So you are unaware of this? Heath insurance navigators draw state scrutiny
To continue the fishing analogy, you can’t say it’s best to teach a man to fish, and then hide the directions to fishing school.
I said, in post #32, that “How to fish,” is properly analogized to “How to earn.”
I can’t easily picture the events that would have to happen to cause “No opportunity to earn,” to happen across the wide scale.
So please explain what you mean when you ask about no fish left to catch, understanding that that phrase “How to fish,” is properly analogized to “How to earn.”
No. But you certainly impose certification requirements on fishing teachers, to guard the public against people who hold themselves out to be fishing teachers but don’t actually possess the ability to fish or teach fishing.
And I argue that this is what’s being described in the link you provide.
Except the locking the gate to the fishing pool still applies. Really, the main function of Obamacare is to disallow insurance companies from rejecting applicants or kicking them off the insurance after they get sick. The rest follows from there – if you have to insure all comers then you have to require everyone, including the healthy to get insurance as well. If you require everyone to get insurance, you have to subsidize the lower earners.
You can teach people how to earn all day long, but the vast majority will never make enough to self-insure against major illnesses, and most won’t earn enough to self-insure for regular visits to prevent minor illnesses from becoming major illnesses.
Its the single most overworked analogy in the conservative compendium. It sounds good, its simple, which doesn’t stress the conservative imagination, and its vaguely stern, which conservatives just love. But its stupid, stupid in a way a bright middle schooler could see.
First, who’s going to do the teaching? There’s no money in it for free enterprise, the customers are already poor and unemployed. Surely you don’t mean Big Gummint taking over more of our lives? Then who?
Second, teach them what? Typewriter repair? What area of employment can we guarantee? Suppose we have a million job opportunities for computer programmers, and we have a million truck drivers out of work. Well, OK, then, train the truck drivers to be computer programmers, problem solved, you’re welcome!
But we need them now, not five years from now, we don’t know what we’re gonna need five years from now. Whats to stop fifteen different states from training a million programmers each? Great, now we got truck drivers out of work, programmers out of work, and the wages for programmers plummet, because of the Invisible Finger of Free Enterprise. Brilliant. In the meantime, because of 'luci’s Law of Perpetual Irony, the economy gets a pulse, and we need experienced truck drivers!
No problem we’ll just start training computer programmers to drive trucks! And hey! Some of them already have lots of experience. Except its been years since they did it.
Who’s quote is it? For every complex and difficult problem there is a solution that is simple, direct, and utterly wrong.
Single-payer or a British-style state-payer would have been impossible. That’s what Clinton tried, and Obamacare is what the the GOP responded with. You may as well say that curing all diseases and giving everyone a unicorn would have been better than Obamacare – it’s true, but it’s impossible, so so what. Obamacare was the best that could be done, even with a Democratically-controlled senate, house, and presidency. The alternative to Obamacare wasn’t NHS or single-payer, it was the status quo.
A fair reading is that the OP is not referring to everyone who labels himself a Republican, but instead to the central figures of the GOP–state governors, legislative leaders, etc. To my knowledge, they are not generally arguing that participation rates in the exchanges is determinative of the level of harm from Obamacare, either to those people or to the country, except to the extent that if people find out that Obamacare isn’t what the GOP has been saying about it, support for it might increase.
Still, its a good point, we should restrain our disapproval so that we only rag on those Republicans who do not denounce, renounce, and condemn the Rick Perrys in the Party.
Hey, I know! Send more people to law school, you guys wouldn’t mind making less money, right?
“Are you a victim of Cognitive Dissonance, the number one threat to the Republic? Call Parker, Bricker, and 'luci today, at 1-800-KA-CHING, that’s 1-800-KA-CHING for a free consultation!..”
Free consultations? If you give them free consultations they’ll never learn to consult for themselves.
Don’t worry, the Pubs will fix that!
You missed my point. In response to Whiteknight’s analogy of someone actively making sure people don’t find out about the free food while not actually doing anything effective you said “I don’t agree that’s happening here.” I then showed you evidence of Republicans doing just that.
It isn’t that there is no opportunity to earn, it’s that there aren’t 40 million opportunities to earn.
“Get a better job” is not an answer to 40 million un or under employed people, because there aren’t 40 million better job openings in the economy.
To use your fishing analogy, all the good fishing holes are pretty much full already. Maybe your newly trained fisherman will find a new spot, but there aren’t close to enough new spots for all of the folks who need fish. So just about every person who you’ve taught to fish, if he does fish, is just taking a space away from an existing fisherman.
-The “Health Insurance Marketplace” is just a website with coverages available based on what you select. Yes, it’s convenient.
-Pre-existing conditions was a nice bonus, but it was also one of the “etc” I specifically mentioned as a benefit. Reality-wise, though, not a large pot of people suffered from that, so most will pay an extra cost for it at the benefit of a few.
-You should know what you are getting. Not only did you buy it, but you were given a book after you enrolled (in any insurance: home, health, car) that specifies exactly what is covered.
-“Accountable” how? All it does is enforce a rate increase ceiling. As far as I know, you are only going to pay a fine (not per-insured, as per usual business for the government) and then they have to reduce the insurance premiums to the “limit of change”. If it’s like any other government action, the fine won’t even cover the amount they took in, and the people who paid won’t get their money back.
-Companies don’t often “arbitrarily” cancel health insurance. This is sometimes tied to the maximum lifetime benefit. And it still allows the majority of those cases: You lost your job due to being sick. Five months later, you are out health insurance. This doesn’t go away. Your plan is cancelled due to non payment. You will now have to go and get an exchange plan.
-Actually, a lot of exchange plans (not employer plans…yet) exclude a huge number of doctors to save money. You don’t have a “choice” outside of their specific plan providers. Despite opinions that people will benefit from this on “free market” reasons, it certainly doesn’t enhance your choice.
-Yes, but how is that a benefit? They have access to health care exchanges, right?
-Most plans come with free preventive care already. Most insurers already have the math that getting your body felt-up…sorry “examined” yearly makes their long term costs go down.
-This is one of the few breakaway benefits. It had been lobbied for for years on it’s own.
-Most states (granted, not all) already upheld your right to appeal medical decisions made by the insurance company. I haven’t heard of significant changes to how it happens (Can I get this done? Nope. Can you reconsider? Yep…Still nope.) so I’m not terribly excited by a small extension of what already happens.
With respect, I outright reject a poll conducted of 417 interviewees out of 6.6 million people. Further, it doesn’t break down any information on who those interviewees were. All rich? All poor? All Juggalos on unicycles doing a Ride-A-Thon to Central Park in New York?
That’s like sticking your toe in the ocean, saying it feels cold, therefore Global Warming is a lie. (I thought you of all people would like that analogy 
)
If they rammed through the ACA despite both popular and congressional rejection of it, they could have rammed through Canadian or British models of health care instead of the ACA.
No, they couldn’t have. They were getting push back from Democrats and the one of the independents. They had to move the bill to the right to get them on board. There was no way, simply no way, for single payer or a NHS to be implemented.
No, I don’t think so. As a radical, I am frequently pissed off at the menshevik, “centrist”, “business friendly” Clintonista Dem leadership, and totally flipped my shit when they refused to even talk about single payer. Shit, you’d think it was a discussion about compulsory gay marriages for Eagle Scouts!
But I totally underestimated the extreme level of opposition to what is a very moderate incarnation of what was originally a Republican idea! They weren’t just opposed, or critical, they were rolling about on the floor, shrieking and tearing their hair! Christ Jesus, its affordable health care, not installing mind control chips into pre-schoolers brains!
So, no, and that totally surprised me. Given that fact, and the obvious truth that the Republicans were perfectly willing to let our people suffer if it meant cutting the profit margin for health insurance companies, no, it could not be done.
I think the ACA is a mess with lots of problems, only half of which are anticipated. The other half will be made up of unanticipated problems and deliberate sabotage. But its the best we could do.
Fuck.
They were getting pushback from Democrats for the ACA. They wouldn’t have gotten pushback from the Democrats on Single Payer. They wouldn’t have had to make as many compromises they did to get the Republicans onboard.
The Democrats weren’t pushing back because they don’t want health care. They were getting the push back because the ACA is a mess of a law.
Just FUD still
That post of yours deserves no respect, do you have any evidence that the poll was not done properly?
And thank you for showing grandpa to suck eggs.
Not all Democrats in Congress supported single payer. There was not a majority in Congress for single payer… the ACA was pretty much the only health care reform bill that could get a majority to support it.
People still keep making the assumption that all Democrats are lefties and liberals. Sadly, no.
The great H.L. Mencken said that.