So, let's debate Obamacare

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

They’ve been saying it would be a success at 7 million for some time. There are a number of Colbert and Daily Show segments showing Fox talking heads saying they’d never get there.

[BrokenBriton]

The demographic is at least as important as the headline number, and it seems the <=34 age group did sign up.

Looking like quite a big win - atm

[BrokenBriton]

The Guardian is saying 8 million, and 28% for18-34s.

Obama says 8m Americans have signed up for healthcare plan

[elfkin477]

@Wesley_Clark

Insurance rates have been climbing 10-30% a year for years before the ACA.

Not even close to that much:

“It is clear that in recent years health care cost growth has slowed,” Health and Human Services department spokeswoman Erin Shields Britt told ABC News. “In the ten years before the health care law was passed, health care costs increased at 8.7 percent per year on average, according to the independent Kaiser Family Foundation."

Of course their point in citing the figure was that the increase was lower than that in 2010-2012, but I doubt they’d lowball the increases if they were trying to make a point about how much things were better for three years.

[GIGObuster]

@ITR_champion

This line of argument gives me flashbacks to around eight years ago. Everyone knew, by then, that almost everything President Bush and his Administration had told us in order to justify his war in Iraq was false. He said Saddam had lots WMDs, but Saddam had none. He said Saddam was trying to acquire uranium, while Saddam wasn’t. He said Saddam was collaborating with Al Queda, which was untrue. He said that the war would cost two billion dollars, and the cost ended up being in the trillions. He said that the war wouldn’t last more than six months, but it lasted many years. Yet a few of his defenders insisted that Bush never lied to us. Yes, he said some things that turned out to be untrue, but can you prove that he knew they were untrue when he said them? Obviously we can’t prove what he was thinking, absent mind-reading capabilities. We can say that the President and his Administration were either lying through their teeth or dumb enough to believe their own propaganda. We can’t prove that it’s the first rather than the second. And the same is true for the current Administration and its health care.

Lets pretend that there were lies. (more like fibs if you ask me) When the Bush supporters defended him, one favorite line they told was “but Clinton did too!” I remember one short and effective rebuttal to that: ‘No one died when Clinton lied’

Now IMHO many will be able to say in the near future that ‘many lived when Obama fibbed’*

*Up to 18000 to 35,000 people a year will live longer and not die prematurely once all states that are refusing to expand medicare and support the ACA properly do so. (And those numbers are more conservative than the more recent and more alarming report from the Department of Medicine at Cambridge Health Alliance.)

Dying from Lack of Insurance - FactCheck.org