Good news about the ACA – the rate of Americans without health insurance is at the lowest level since the very beginning of 2009.
How low will it go? If it continues to drop at the same rate, how effective will this be as a political cudgel for the Democrats, especially in 2014?
I picture ads like this, not what you’re saying.
"When 5 million Americans lost their insurance due to non-compliance with Obamacare requirements, we were told that that number wasn’t a big deal.
But when 3 to 4 million people gained coverage, we were told it’s a huge deal.
blah blah blah democrat fuzzy math…"
Ummm…the OP asked how it could be used for the Democrats.
What are you at? Trying to be adaher? Don’t worry, he’ll be along shortly to explain how, no matter what happens, it’s good news for the GOP.
Millions lost health care?
Good for the GOP!
Millions gained health care?
Good for the GOP!
Health care costs went up?
Good for the GOP!
Health care costs went down?
Good for the GOP!
ACA is almost responsible for me abandoning the Democratic Party. Of course people are going to have more insurance when you make it virtually illegal not to. This doesn’t mean anyone has more access to health care than they did before…some people have less access.
Really? Not anyone? Not even people with pre-existing conditions that were previously unable to get insurance at all?
Not even 24-26 year olds who are still on their parent’s insurance?
That’s just nonsense.
Bullshit. Cite for the bolded claim, please?
Very effective, with the caveat that people who were previously insured need to be just as happy with their new insurance as they were with their old.
Oh, and one more thing: If years after this law passes we are far short of universal health care, that puts Democrats in a bind. They can’t say the law has failed, but they also can’t come back and say, “The US is the only wealthy country without universal health care. We need to reform the health care system!”
Like it or not, ACA is the law of the land and will be our health care system for the next 100 years barring a smashing GOP victory in 2016.
Cite for the claim that people have more access?
Some claims can be disproven easily by simply providing cites for the opposite. The fact that you have no chosen to do this rather easy thing means that you have no evidence that access has increased.
You post makes almost no sense at all in the context of this thread. You ask for a cite for a claim that was never made, then attempt to excoriate me for not supporting a claim that I never made.
:rolleyes:
So you do not believe access has increased? Okay. I agree with you.
Almost?
Your new rhetorical gambit of making up things that other people said is one of the saddest, most pathetic things I’ve ever seen on the SDMB.
As a person who is taking full advantage of Obamacare, I am VERY pleased with the Democrats for enacting it, and I hate with great vitriol the Republicans who want to shut it down. I have health care that I can afford, I can take the inexpensive maintenance meds that keep me from having more severe problems and see a doctor periodically to make sure they are working properly. I like that.
Before that, I just had to take a certain pleasure in the notion that if I DID have to go to an emergency room, my bills would be paid for by others, since I would have to go as an indigent.
It’s like your mechanic says, you can pay me now, or you can pay me later.
Well, he did use the word “access” twice, which was what I was responding to in Hilarity’s post. So, yeah, he kinda had some context and I could tell he was trying to argue about something within that context. The other 99.999% of his post was nonsense, tho.
Unless you live in Nevada, in which case you’re on the hook for your emergency room visits. Nevada law allows medical providers, including hospitals and emergency rooms, to charge interest on unpaid debts and allows them to be purchased by collection agencies. Emergency room visits in Nevada (and many other states) can bankrupt a person or family.
By “access” I don’t just mean ability to find it, I mean ability to afford it. So here is an example. Old insurance: You and your employer split the premiums to the tune of, say, $600 a month, you paid co-pays of, let’s say, $15 for an office visit and $50 for an emergency room visit. So if you went and got a physical, plus one more visit, that was $30 and let’s say one visit to the emergency room, for which you paid $50 but when you got the bill you learned that without insurance you would have paid $7000. So without the insurance you would have paid, let’s say, $200 for the physical, $120 for the other visit, and $7000 for the ER visit for a total of $7320.
Under the new plan you and your employer split $300/month and you have a yearly deductible o $13,000. When you go get your physical it turns out to cost $648 with all the lab fees and things, and when you go to the ER it costs $7000 again, along with lab fees and diagnostic stuff, say $7400, and you get a bill from the hospital that says your insurance negotiated it down to $3000 and it’s due now. For a lot of people this is a large hunk of money, it’s all out-of-pocket, and its due now–plus, of course, you still have the monthly insurance cost.
So yeah, over the course of the year you are not actually paying any more. And you can probably call the hospital and negotiate a payment plan. But it still looks like a lot more money, and so…the next year you skip the physical, and you decide the bad cut isn’t really bad enough to go to the emergency room, you can probably put on some hydrogen peroxide and band-aids. And so on.
Voila, less access.
$7000 over the course of a year, deducted from your paycheck before you even see it vs. $3000 due right now is really going to affect your perception of what you’re paying for health care. Or to put it another way, now you really know what your health care costs and it’s too much. Even if, on a certain level, you know that the acetominophen you got at the ER, $28 for two pills, doesn’t reflect just the cost of the pill itself but cost of the training and expertise of the people who decided you needed it and administered it, and the overhead to keep the ER open and staffed, you also know that you can go to walgreens and get these pills and administer them yourself for about $6.
My direct personal experience as an ACA insured person is this: what you are saying is bullshit. Purest, arrant bullshit. You’re taking a worst-case scenario, pumping up the numbers and working it as hard as you can to make ACA look bad. Without insurance, a single visit to see my primary-care doctor was a budget-crushing $140.00. Now it’s an affordable copay of $35. This makes an enormous difference in my ability to see a doctor. Medicines that were prescribed to me were affordable without the health insurance, because I mostly take cheap generics. Now they’re very affordable. In my wife’s case, though, medicine for her migraine headaches was NOT affordable, now it is. It makes a HUGE difference to her quality of life.
You have NO CONCEPT of what you are talking about. NONE. You are spreading ignorance. Cut it out. You’re hurting people with your mistruths.
Of course they can come back and say exactly that, and it will be the truth.