Bullshit. I never said the law was 2,400 pages long. I’d appreciate you not attempting to put words in my mouth. Especially in GD where such behavior can’t get the response it deserves.
And this whole 900-page stuff is just the best bullshit the Dems were able to come up with to not have their behavior seem not as bad as it was. Yep, that’s their best, which pints to just how pathetic their position is.
I recently read that there were over 2.5 million new sign-ups when the most recent open enrollment began in November. Today is the last day to sign up for those who want coverage starting tomorrow. And, open enrollment ends in February, so there may be more signing up soon. http://health.usnews.com/health-news/articles/2014/12/17/federal-health-marketplace-enrolls-another-25-million-americans
I suppose we are looking at about 10 million signed up now.
I don’t really see how running on taking health insurance away from 10 million people is going to be a winning-ticket idea for Republicans.
If you Google “Why ACA reduces costs” you’ll get a variety of reputable looking hits, e.g. Bloomberg - Are you a robot? , Affordable Care Act Reduces Costs for Hospitals, Report Says - The New York Times , http://www.rwjf.org/content/dam/farm/reports/issue_briefs/2011/rwjf71451 , etc.
I’ve neither the time nor talent to investigate the claims, but they’re pervasive. When the choices are[ul][li]Believe Forbes.com, FoxNews, etc., or[/li][li]Believe reputable main-stream media and organizations like Robert Wood Johnson Foundation[/li][/ul] it should be a no-brainer … if you have a brain.
It’s not that big of a deal to point out that a surgery doesn’t work and the insurance therefore won’t pay for it. The real sensitive point is the decision that, although a procedure may do some good, the benefit of it versus its cost doesn’t meet your standard, and therefore it’s not covered.
The OP’s 3 Obamacare complaints were
the number or people who signed up; was it 6, 7 or 8 million? I think the part he’s missing here is the ‘million’ part. Were not just talking about 6, 7 or 8 people.
That the open enrollment started November 15 instead of sometime in October.
And that rates vary- some rates went up, some went down, some stayed the same, and that insurance prices increase generally.
I find these to be some odd and very minor complaints from someone who seems to be opposed to Obamacare in general.
It makes me wonder if the OP is having trouble signing up. I’ve helped two family members sign up and would be happy to help, if that’s the case.
My google-fu is failing me. Do you have a cite for the 100,000 cost per person?
You don’t need a cite. If he is correct, the cost of ACA would be 700 trillion dollars.
Not to mention more uninsured people would be insured if the Republican governors had accepted Medicaid expansion.
Eh. If someone tells me they have a 2,400 page document for me to read, my assumption is that that’s 2,400 pages worth of stuff to read (excluding margins), not 900 pages worth of stuff to read and 1,500 pages worth of nothing.
More to the point, though, yes, 900 pages does sound like less to read than 2,400 pages. Perhaps you’re correct that that usefulness of having space to edit is worth 1,500 pages of extra content to read, though I would personally tend to expect not. The point, however, is that a 2,400-page bill makes it sound like there’s 2,400 pages worth of “stuff”, vs. 900 pages worth of “stuff”. Look at that ridiculous amount of stuff that people are expected to read! It’s silly! That’s the impression using that number gives off, I’d argue.
Am I having a math fail here? 7M multiplied by 100K is 700 Billion, not 700 trillion. I have no idea if the 100K claim is correct.
What a load of crap, on several different levels.
Cost control has nothing whatsoever to do with “telling patients they can’t have something they want”. Cost control, as every country in the world has discovered except the US, is about eliminating costly expenditures that have nothing to do with health care, like the entire process of setting up thousands of different insurance plans, risk-rating every individual, and then adjudicating every claim – and everything that goes with that. Cost control is indeed precisely about eliminating the market-driven approach to insurance so favored by conservatives, and about regulated standardization of provider fees.
Furthermore, the question of whether a procedure is medically indicated or not is, by definition, a medical decision and should never be in the purview of insurance bureaucrats anyway. The whole concept being advocated here is fundamentally misguided.
Much as been said here and elsewhere about “choice”. Choice in health care providers, sure. But “choice” in insurance is an absurdity and a smokescreen for the scam that it is, because the only thing anyone ever wants from their insurance is to pay the bill. That’s why community-rated insurance works. And moreover, under such a system there is more real choice in health care than under the present system, because you’re not limited to an artificial “network” of providers.
That’s not just absurd, it’s immoral and obscene. It’s astounding that in a supposedly civilized society anyone would be comparing health care – the most fundamental human right-- with a TV set, and concluding that they are exactly the same.
I don’t necessarily disagree with that, and the bolded part (emphasis mine) is actually very key. The second part I happen to disagree with, except for entirely discretionary things like cosmetic surgery or cosmetic dentistry, but I acknowledge that one can have a reasonable debate about it. What’s very important to a successful health care system is that the first part – the universal coverage – must be available to everyone at the same basic rate and must cover all medically necessary services. This has to be a bedrock principle or else services that are truly medically necessary may gradually leak over into the “pay it yourself” category.
oops read it as 1000 K. 700 billion is wrong anyhow, as is the 100 K I’m sure.
Looked up Medicare spending. It was about $492 billion in 2012.
Cite. There were just over 41 million people enrolled. That’s a per capita cost of a bit over $10K. This is clearly going to be higher than costs for the younger, healthier people covered by ACA. Plus some of the newly insured get subsidies, not complete coverage.
Any competent doctor is going to probably be telling at least some patients that they can’t have things they would like, though with our fee for service system they might well allow stuff that will bring in money.
Another type of cost control is the publication of costs that allow people to compare hospitals in the same region. That is not a direct method of cost control, but it does help the market.
Wolfpup, that’s how single payer works. Do you actually think those expensive biotechs or proton beam therapy are covered in those places? Heck, in Canada it’s very difficult to get a PET Scan unless you’re lucky enough to live in Quebec:
I guess French people just take health care more seriously than Anglos.
Where you run off the rails is not recognizing that insurance is really just a pass through, they profit off of the fact that the providers get to operate from a position of extreme advantage, and thus charge exorbitant prices. Because they insulate customers from some of the worst effects of that, health insurance companies do allow providers to charge more than they would in a market without them, so are indeed a piece of the inefficiency. They aren’t the whole thing, though. They are just a layer of inefficiency built on top of a foundation of skilled professionals who have control over an extremely important service that people literally die without.
Health insurance in the United States was quite literally invented by hospitals and providers to guarantee them a more stable revenue while protecting them against the socialized medicine they had seen go into effect elsewhere. The insurance companies are a symptom, not the cause, of what’s wrong with American healthcare.
The ACA limited health insurance profiteering, which will reduce costs, and of course will absolutely reduce costs for people who simply couldn’t get health insurance at all. But it really did nothing on the provider side. Every system that works has provider-side price regulations, and it doesn’t have to be single-payer to have it. It doesn’t even have to eliminate all the good things about free markets to do it either.
For example if the system just makes all doctors employees of government, and gives patients no ability to choose who they see, it means doctors don’t suffer at all if they do shitty jobs and patients don’t want to see them. So if it’s single payer but patients are seeing independent doctors who bill the government, the doctors have a major incentive to do a good job. If they get a bad reputation patients won’t come to see them, and they won’t make as much money.
Not only are market forces not intrinsically evil in healthcare, many UHC/single payer systems actually try to preserve some element of market decision making just like that to make the system more efficient.
The aging population is going to call a lot of this into question even in Europe. In America like I said we spend like twice as much for worse results than other countries. But something we have in common with Europe and all other first world countries is healthcare costs are growing faster than inflation. Meaning they are growing faster than the economy’s ability to continue paying for them without squeezing other things out. This is a baked in reality for populations that are getting older in the first world. More old people going into their twilight years and fewer young working people to fund their care is going to roil healthcare across the globe. The United States is best setup to suffer the most from this, but all the numbers I see strongly suggest that eventually there will have to be rationing of care for the elderly based on economic necessity versus solely medical concerns. While healthcare costs did slightly dip during the global recession, it doesn’t look like that’s holding and I’d expect high cost growth rates (which we’ve seen for a generation all over the world) to continue.
How can healthcare be the most fundamental human right? There are many rights that have to exist before healthcare can even be provided, so it defies logic that it can be the most fundamental human right. What of a society that had a right to healthcare but not a right to food if you couldn’t afford it? Or a society with a right to healthcare but no freedom of movement or thought? What matters how healthy you are if you spend your whole life in a North Korean gulag?
“Must be available to everyone at the same basic rate” is not necessary for a good healthcare system. Lots of countries have no out of pocket cost for say indigent persons who cannot work, but require working persons to pay a payroll contribution into a healthcare fund. That isn’t people paying the same basic rate but can work just fine, and does in many European countries.
I agree with the last statement – I believe that’s how Blue Cross originated. But the first paragraph I believe is misleading. It’s a lot like asking how insurance companies could possibly be such major contributors to health care costs when their profits are a relatively small proportion of total health care expenditures.
And the answer, of course, is that they are the core of a fundamentally dysfunctional system. Sure health care providers will naturally charge all that the market will bear, but the insurance industry is the market that is happily bearing it – they just pass on the costs and have little incentive or ability to control them.
Put it this way. Many decades ago Canada had exactly the same system and the same problems as the US does. As provinces adopted single-payer one by one and basically told the health insurers they couldn’t be in this sordid business any more, the cost problem was largely solved. Sure Canadians still fret about rising public health care costs, but they are less than two-thirds of what they are in the US and significantly are rising more slowly.
Every country with universal health care, whether it’s technically single-payer or not, has some type of regulatory agency that negotiates or otherwise regulates provider fees. The beauty of single-payer is that this capability is intrinsic.
Sure, but my point is that market forces are intrinsically evil in health insurance. Regulated markets and competition in health care delivery are good things. There is a vast difference. The latter provides health care and saves lives, the former is a useless waste of money.
I think the present challenge is just the baby boomer wave. If you look closely at the stats, people aren’t living much longer than they used to, it’s more that medical science is getting better and better at preventing early deaths, so more of us are living full lives. Living as I do in a single-payer system in Ontario, and with a number of elderly relations, I see no signs of them getting anything but the very best of health care from the public system.
I’m sure you know what I meant. The right to life has to be the most fundamental human right, and health care is surely central to that. If you prefer, I’ll rephrase that to “health care is a basic human right, period”. The point here being that comparing it to the ability to buy a large-screen TV is, as I said, absurd and obscenely immoral. Indeed I would say that the view of health care as merely a market commodity that you can buy if you can afford it is the very core of the present health care problem in the US.
To be fair, measures like Medicaid and like EMTALA providing for limited mandatory ER treatment seem to recognize that fact – it’s just that they are so incredibly limited and so incredibly wasteful and inefficient and inadequate.
I suppose I wasn’t clear. By “same basic rate” I’m referring to the principle of community-based rating rather than individual risk rating; a more accurate term would be “same basic rate structure” – that is, everyone either pays for health care out of tax dollars and/or some nominal rate structure that is geared to income. Either way, they are guaranteed health care for a nominal cost that is geared to income, a premium that is typically no more than a few hundred dollars a year and, for many, could very well be zero.
Look, a 2,400 page bill is 2,400 pages long. Really. I guess you’ll have to trust me on this. Now we can put all that info on 2-inch Post-it Notes and it might turn into a 24,000 page document. Or we might get giant pages and condense the type so we have a 24-page document.But neither of those things change the fact that a 2,400-page bill is 2,400 pages long.
As far as the presence of ample white space, as I said, this is SOP for legal documents in the U.S. Is it different in the U.K.? I’m willing to go out on a limb here and say that the spacing is such that it makes it easier to read carefully and make notes. So, your 900 pages would likely be more onerous. Otherwise, that’s the way bills would be written, right? Or do you hold that there is a paper company conspiracy afoot?
Here is the official printing of the ACA:link. It is 906 pages.
For Chrissakes, just because a prior version of the bill was 2,400 pages is irrelevant. I used to be 162 pounds and less than 10% body fat. Ferraris used to go 0-60 in 12 seconds. Our country used to be made of 13 states.
If you are going to state how many pages the ACA is, it is simply a fact that it is 906 pages. You can’t go back in history and say it is 2,400 even though it was at one time; not can you state that the U.S. is comprised of 13 states. Why does such a simple fact have to be tinkered with by a conservative poster who wants to score a totally meaningless, glib talking point?
Here’s an earlier version of the bill, about 1,900 pages. Look at the format. THAT is how bills are formatted and what congressmen read.
I do agree that this is a silly point to debate. But someone tried to claim that my number for the pages of the bill congress had to read was 2,400 pages. I simply have been pointing out that my claim was not wrong. But even if it was 900+ pages of more dense type. That’s still an unwieldy amount to read very carefully in the scant time they were given. THAT is the point.
There was plenty of time. The opponents only have themselves to blame that rather than reading the bill and debating it on its merits, they spent most of their time inventing things not in the bill out of whole cloth to try to hoodwink the public. Remember Sarah Palins"death panels" for example? Instead of reading the PPACA bill, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa was busy speaking about "a government run plan to decide when to pull the plug on grandma.”
Let’s be clear that they only had time because the Democrats were denied a chance to rush it through Congress before the public could be informed. The President wanted a bill on his desk by July 2009. July is when the Senate’s full bill first emerged from committee. He wanted that sumbitch, once it emerged, passed by next month.