Not out of needing health care.
And that’s fine, because unlike a car, everyone’s going to want health care - demand it, in fact.
He didn’t do a very good job then. As with pretty much everything else, there is a conscience exemption.
Does the health care law mandate that we have to buy insurance from a specific comapny?
I keep wondering where this logic comes from.
Everyone needs (and generally wants) Health Insurance. You’re going to need health services at some point unless you’re some Highlander style Immortal, and even he ended up in the hospital on occasion (true he got up and walked away, but someone paid for the services used to that point!)
Can the government force you to buy a car? No. Not everyone will have the need for a car.
And on the ‘forcing non-drivers to pay gasoline tax’ - in my state half of the funds used to maintain the roads come out of the General Fund. You’re already paying for it whether you drive or not.
Can they force you to purchase from one company? No, and they’re not doing so with health Insurance.
I keep asking people who hate Obamacare this question;
Are you mad because you’re being forced to buy something you don’t want?
Or mad because you’re being forced to buy something you already have?
Neither. They are taking a principled stand, and they are mad because they can’t distinguish health insurance from broccoli or a Chevy.
Bolding mine.
Chimera can you elaborate on this, please? I’d like to be able to use this argument, but I don’t understand (in regards to healthcare) what point the bolded sentence is trying to convey. Assume you’re debating with an uninsured “Obamacare” hater. What are they buying that they already have?
He assumes that all opponents fall into one of the two groups: if they don’t want it, they won’t have it, and if they want it they will. Presumably there is some number of people that wants it but can’t afford it, but I suspect the number of those people who oppose Obamacare is miniscule.
Thanks for the clarification RNATB.
The vast majority of people I see opposing Obamacare already have health insurance and want to keep it. The idea of getting all bent out of shape about being forced to buy something you have and want to keep seems incredibly assinine to me. It’s like being frothing at the mouth angry over the idea of having to buy clothes. (Which the government already requires that you purchase by outlawing public nudity)
This is why I ask the question, to either make people think about what they’re really angry about, or give me some alternate explanation. Who knows, maybe there are people out there who neither have nor want health insurance. Maybe it’s because they think they’re immortal, maybe it’s because they’d rather continue not paying their medical bills when they happen and sticking the rest of us with them. I have no idea, and I’d really like to know.
To date no one has answered the question. Instead they ignore it and keep raging.
That’s true enough, but you are missing the point (not hard, since it’s a point that is usually just handwaved away). Rightly or wrongly, a lot of people think that this is going to make their insurance rates go up. Not difficult logic to understand, since you are talking about covering millions more people than are currently covered without a real fundamental change to our current health care system. So, people are worried that they will be paying more for less service.
Small business owners are especially worried, but really even large businesses are concerned. From listening into the discussions by several small business owners, the big concern is they don’t know what their costs will be in the next few years. There are concerns that their costs will go up, and some folks I talked too are gaming things out to see if they would save money by dropping their current insurance and paying the penalty. There are downsides to this as well of course, but I’ve seen scenarios presented where it’s possible that owners would lose money on a fixed price contract if their insurance rates go up in the worst case speculations. And that’s the key…no one really, truly KNOWS what the costs are going to be. Basically, we’ll just have to wait and see as things get implemented that are waiting in the wings for the time post election, and see how they play out when put into effect in the real world.
No one has answered your question to your satisfaction because those who are all for ‘Obamacare’ are snarking on how stupid ‘conservatives’ who oppose it are, and most of the ‘conservatives’ who could give you a reasonable answer aren’t participating in these sorts of threads anymore, since they have been basically drowned out. The short answer is that you are misunderstanding their concerns (again, whether they are correct or incorrect)…it’s not about having to pay for a service they are already getting, or and argument over the principal of the thing, but instead it’s worry about an unknown, about the possibility of things costing more and of getting less service in return for those higher costs.
Thank you for answering that, but I honestly don’t think it is me misinterpretting things. The discussion above wasn’t about costs. It was about being forced to buy health insurance, and that is, time and again, how I hear it couched. So that is what I addressed.
The issue of costs is a legitimate concern, but it is a huge unknown at this time. If it were this that was being discussed, then the conservatives who oppose Obamacare would have less basis to complain about how they’re being addressed than they do when all we (and I am a moderate, not a liberal) hear is screaming over how they’re being forced to buy something and how wrong that is, accompanied by the ludicrous arguments and examples we see above.
In my case at least, it is about the principle of the thing.
Obamacare is not going to do anything about the increasing costs of health care - more likely just the opposite, since there will be more demand as people are forced to buy health insurance and want to get their money’s worth. And you are probably correct that some companies will decide that paying the tax is cheaper than providing health insurance and drop coverage.
But that is not the problem. The problem is
[ul][li]Obama lied thru his teeth that this was not a tax. []As the OP mentions, we have now established that the federal government can order you to buy something from a private company. []Congress is supposed to have the power to regulate interstate commerce. Not buying something means you are not engaging in interstate commerce. Therefore, Congress does not have the right to regulate it.[/ul]It pisses me off when the government oversteps its boundaries. It pisses me off more when the government lies about what it is doing, and then oversteps its boundaries. It pisses me off most when the government lies about what it is doing, oversteps its boundaries, and passes legislation that isn’t going to fix the problems it’s supposed to fix. [/li]
This is like the Kelo v. New London decision - it is plainly contrary to the Constitution. And nobody seems to give a shit.
Regards,
Shodan
Except that in every other country in the world, health costs are very much lower than they are in the United States.
You might think having a ton of different “profit centers” in the middle of it might have something to do with it, but god forbid we do anything to detract from our sacrifices at the altar of Profit.
And frankly, I don’t buy the “everyone tries to get their money’s worth” line. I’m not going to run to the doctor every other day to “get my money’s worth”. I don’t do it now and I pay a shit load for my insurance.
No kidding, who the hell wants to sit in a waiting room for an hour for nothing?
shrug The courts interpret the Constitution, and that’s what they did. They seem to think it IS Constitutional, so until there is a later ruling that’s how things are.
I disagree. He was wrong, but I don’t think he was lying.
I think that’s an oversimplification. And there is the ‘political will’ aspect of all of this. As I said, the government COULD do a lot of things…but mostly, they don’t have enough political capital to do them. If the government ACTUALLY tried to force Americans to buy cars from GM or face a tax penalty, then I have little doubt that officials pushing for that would be opposed by the opposite party AND probably face re-election problems. That’s the thing…unless there is a fundamental shift in the voters, they just aren’t going to go for something like this. At least not once it starts hitting them in the pocketbook. For that matter, I think that if this thing turns out as some of the worst case scenarios I’ve heard, THIS is going to be a political third rail for those who supported it. Or, it might turn out to be much ado about nuffin…too early to tell right now.
My apologies then.
Insurance doesn’t work that way: it’s the one “product” that people buy hoping they won’t get their money’s worth. For me to “get my money’s worth” from my car insurance, I’d have to get in one or more fairly serious accidents, but I certainly would rather that not happen.
Would you prefer that the government get into the insurance business itself—the way it handles police protection, fire protection, military defense, road maintainence, etc.?
How would you fix the problems? What’s the preferable alternative to Obamacare?
People are mad because they are being forced to buy something. Period.
Now, if Obamacare were funded through a mechanism that was truly a tax, then the government would be within its rights. But, as Obama the great Constitutional scholar told us, it’s definitely NOT a tax. Except when they have to defend it in court, then magically it turns into a tax, a tax that really isn’t a tax. :rolleyes:
People are upset because the way the government is supposed to collect income is through taxes, and Obama set up a new mechanism by which the government can extract money from the populace. People should be very concerned about that.
A lie is an intentional misstatement of fact. How do you reach the conclusion that Obama believed this was a tax, but told people it wasn’t a tax, given that the four most conservative members of the Supreme Court agreed with him that it wasn’t a tax?
Which again, if you’re angry that you are being forced to buy something you already have and want to keep, you really need to dial it back and reconsider what you’re angry about.
If the government mandated that your body convert Oxygen to Carbon Dioxide, and applied a penalty if you did not do it, would you likewise be howling in rage?
That may be the case, but that doesn’t excuse his behavior in my book. It compounds it. After swearing up and down and assuring the people that the mandate was NOT a tax, he then had his administration argue its constitutionality on those very grounds. An ethical person would have not seeked to have the bill passed on grounds that he was certain was wrong and told the people—repeatedly—was not the case.