Hm… a shitty job is bad, but a shitty insurance policy is good. Next you can tell me why income tax cuts for billionaires is good for unemployed people! And how poor minorities really are better served by the Republican party!
Derp.
Well, still quite a bit more than 5%.
Actually what he said was that it wasn’t a tax, that if you like your plan you can keep it, that the average family’s premiums would go down by $2500, and some other lies later.
One of the ones he hired to put the plan together said that Americans would never fall for it unless Obama and Co. lied about it, but the subsequent approval numbers seem to indicate that this wasn’t a lie.
Also amusing is the assumption that during years when the Dems control the White House, the Senate, and for two years the House, it is all the fault of those Eeeeeevil Republicans that legislation that got passed over their objections isn’t at all popular.
Regards,
Shodan
It’s not a total failure, so you don’t need to put the word success in quotes. There are absolutely successes with the ACA. I’m on Obamacare. If it weren’t for Obamacare, my wife and I would be uninsured. As it is, we had great care for our family of four last year for $8/month. Now, it’s gone up considerably for 2015, but we’re also making quite a bit more money-- but no employer-paid benefits. So this is saving us.
Does it need tweaking, fixing and improving? You bet your sweet bippy. Has it been successful at insuring millions of people at a rate that people can actually afford? You bet your sweet bippy.
Successful, with a need for improvement, not repeal.
There are several numbers here: What the hospital bills, what insurance ‘allows’ (which may be very different depending on which insurance company it is), what amount actually gets paid, and the cash price.
You said a vag delivery is “only” $10,000. But the cash price is more like $3,500. Why does private insurance pay 10K when the cash price is $3500?
Insurance that won’t pay for your routine doctors’ visit is not shitty insurance. That’s not the purpose of your insurance.
Insurance that will pay your routine costs but won’t cover proton beam therapy or the newest biotechs is shitty. Arguably, it’s not even insurance, it’s just a prepayment plan for costs you will incur. Insuring against routine health problems is like insuring against needing to fill up your car’s gas tank.
Preventative care is part of Obamacare. Routine doctor visits lower the costs for everyone who receives health care.
In theory. Studies are contradictory on that point. If it was true, I suspect single health care systems would prioritize prevention, but instead they prioritize emergency care. People can wait a long time for preventive care, which is not making preventive care a priority. Yet they spend a lot less in those countries.
But even if it was that way, there are a lot of good things people should do that they can afford to do but don’t that would save us all money. Routine auto care, for example, saves money and lives, but no one is yet calling for nationalizing the auto repair shops and making it free to the consumer.
There’s also the matter of priorities. Lives are lost when you prioritize preventive care over catastrophic care just as lives are lost if you prioritize the latter over the former. It would make more sense for people to be able to choose which is more important. A lot of us are pretty comfortable paying for our own preventive care. What we’re worried about is getting cancer, or having a child with a chronic condition that requires a lifetime of medical care. Ask any British Ehlers-Danlos patient about NHS care. It patches them up for free when they get hurt, but doesn’t really do much beyond that.
Every insurance plan I’ve ever had, before and after the passage of the ACA, has included routine doctor visits.
That’s what most people have. But some choose insurance that only kicks in after a certain amount is spent.
Newsflash: Politicians lie, prevaricate, shade the truth, hand wave, use anecdotes in place of statistics, etc, in order to get shit done. Sometimes, what they are getting done is lining the pockets of their donors or themselves. Sometimes it’s getting infrastructure projects for their constituents (some wise, some not so wise). Sometimes it’s policy changes (some good, some not so good). Forget about what Obama and Gruber said during and after the process of getting the ACA done. Was it good policy? Evaluate that in both broad strokes and in the details. Maybe Obama didn’t do a great sales job on the ACA as a bundle, but the approval numbers of many of the individual parts of the bill are sky high (children covered until 26, no preexisting condition exclusions, etc). How many people really understand why the individual mandate, which they hate, is required for the things they like to be possible?
Good policy is sometimes terrible politics, and vice versa.
Also infuriating is that people keep saying this. You know as well as I do that the Senate is profoundly undemocratic. A minority of 41 senators can block just about anything from coming to a vote. Obama had a Senate with 60 Democrats for about 7 months–Al Franken wasn’t sworn in until early July 2009, and Scott Brown took office in early February 2010, changing that seat in Massachusetts from D to R. After that, the Democratic majority could get very little done without at least some Republican cooperation, which they generally did not get. Passing a law requires, normally, passage by the House and the Senate and sign off by the President. Democrats had the ability to get things done entirely unfettered by Republican opposition for barely more than half a year of Obama’s entire presidency. Normally, compromise between the parties in the Senate can move things along, but members of the GOP (sometimes with the consent of their leadership, sometimes without it) have done their best to stop that from happening.
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Forget about what Obama and Gruber said during and after the process of getting the ACA done. Was it good policy?
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No thank you - I am not going to forget when I am lied to. Besides, you are missing the point - if I support something because I am promised that it will save me $2,500 a year, and it turns out that it won’t, that’s going to affect whether it is good policy or not.
A clear majority of the US says that Obamacare is not good policy. So it makes a great deal of sense to go back and identify who was lying about it, and what the lies were about. That way we know who not to believe in the future, especially about Obamacare and what to do with it. Because we know that its chief architects can’t be trusted in what they say.
Regards,
Shodan
No one said it would save **YOU **$2500 per year. It is saving a lot of people (my business included) a lot of money. (we pay 100% of the health care premiums for our employees and our rates have gone down dramatically this year). I don’t know if it is saving money for the “average family.”
Yet a clear majority if those who actually use Obamacare give it good marks.
This is a horrible way to judge what is good policy, unfortunately. I’m pretty sure that if you offered a new tax law that cut everyone’s taxes to zero and gave them a free car, it would get majority support. It would also be fantastically bad policy. You have also not addressed the fact that a majority does support many of the individual provisions of the ACA.
I happen to think that a good healthcare policy is one that can be measured in improved outcomes and/or decreased cost as a share of GDP. I recognize that these measures are aggregate, statistical measures, and there may be individuals that do worse or spend more under the policy. I’m not sure if Obamacare as currently constituted will turn out to be good policy, though I think it will be, eventually. I think the system we had before was clearly bad policy, since we got measurably worse outcomes for twice the cost of the systems of similar industrialized countries.
It seems so. Either that, or he’s joining his fellow conservatives in asserting that health care funding must be a freewheeling profit-making free enterprise business and the evil gubbermint should keep its nose out of it. It’s either one or the other. I’ve seen no useful constructive proposals on how these types think the ACA can be improved, just blanket condemnation.
Actually according to the latest Kaiser Family Foundation poll, approve/disapprove are within a few points, and the divide is overwhelmingly partisan – the vast majority of Democrats approve, the vast majority of Republicans seem to believe the same things as the OP.
Furthermore, public opinion – especially public opinion that is heavily manipulated by political spinmeisters and the Republican PR machine – doesn’t necessarily reflect reality or the actual functionality of the ACA reforms. This is the same “public opinion” that vehemently rejects the model of universal health care that is so demonstrably effective in the rest of the civilized world.
Do you – or does anyone – seriously believe that the medical device tax is the reason that US health care costs twice as much as in the rest of the world, that any of these piddly suggestions are going to solve America’s health care problem? That canceling the individual or employer mandate is anything less than regressive and counterproductive? That any of these things will make the tiniest whit of a difference in the completely out-of-control costs of US health care?
And “catastrophic coverage” is not health care, it’s a joke. Sure your insurance is going to be cheaper if virtually all your costs are paid are out of your own pocket!
Here’s my view. The only long-term and viable solution to health care costs and the moral issue of universal coverage is to address the fundamentally flawed issue of health care funding as an ordinary business enterprise, where rates are geared to risk and profitability and there is neither interest nor capability in controlling provider costs. The key to doing that is to have universal coverage on a flat-rate model that is not based on individual risk, and an oversight agency that negotiates the rate, the basic common services, and the provider fees. If private insurers want to participate, they can. If they don’t, they can offer to insure those wishing to opt out and enroll in much more expensive risk-based insurance, or offer supplemental coverages. But the basic community-rated plan is available to everyone.
This regulated common framework is well illustrated by the system in Germany, which has large numbers of non-governmental insurers in the public (“statutory”) system alongside a private insurance system with a small percentage of qualified participants able and willing to afford it. For most people, this is de facto single payer, because it really doesn’t matter who the payer is from the standpoint of costs and services. For the wealthy, the ability to insure for extra amenities is still there. Alternatively, Canada does just fine with true single-payer and no private insurance at all for medically necessary services.
I acknowledge that accomplishing this in the US is a political challenge of extraordinary proportions. Some may say that it will never happen, but I prefer to think that the circumstances of cost and waste are such that it eventually must happen. Those who wish to scuttle the ACA altogether should understand that returning to the former status quo is moving in precisely the wrong direction, back to the era of unregulated insurance that was so bad that it precipitated these reforms in the first place. You can’t ignore reality forever, just like even the best PR spin eventually can’t fool all of the people all of the time.
Obamacare is one of the best and most influential laws in the last 30 years. No wonder conservatives have spent equal amounts of effort in opposing it. They know they’re on a losing side and the more people like the law, the harder it will be to get rid of it and the more credit Obama will get. They don’t care how many people it will hurt, they just want to win their partisan fight
The Commonwealth Fund [PDF] did a similar poll. Exhibit 12 is interesting – as I cited above, most of the opposition to the ACA comes from Republicans, yet among those who actually signed up through the ACA, 74% of Republicans (and 85% of Democrats) were satisfied with their plans. It’s almost as if the rest of the Republicans have no experience or direct knowledge of the ACA and are just parroting the party line. What a surprise! 
You only have experience with ACA if you purchase health insurance on the exchanges? That’s a fun way to cherry pick a result ACA supporters like. Only count those who got health insurance, leave out those who lost health insurance or had their premiums go up due to the new coverage mandates.
Look, don’t try to tell us how other countries have made it work. We are American Exceptionalists!
This to me, is the pisser. Other countries have been doing national health care for decades. We, due to our dilatorism, have a golden opportunity to study those systems. What works? What doesn’t work?
Instead, we want our poor to die. Fuck that.