Anyone want to help me respond to this? I frankly admit I don’t know the answer.
Email from Mom:
There’s some good info on the Snopes page about this. It’s outdated anyway, though, because it presumes the existence of a public option, which isn’t in the bill that actually passed.
Snopes to the rescue. - “Mostly false”: basically he wasn’t asked that exact question (it was whether the tradeoff of the cost of providing this plan to Americans would be worth it if it meant that a member of his family couldn’t get options not covered by the plan), and he didn’t sit in silence or ignore it, but his answer wasn’t totally focused. Text of the exchange is after the video.
Complete horsehit from start to finish. There is no “universal health care program.” No such program exists. All the HCR package does is tweak some regulations on private insurers and provides some subsidies to help low income people buy private insurance. It doesn’t require anybody to give up their current insurance. This email is amazingly, fantastically fraudulent.
Congress and the President already get government health care anyway, so the “question” wouldn’t even make sense if the premise was true, which it isn’t.
ETA I hadn’t sen the other responses when I posted. I didn’t know this was outdated. That explains the presumption of a completely fictional “universal health care program.”
From a political perspective the best part about having passed the health care bill and signed it into law is that there is no longer any ambiguity about what the reform will entail, only ignorance to what it says and legitimate uncertainty about what the effects will be. So for instance, we legitimately don`t know with certainty what the reform will do to health care costs, but we do know with certainty that there is NO new universal health care program that anyone will have the option to join, let alone be required to join.
So the whole e-mail, as it’s purported to still be relevant, is completely absurd on its face. Citizens are merely required to have some insurance starting in 2014. The law doesn’t provide for any public insurance plan at all, let alone a universal one.
If one wanted to ask relevant douchey hypothetical questions about the health care law that actually make sense, better examples would be like:
“Are you planning to exempt Sasha and Malia so that health insurers still have the option of refusing to pay for their health care if it’s discovered they have pre-existing conditions?”
“Are you going to allow the Medicare part D donut hole to close for your mother-in-law like it will for all the rest of America on medicare, or are you going to let her to keep paying thousands of dollars for prescription drugs?”
“Will you keep the lifetime benefit maximum so you can run out of benefits and die when you get cancer or will you go ahead and not die like the rest of us have to?”
I don’t understand how any of these questions would make sense. Why would he exempt his own family from the preexisting conditions provision? Why would he cut himself off from something that everyone else gets?
Same with the other questions. Why he be asked to exempt his own family from benefits that everyone else would get? What right woukd he even have to block his mother-in-law and his children from protections that the rest of the country is getting? How would that be legal, and what would be the point?
Plus, Obama’s family gets public healthcare anyway, so the issue wouldn’t even pertain to him
They weren’t supposed to make any sense. The idea behind the e-mail is that the health reform President Obama and the Democrats passed is good enough for the American people but somehow they’re hoping to get out of it for themselves, which is false. The problem with the e-mail is it’s factually incorrect and suggests there’s some universal government insurance that doesn’t even exist, let alone that he’s trying to get out of.
If you wanted to ask leading questions that are factually accurate, my examples are as good as you can get. There’s nothing sinister about the reform. It’s good for everybody except the insurance industry and any politician is going to be happy the reform applies to themselves and their family. If you sat down with Obama and tried to ask questions like that, to try to trap him, he wouldn’t respond with stoney silence, he’d respond with “Fuck yeah I want my kids to be insured. Damn right I want my mother-in-law’s prescription drug costs to go down by thousands of dollars”. Even Republican lawmakers, were they ever to be honest, would have to admit that virtually every individual reform is good for themselves, their family, and everyone else.
That’s why when people are polled on the individual components of what is actually passed in the law, it’s overwhelmingly supported.
Thanks, everyone. I tried Snopes, but didn’t find it.
My mom thinks I’m really smart.
I guess I was whooshed. My bad.
Can anoyne point me to an easy to understand precis of what the US healthcare reform actually entails?
To me in the UK the email makes little sense. I would expect a wealthy man like Obama to have private health insurance. The idea (over here) is that everybody has access to NHS healthcare, but people who want to pay for a perceived better service (or whose employers offer it to them as a perk) can “go private”.
The US scheme isn’t going to stop people having the option of private health insurance, is it? So why would people be annoyed/surprised that rich people would continue to have their own health insurance?
The US scheme isn`t even going to offer ANY (new) public insurance at all, so everyone will have to have private health insurance. That’s why the e-mail is so wrong - it’s completely wrong, factually (really just way out of date) and literally absurd in the context of reality. Nobody even discussed a UK style universal health insurance program, even though we should have. The only thing being discussed was a public option, so even in that hypothetical scheme it would merely compete with all the private insurers. Some people would choose to join the public plan and apparently Charlie felt asking Obama if he would was relevant somehow. But that was not included, so it’s a moot point. There’s no new government run healthcare program at all.
Congress & their staffs will be required to enroll in the insurance exchanges.
So what is there? Government aid for poorer people so that they can afford private healthcare?
If that’s really all it is, what’s all this frothing at the mouth about “death panels” and “being told what we can and can’t eat” and “socialist Obamanation” etc etc?
Well, there IS a bit about large chain restaurants having to display the calorie count of items ON THE MENU. I suppose that might make you not want to eat 4 Big Macs and a stupid-size order of fries, thus prompting the utterance, “Whew! I can’t eat that…”
The rest is wing-nuttery.
There’s that; there’s also the restriction on refusing insurance to those with pre-existing conditions, and other measures to ensure that as many people as possible receive reasonably-priced insurance; and there’s the mandate – you have to get insurance, or pay a “fine” (actually additional income tax, AIUI). The death panels are bullshit, of course, but there is, I suppose, a whiff of socialism in having a national program at all – and the mandate doesn’t sit well with a lot of people.
Pretty much, yeah, along with some stiffer requirements on providers (insurance companies can no longer deny coverage for people with preexisting conditions or dump them if they get sick. parents will be allowed to keep their children on their plans until they’re 26 years old), closing of the Medicare “donut hole,” a graded system of subsidies to low income people to buy insurance, and (most controversially) a mandate that everyone acquire some kind of health insurance (which can be susbidized if necessary) or pay a small fine in the form of a tax.
The GOP gets a lot of money from insurance companies. Part of it is the GOP using its media outlets to try to tamp down public support for reform. They did it to Clinton too.
Another factor is that the right wing media complex is simply trying to demonize Obama for anything and everything, so anything he does is characterized in the most hyperbolic, apocalyptic terms possible.
One thing it would probably help to know is that the vast majortity of teabaggers and the like holding up the signs calling HCR and Obama “socialist” don’t actually have any idea what’s in it (as illustrated by the email in the OP).
Most of the anger was manufactured by two groups: 1) The insurance companies, who lied through their teeth through industry advocacy groups to get people scared and angry and 2) Republicans who knew that getting meaningful reform through would be a very positive thing for Democrats in the long run.
Polls showed most people were extremely confused about how the constituents in the debate lined up. Few people realize(d) that the pharmaceutical industry, AMA, and major hospital industry association had all supported the reform and in fact spent over $100,000,000 publicly supporting it. Granted they weren’t acting in selflessly, they agreed to support it on the basis that the Democrats would work to protect their interests to some extent. But the point is they weren`t even opposing it, let alone spreading vicious lies the way the health insurers were.
As far as what reform really does, the first thing to understand is that it’s enacted slowly over many years. But in the end the idea is simply to reform how insurer’s can operate and to provide subsidies so poor people can afford insurance. There are a lot of provisions that seem fair and desirable but are understandable going to hurt the insurer’s profitability, like not allowing them to refuse to insure very sick people or not allowing them to charge higher premiums simply because you’re a woman or are old. To counteract what are basically requirements to insure people who won’t be profitable, we’re requiring everyone to carry insurance.
I have insurance, but I’m a young and healthy man with no plans to suddenly develop heart disease or a uterus and expensive pregnancy. So opting to not have insurance wouldn’t be the worst decision in the world for me. On the other hand, since I’m so healthy, I’m very cheap and profitable to insure. So now I would be required to carry insurance if I didn`t have it. We’re expanding the pool of insured to defer the cost of the newly insured sick people.
The talk about death panels was utterly empty and had no basis in reality. I think the same is true when people talk about the government making health care decisions for them - basically entirely baseless.
If I try to be as open minded as possible and give the absolute most benefit of the doubt, the only thing I can think of would be that since we’re now requiring that everyone has insurance, the government needs to define what qualifies as insurance.
On the local radio after the bill passed, some DJs were complaining that you can no longer choose to buy a cheap policy that covers no preventative care or that saves money by not covering substance abuse programs if you plan to not become a drug addict. I’m not honestly sure if that’s true as I thought cheap catastrophic coverage was fine and sufficient. But even if it is true, it’s a bad example of the government making important decisions for you. Spending money on preventative care is a fantastic way to reduce medical costs over the long run. I may be inadvertently making a straw man, because I’m not entirely sure if people are actually objecting to things like that, but it’s as close as the law comes to allowing the government to take over your medical decisions.
This is really well put, Fuzzy.
I did see him get asked, last year, if he would enroll himself.
He said(paraphrased), “I’m the President of the United States, I have a personal doctor at my beck and call. But if I didn’t, then yes, I would.”
I liked his answer.