Prompted by two things …
Commercials I’ve seen by companies that want to train you for the tens (or was it hundreds) of thousands of jobs that will be created
Claims by friends (and friends of friends) about doctors’ questions related to the language spoken at home and the number of guns in your home
Number 1 wouldn’t surprise me too much, but I kinda doubt there will really be that many jobs available. It’s possible that they’ll be “teaching” applicants how to do the job (for a fee), but only a small percentage will actually get the job. Kinda like those envelope stuffing scams.
Number 2… yeah, I wouldn’t put too much stock into anything your friends say about it. “Language spoken” *might *be used for demographics, but I kind of doubt it. But number of guns owned? Not a chance.
I’m not an expert in the ACA, but I know a fair amount about it, and I don’t know anything that would require docs to ask the second question. Probably they’re asking for medical reasons. I remember when our older daughter was born, our pediatrician asked if there were any guns at home; I assume if we’d said yes, she would have given her professional opinion that we should get rid of them. This was in 2007, several years before the passage of the ACA. I don’t recall a similar question when the baby was born last fall.
The first is, as Lightnin’ says, likely in large part a scam. The ACA does create some jobs, although job creation is not its primary purpose. (Mostly it enhances entrepreneurship and labor mobility by not tying employees with pre-existing conditions to their current job on pain of death.) The AVA does give strong incentives for docs to go to electronic record keeping (which the evidence suggests improves medical efficacy in part because it gives all docs fingertip access to your health profile, and in part because doctors can’t fucking learn to write their notes in the proper place on their own forms – the hospital lost our older kid for forty minutes sue to just such an error that wouldn’t happen with electronic records). Therefore electronic medical processing jobs are going to arise, but if they’re advertising on the Internet, as always, that’s probably bullshit.
–Cliffy
There’s certainly no question about the number of guns.
The thing about guns is probably a rehash of the Florida kerfuffle (which was already rehashed into a Medicarescare).
Some times the right wing marketing machine gets a bit lazy. Unfortunately, that doesn’t diminish their effectiveness.
Every time I have visited a U.S. doctor that I have not previously consulted, I have been given a thick stack of forms to fill out, with all sorts of personal information, before the doctor will see me. (This does not happen under the NHS in Britain where I am living now.) I think it is very unlikely that Obamacare will add significantly (if at all) to teh thickness of that stack.
Generally speaking, it is very much in the interest of companies that advertise job training to greatly exaggerate about the number of job opportunities that their training will open up for you, and it is well known that they do indeed greatly exaggerate, all the time in all areas. I expect there will be some bureaucratic jobs created by Obamacare, but I would not be surprised if the real figure, in practice, will be more like hundreds (nationwide) rather than tens of thousands. Maybe even fewer: I am sure much of the work will be done by already employed government workers.
As for the guns thing, this is standard issue right-wing paranoid nuttery. Do your friends also believe that Obama is a Kenyan born Muslim bent on enslaving the United States to the United Nations?