that I am not the government and I don’t recieve taxes every year with the expectation of maintaing a safe, prosperous and healthy country. I am quite sure you think those parameters should be more narrow but we are where we are. If I don’t tackle a bank robber is that a useful analogy for slashing police budgets? Not in my opinion.
Can we please stop debating this bill as if it were a health care bill?
It’s not a health care bill. It’s a tax cuts for the rich bill. The purpose of the bill is to enact tax cuts for the rich, and if some people have to lose their heath insurance to pay for it that’s too bad.
Yep, and end up seeking treatment from emergency rooms rather than preventative care - not a way to control costs…
I think the bill ought to be consistent, and put earnings and other limits on peoples’ ability to be treated in ERs as well. :smack:
It’s designed to stop rich people form having heart attacks every Apr 15.
Are you prepared to apply this reasoning to other policy matters? For example, if a future US Government decides that some type of waste disposal shouldn’t be prohibited, and our water supplies become dangerous, then it is only a slim possibility that we could attribute a hypothetical cholera epidemic to that government policy?
Or how about if a future US Government decides to zero out defense programs, and the country ends up being attacked by terrorists/North Korea/space aliens. Based on your reasoning, are you prepared to say that the policy of unilateral disarmament ought not be blamed for the foreign invasion?
It may be a tax cut for the wealthy, but it is still a healthcare bill in that it will (negatively) effect the healthcare of millions of citizens.
Can we just call it a wealthcare bill?
I’m not suggesting this as a basis for something that is desirable. This is to illustrate the objection to the statement that the bill will likely kill thousands. It’s probably more semantic than anything else. I think healthcare under discussion more fits with #3 anyways, in that we made a commitment and regardless of how we got there here we are so we should do our best to honor it, or if we choose to renege we should do it in the way least harmful.
Yeah, that’s the fun part.
If a homeless guy has a heart attack or breaks his leg or gets tuberculosis, is he going to be thrown into the gutter by the hospital security guards? Or are they going to treat him, even though he can’t pay and won’t pay?
I know some people have stated that it would be fine for the doctors to step over the homeless guy’s broken body as they go to work. They didn’t break his leg, so they don’t have a moral obligation to fix his leg.
Except forget the OBLIGATION. Does the homeless guy have a right to health care? In an indifferent universe of impersonal physical forces there are no such things as rights. You live, you suffer, you die, and it’s all meaningless.
So forget his “right” to health care, can we instead argue about whether it’s wise public policy to provide health care for the impoverished?
Especially since it turns out we can’t quite bring ourselves to watch them die in the gutter. If we could, at least we’d save ourselves some money by hardening our hearts. Instead we wait until the chronic problems become acute, and then treat the acute problem which costs us much more in the long run anyway. And then we pat ourselves on the back for providing that care out of charity, rather than obligation. It makes us feel better somehow.
The ACA has only been in effect for what, seven years? It wasn’t carved in stone, handed down by God to Moses on a mountaintop. Even if the ACA was repealed entirely, which it won’t be, returning to the status quo ante is not the same as killing people.
Folks who argue otherwise, on the internet, on tv/radio, or on the Senate floor are engaging in cheap rhetoric. IMO.
You’re just repeating what you’ve already said without responding whatsoever to the counter-arguments.
Claiming that a bill is MEAN :mad: , like some Senators have, or even worse, that it’s inhumane, like some posters here have, is NOT a counter-argument.
A bill that is *about *our humanity cannot be called inhumane? Whyzat?
FTR, It was Trump who called AHCA “mean” after praising it when the House passed it.
Easily solved. Simply require each hospital to build a windowless abattoir next door, so we don’t have to watch. 
While I consider myself pretty liberal on most issues, I tend to be awfully harsh in my opinions of personal responsibility and what health care every individual ought to have available. I could imagine myself supporting any number of plans to reform aspects of our social safety net, even though such changes would likely reduce the quality of life and life expectancies for various portions of our populace.
I just don’t see the point in enacting policy which seems extremely likely to BOTH fail to provide minimal health care to many folk, WHILE ALSO increasing certain costs (though failing to spend on prevention and encouraging reliance on ER resources.)
I don’t think all invasive and heroic therapies are universally scaleable, but in a country as wealthy as ours, there should be no diabetic or hypertensive who is unable to afford their insulin/medication.
The poors can always host spaghetti dinners, crowdfund on the internet, or sell their organs.
I agree. Those arguments, valid or not, aren’t addressing your claim. But several people in this thread have addressed your claim, and you appear not to be able to respond.
Except why was Obamacare passed in the first place? Because our health care non-system was a mess, prices were rising, millions of people couldn’t get insurance at any price.
Obamacare was a step to alleviate some of those problems. So here we are 7 years later and we throw all that shit out, and we’re farther behind than ever.
Look, do you want a single payer system? Because unless you conservatives come up with a system where poor and working class and self-employed and chronically sick people can get a minimal level of health insurance then that’s were we’re going to end up. Do you think all the Trump voters who believed him when he said that he’d make sure that their premiums would go down and they’d get better coverage and that they’d cover everybody are not going to notice that their premiums are higher, their coverage is much worse, and lots of people have lost coverage?
I get it, you and I both know that Trump was just spouting bullshit, and the conservative answer is that the poor should have higher costs and worse coverage and more people need to be kicked off the system if we’re going to be able to cut taxes for the rich. Guys like us aren’t going to be surprised. But what about the populists who voted for Trump because they believed him when he said because he’s an elite he was the only one who could stand up to the elites to help the little guy?
Do you really want those people to become reliable Democratic voters for a generation? You might have some issues that you really care about and you think the Republicans are much more reliable on those issues than the Democrats. Or maybe you’re a movement conservative who doesn’t give a shit about the issues and you just like seeing your team win and the liberal tears. Either way though, screwing over the voters with a massively unpopular health care bill that results in millions and millions of people having more expensive insurance, worse insurance, and/or no insurance, all to pay for a capital gains tax cut, don’t you think that’s going to leave an impression?
Or are Republican voters just that dumb that they’ll keep voting for Republicans no matter how many times they get kicked in the face?
No. It’s not. If anything, the problem is that we don’t characterize enough legislation as literally killing people. The actions of our government are, time and time again, a matter of life and death. Pass a law that makes it much harder for medicare to pay for medical treatment? Someone is almost certainly going to die as a result of that. Pass a law that increases the amount of lead available? Someone is probably going to die as a result. Pass a law banning Oxycontin? You bet your ass a bunch of people are going to die as a result of that one. The AHCA is not special in this regard. Government decisions are life and death all the time. It’s just kind of insane how callous and shitty this decision is. No matter how you bend it, a massive tax cut for the super-rich is not going to save as many lives as spending that same money on health care for the poor. That’s what this law does.
Well, if someone relies on a service provided to them by law, and then the law changes so that they no longer get that service, and they die as a result, how is it unfair to characterize this as killing someone? If there is a distinction here, I guarantee that the people for whom it matters don’t give a shit. “I’m sorry, but we aren’t going to give you your medicine any more, so you’re gonna die. But don’t worry, that money will be well-spent - we’re giving it to the super-rich for some fucking awful goddamn reason.” How many fucking people do you know who would say, “Hey, yeah, that’s a good idea - let’s stip coverage from millions so that we can give the super-rich (and it is explicitly the super-rich) a massive tax cut.”? Does it bother you at all that the republicans sold this plan as better, cheaper health insurance, and instead it’s more expensive and worse? Does it bother you that the republican party basically spent the last 8 years LYING about their health care priorities?
Are you just upset that the term “killing people” was used, as opposed to something less inflammatory like “we can be reasonably confident that this policy change will increase mortality to the tune of several thousand per year, or perhaps more?”
Because I still can’t tell if you’re arguing about syntax, or if you’re trying to argue that the additional deaths we can reasonably expect to happen (as a result of fewer people having health insurance, either voluntarily or involuntarily) either (1) won’t happen at all, or (2) if they do, changes in government policy shouldn’t be held responsible.
Yeah. D’Anconia, would you be ok with someone saying “it will lead to thousands of more premature deaths”?