I hope you have the integrity to stand by this. You are asserting that the result of the elections in Virginia are a referendum on the topic of this thread? I will hold you to that.
I wonder< should a person be forced to have Insurance, if they don’t, should other people be forced to pay the costs if they don’t or should they just be led to suffer the consequences? It was that way in the 40’s and early 50’s.
I also find it strange that so many who call them selves pro-life do not want to help another to live or have the opportunity for a healthy life. One bad illness could either break them or they could die! We make drivers have a license. etc. So , perhaps if people realized they could go without Insurance they would get no help, would they then rebel?
Or fears of not being able to get a better one, hmm? You’re still not acknowledging that minor detail as pertinent, no doubt as it would undercut your RO. But at least you have something more to offer on the topic than John Mace’s shallow, unseemly pouting.
As to what difference this statement made in the debate, either you had a better factual reason than that for this bit of insinuation:
or you didn’t. Either way, you’re not willing to explain, are you?
monavis, why do you think you’re required to have auto insurance if you drive on public roads?
You’re required to have liability insurance( in case you hurt someone else or damage someone else’s property). You are not required to have auto insurance to cover yourself.
Not a good analogy.
A strained, but nonetheless fair, analogy. Particularly if you might have an infectious disease which ought to be detected. And if you cannot afford such care, and end up in the ER, and cannot afford that either, you have a minimal but nonetheless real effect on my property.
The question was about the justification for being required to buy insurance, and for other people paying your costs. You should have read it.
Or were you about to follow that with something resembling a productive, thoughtful response? I know we all look forward to seeing that.
It must be frustrating not to get some factual support to bolster your supercilious both-sides-do-it-ism. This just isn’t working out the way you need it to, is it? Like so many other discussions before it.
Not really. When you get into a 1 ton piece of machinery and drive it 65 MPH down the freeway, you are entering a high risk situation where you can cause great bodily harm and great property damage.
But if you insist on going with that analogy, you could require people to have liability health insurance. Pay a minimum into the pot in case you accidentally cause someone else harm. But don’t require me to have coverage for non-communicable diseases, pregnancy (besides which, I’m a guy), and any other medical expenses I might have that affect only me. Get the actuaries to figure out how much that is, and I’m guessing it’ll be a few pennies a day.
Plus, Obamacare does not actually provide such liability insurance. Suppose I catch a deadly virus, infect your entire family, and kill your wife and child. What is my liability? What does Obamacare provide you in compensation? Nada.
But if I do the same by driving my car into your house, I’ve got liability up the wazoo.
Not seeing even a strained analogy here.
If the two were not at least somewhat analogous, we wouldn’t call them both by the same name: insurance.
The analogy is not about what they are, it’s about why the government requires us to buy them. You are not required buy law to by homeowner’s insurance, umbrella insurance, or (for that matter) car insurance to cover yourself.
You are required to buy car insurance for the primary (and sole) purpose of the liability you assume by driving a car on public roads. You can own a car, and even drive it on private property without having insurance.
You are not required to have bicycle insurance if you ride on public roads because there is little chance you are going to cause harm to lives or property on your bicycle. Same thing if you’re walking around.
The purpose of the individual mandate in Obamacare was not to mitigate the spread of communicable diseases. Please don’t lets go down that road in a thread about falsehoods used to sell that piece of legislation. The purpose was to spread the cost of insuring everyone across enough healthy people (who wouldn’t ordinarily buy insurance) so as to lower the overall cost of the system.
That’s incomplete. It was also to limit the cost of the uninsured who suffer expensive illnesses. Since that cost is carried by the rest of society.
Saying it was just to increase the risk pool (and is only a burden on the healthy) is needlessly inflammatory.
Well, I don’t want to prolong an arcane semantic discussion, let’s just say you’re wrong, and leave it at that. There! All settled.
I don’t think so. You don’t lower costs by bringing a bunch of sick people into the risk pool. You have to bring a bunch of healthy people in if you want to lower costs.
But I didn’t say it was “burden” on anyone-- that came from you. I said there were lots of healthy people who wouldn’t buy insurance. Whether doing so is a “burden” or not is another matter.
If you want to Pit someone, go to the Pit and open your own thread.
Repeatedly making snide remarks about another poster that are bare millimeters inside the line of insults is going to be regarded cumulatively as an insult and garner you a Warning.
[ /Moderating ]
I literally have no idea what you’re talking about. The false claim in question was that if you like your plan, you can keep it.. That in no way assuages – or has anything to do with – fears of not being able to get a better one; it addresses a single concern with a reassuring lie; it is silent to, and irrelevant to, anything else.
As I said, it’s axiomatic: when a salesman uses false advertising, I figure he was trying to make the sale – or else, why bother? If you offer a sandwich you claim has no more calories than a Big Mac, or you assure me it’s kosher or vegan or whatever – or say the furniture comes with a thirty-day money-back guarantee, or whatever – then I’d ask for your reason when the truth came out, but default to figuring you put it in the sales pitch in hopes of getting the sale.
This would be wholly unremarkable of me in any other context; I always figure a lie told during a sales pitch is intended to help make the sale, and would always figure it’s on the liar to suggest an alternative reason for the fake advertising. Why should this be any different?
But you’re completely missing the context, which is much clearer if you look at the quote that most people are focusing on:
Now, how can anyone say that is an unambiguous statement? The context makes it clear that he was saying some people will not be able to keep their health care plan. Period. No matter what.
It’s pretty clear he lied or deliberately misled. Essentially the same thing. Those claiming otherwise are undertaking laughably complex mental gymnastics themselves. A more interesting question is what effect this will have on future activities if any. To me at least.
A couple key things have to happen in the next few months.
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Get the damn website up and running. This is not rocket science, and I have to believe that the administration is going to be able to do this. They seem pretty confident about the Nov 30 date. Even if they miss that by a bit, but still get it up and running I say no big deal. People will forget about the bad start-up problems (except for the folks who won’t give Obama credit for anything under any circumstances).
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Get X million “young invincibles” signed up so that costs don’t get out of hand. I don’t remember what X is, but I seem to remember it being something like 7 (million). That’s a bit of a toss-up at this point as the fines for not signing up are pretty small, and it’s generally hard to predict what people are going to do.
Longer term, we’ll just have to see how this extremely complex piece of legislation plays out, and whether the Insurance Companies aren’t going to be able to outsmart the government and figure out new and improved ways of screwing us over. That, I certainly wouldn’t bet on, especially when we all know that the GOP isn’t going to cooperate on tweaking the ACA to make it work better-- as opposed to “repeal and replace”, despite the fact they don’t really have anything to replace it with.
And that’s where Obama’s need to dumb things down in an effort to combat the stream of lies being told *about *the law comes into play. Certainly he was “trying to make the sale”, but that term incorrectly implies he was doing it for *his *benefit, not ours. You do go on about wondering why he said what he said - but there’s really no need to wonder. Only if you ignore the political environment both in and outside of the Beltway does it fail in any way to make sense.
It’s been asked of others, it might as well be asked of you: What *does *happen if you get a signed confession from him saying “Yes, I lied. Signed, Barack Hussein Obama”? Do you think it would mean anything beyond a little crowing from those, such as in this thread, who insist on making it the sole focus of any discussion surrounding the ACA law? Do you see any purpose to this thread other than looking for some cheap points to score in a game nobody else is even bothering to play?
Did you not watch the Sunday Talk shows today? I did. It was a major topic on every single one of them.
If you want to argue that this is not going to be too big a deal in the long run, I’ll say: Maybe. As long as these new plans people get really are better and cheaper. But that’s not a slam dunk (to borrow a phrase from another administration), regardless of what some here seem to be assuming.
However, to pretend that nobody is paying attention to this, and that no one (other than rabid partisans) would take note if Obama actually came out and admitted to lying about the ACA is… naive, to put it kindly.