Out of curiosity, has the cost of healthcare gone down for you and your family by almost 75% or has the portion of the cost you pay out of pocket gone down leaving someone else to pick up the difference? The two are not necessarily the same.
Yes, you’re absolutely correct. A bill that never became law was once 2400 pages. Kudos on that marvelous win. Also, thank you for making it clear to all involved that you have absolutely no intent of debating honestly.
The Republicans could actually repeal the law and just take their political lumps. It’s not like Democrats will get Congress again anytime soon, and even if they did, there’s no way the conservative Dems would fall on their swords again for the sake of liberal Democrats’ desires. Most of them voted for ACA, lost their jobs, and the attitude of the base was, “Good riddance”.
If you want to say or imply I’m dishonest, take it to the pit, tough guy. As it stands, YOU injected yourself into a conversation, attempting to correct a minor point. YOUR OWN CITE showed YOU to be WRONG about that and that I WAS CORRECT. When this is pointed out to you, do you admit your error and apologize? No. While you are forced to admit that I was right (hell, you’re own fucking cite proves me correct. That, and well, reality.), you then claim that someone other than you is debating dishonestly. :rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:
There are a bunch of words there that you should probably look up, starting with the last one.
The cite shows that you’re wrong. You said, “That was all obfuscated in a 2,000-plus page bill that people weren’t given the time to read in its final form.”
That means that the final form was 2000 plus pages. So aside from the ignorance of your original comment that no one read it, when they surely had, you’re also doubling down on being shown you’re wrong.
We’re here to fight ignorance, not fight to hold on to it.
Not sure what is so hard to understand about this.
Guy A says the bill was 2,000-plus pages
Guy B shows a cite that clearly indicates them that, no, it was approx 900 pages
Guy A says a version exists that shows it was 2,400 pages so he’s not wrong
Guy B indicates again that that was an earlier version, not the “final form” indicated by Guy A
I wonder if I make a flow chart it would help?
No. The 900-page count modifies the bill into a form that bills are not presented in. We all know that the page is double or triple spaced, like most legal documents. Can it be condensed into 900 pages? Sure. Hell, let’s do legal-size type and extend the margins all the way out (which is also not the way bills are presented) and we can probably get it to about 30 pages. That was my point about the bible fitting onto the head of a pin.
My point stands.
As far as the $2,500 claim. I think you were right about it being something he said only as a candidate. I searched a little and that does seem to be the case. I still think I recall him saying it as president, but I’m not interested enough to search more. At this point it does look like I’m mistaken about that.
Apparently Obama made the claim as a candidate in the run up to the 2008 election. The referenced quote is:
Politifact ruled the claim as a Promise Broken. Politifact cites as their source that Obama made such claim a speech Obama gave on June 23, 2007 entitled “A Politics of Conscience” however the link is dead.
But Obama continued making a substantially similar claim after he was elected. Fackcheck.org takes a run at Obama’s claim that:
They cite as their source for the claim a posting to the White House Blog in mid-March 2012. FackChecks has some issues with the many caveats used in the claim and the numbers cited to back the claim.
The March 2012 timeline is, of course, well after the PPACA had been enacted into law and well after the Congressional Budget Office had come to a different conclusion, estimating a slight increase in premiums.
That must be what I was remembering. And it naturally didn’t turn up in my search for $2,500.
Thanks.
Cite?
How many times do we have to see that phrasing “up to” before it sinks in. The coupons in today’s Smart Shopper Weekly can save you “up to” $400 on your grocery bill! Assuming, of course, you buy four pounds of yak cheese and the giant economy size can of lingonberries. “Up to” establishes the upper limit, you may save $1.98 on Piggly Wiggly bacon, you may save $33.08 on your months groceries, but what you will not do, what you cannot do, is save $401. That is guaranteed, on that you may rely.
It is political speech, it has the same level of reliable veracity as a whore’s moans of passion. I didn’t vote for Obama because he is totally honest, or that he never shades the truth, I will never have any such opportunity.
If offered the chance to vote for a saint, I wouldn’t do it, the cynics and swine would eat his lunch, himself, and crack his bones for the marrow before a week was out.
Democracy! Gotta love it! No, really, we gotta…
No one expects you to vote for a saint. We just expect you to not carry water for his dubious claims.
The problem with arguing about the ACA with conservatives is that they categorically don’t believe in expanded access to health care. You can shout past each other till your ears turn blue, but the bottom line is that - no matter what - the GOP is not persuadable when it comes to the law. That’s basically why I tend to not engage in these debates anymore, because the exact same arguments keep coming up & the conservative recalcitrance is always ubiquitous.
Whatever happens, though, don’t ever mention that Obamacare was created by Republicans in the first place. They hate that.
As I understood it, the purpose of the 2000+ pages claim was to show that this was a very long bill that people would have difficulty, or at least need a lot of time, to read.
Spacing doesn’t add content, though. It adds pages, but not more to read. A 900-page bill, spaced out to 2000+ pages, or condensed to 400 pages, wouldn’t seem to take an appreciably different time to taken in. Unless you made the font really small, I guess.
We did move on. First there was the election of 2010 and then the election of 2014. Both houses flipped.
So maybe all the people who lost their doctor, or had the cost of their policy go up, or fewer hours at work know something you don’t and decided to cut the bullshit at the source.
This was suppose to help 30 million people without insurance and not screw over the people who had insurance. So far it’s helped 7 million at a cost of 100,000 per person. Democratic Senator Tom Harkin said it best: “We had the power to do it in a way that would have simplified healthcare, made it more efficient and made it less costly and we didn’t do it,”
It was poorly planned, overpriced, and it hurt a lot of people.
Ignoring the uninteresting politics of it, the ACA essentially just extended the existing health insurance system to people who don’t have employers by forcefully creating pools of people where before the sickest would be excluded by insurers entirely. The only way that can be offered by for-profit entities (or even not-for profits that don’t have government tax revenue to fund them) is by jacking up prices for young/healthy people to cover all the old/sick people now being allowed into the game. That’s what happened.
That has positive/negative arguments to it, but what the ACA didn’t do is anything meaningful to get costs under control. The ACA started from a false premise–that health insurance companies are why we spend like 2x as much per capita on health care than I believe any other OECD country (going off the top of my head there.) Healthcare companies are rent-seeking inefficiencies but the whole concept of them actually was promulgated by the entities most responsible for the mess we’re in–health care providers, the U.S. medical guild and hospitals broadly. Health insurance companies was their creature, defeat of UHC over 60 years ago was their political wrangling. What’s odd is some of these organizations are even not-for profit hospitals and such, with relatively modest CEO pay (modest meaning like $400k-500k, but that is relatively modest all things considered.) I suspect for some of them it’s just that capturing more money gets them nice and nicer buildings, fancier equipment, more prestige etc. Greed seeps in even without a direct shareholder–profit motive relationship.
Despite the incorrect statement above “single payer UHC” is not a global standard or a first world standard. The broad standard is universal coverage, control of provider pricing, and strong protections on ruinous out of pocket costs. Some countries this means a multi-payer system where the poor pay nothing and even the middle class pay paltry sums, with enforced controls on pricing. Some countries this means the government does all the payment so has full control of price by being the only purchaser. Some it even means all doctors are employees of the government instead of government paying independent practitioners.
A proper ACA could have just clipped their nuts. Pass a law saying all medical providers in the country have to charge off the Medicare table, whatever Medicare pays for something, that’s what the doctor has to charge for anything. If you don’t like it, no medical license. That wouldn’t fix all the problems but you’d see serious changes in pricing right away, and a short-term doctor shortage. Ultimately you’d need government to step in to fund doctor training, because people won’t go a quarter million in debt without inflated salaries at the end of the road.
Healthcare providers operate much like a guy who privately owns a dam that overlooks your town, and who has the legal authority to open it and flood the town anytime he wants. What price would he charge to not open the damn? The answer is, whatever he wanted. Entities with power like that have to be controlled by government, just like monopoly public utilities. For some things like emergency service hospitals have true monopolies genuinely based on geography and such. For others like cancer treatment, it’s more like a cartel. Since everyone agrees to limit the supply of new guild members (look at how many different specialists people visit now versus 1970, but how we’ve hardly increased our throughput for training new doctors since then, oh and also look at how many more people live in the United States in 2014 versus 1970) all of them are going to have high prices, so being able to shop around from one cancer treatment provider to another is just a myth. Just like in a true cartel, you may be able to go to different members of the cartel to buy, but you’re not really exercising genuine consumer power because of how the cartel operates.
Health insurance companies are miserable to deal with and people hate them. So they were the target of the ACA, but of course even it was in many ways a windfall to them. People don’t tend to want to think of their doctors negatively, but they are the ones really to blame.
Well said.
You have it backwards. In the U.S., the standard format for bills, like many legal documents has lots of space. So a 2-page bill has a lot of space. A 15-page bill has a lot of space. 350-page bill has a lot of space. All of these bills can be condensed. But the 12-page bill is still 12 pages long, the 15-page bill is still 15 pages long, and the 150-page bill is still…wait for it…350 pages long. The fact is that a 2,400-page bill (yep, 2,400 pages long) is a really long bill. That is the point.
I don’t know which is easier to read. Sure 900 pages sound like less to read than 2,400 pages, but it may not necessarily be easier to read the way you need to read a bill, making notes, etc.
Despite the fact that Gruber thinks the American people are okay to lie to, and he got caught carrying water for an administration lie AGAIN, Gruber gets at an important truth here that a lot of single-payer advocates deny:
“The real substance of cost control is all about a single thing: telling patients they can’t have something they want. It’s about telling patients, ‘That surgery doesn’t do any good, so if you want it you have to pay the full cost.’”
“There’s no reason the American health care system can’t be, ‘You can have whatever you want, you just have to pay for it.’ That’s what we do in other walks of life. We don’t say everyone has to have a large screen TV. If you want a large screen TV, you have to pay for it. Basically the notion would be to move to a level where everyone has a solid basic insurance level of coverage. Above that people pay on their own, without tax-subsidized dollars, to buy a higher level of coverage.”
C’mon, dude, this is getting really, really dumb.
You’ve insisted that the law is 2400 pages long; you’ve been shown that no, it is actually only 900 pages long. You are plainly, factually, categorically wrong on this one, & arguing otherwise is illogical.