You are moving away from broad, sweeping statements without substantiation to broad, sweeping statements with entirely inadequate support. This is an improvement. Sorta. Kinda.
Here is an article which suggests the ways that GOP presidential hopefuls will handle Obamacare in the 2016 race.
For fuck sake, the very idea of taking the repeal/don’t-repeal ACA fight into the 2016 election - six years after it became the law - seems enormously stupid to me.
These are the same people who’ve actually tried to repeal, er, their word is “privatize” Social Security, remember? And repeal the Civil Rights Act. They want to repeal what amounts to the entire 20th century, as if they were some kind of historical re-enactment group that pines for what they imagine the antebellum years to have been, full of states’ rights bluster and such.
Gotta wonder sometimes if the congressional GOP caucus meetings are full of men wearing frock coats, dipping snuff while sipping porter brought to them by colored servants, denouncing the perfidy of the abolitionists and the agitators of the working classes … Maybe in another generation they’ll move on to blustering about tariffs and bimetallism.
I know, right? What do they think it is, the second amendment?
Many insurance plans have defined benefit elements. That does not make them bad insurance plans, even in the health insurance arena. Medigap plans have such components and just imagine the hell that the AARP would rain down upon any politician proposing to eliminate such plans.
The question is whether a plan with a defined benefit element, in the context of an individual’s overall insurance cover and financial status, makes sense. By the administration attempting to force the elimination of such plans for certain persons they are taking it upon themselves to substitute their judgment for the consumer’s.
Maybe the Obama administration should change the line to, “if you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan, unless we don’t like your health care plan.”
As the article noted, the administration’s proposal would ban such stand alone plans for persons who are not required to have coverage under the PPACA and persons who are not eligible for medicaid due to their state’s failure to implement medicaid expansion. Nice way to kick someone when they are down.
Elucidator, it doesn’t matter. He made a promise. He CLAIMS that he didn’t know the promise would end up being invalid. Well, these plans have not yet been cancelled. It would be very easy for him to keep these plans from being cancelled. That is, if he ever intended to keep his promise and wasn’t just lying like a mofo.
Is that really the best you can hang you hat on - that a “promise” made by the president invalidates the entire law?
Not whether the law works, whether the country is better off, if it saves money, if is liked / disliked, if it produces (net) better outcomes?
But rather that a simplistic promise made has been broken?
And yeah - it is a simplistic promise, and the number of people that have actually lost their insurance due to inadequate coverage is small.
And it can be stopped at the number it is now. He can’t make insurance companies re-offer plans that are already cancelled, but he can prevent his law from requiring cancellation of plans that insurance companies are currently happy to offer.
These plans should remain in place if the people who have them like them.
Are all the health insurance vendors paragons of virtue? Do any of them sell shitty plans, or are all these policies woefully misjudged? And if there are shitty, unacceptable plans on the market, why are they sold? Are the insurance vendors “currently happy to offer them…”? Might that reason have something to do with profitability?
If the President had said “Some of you have some really shitty health plans, plans that ensucken dead donkey balls. But if you have a really shitty plan, and you’re dumb enough to like it that way, you get to keep it!”, would that have made you happier?
It’s not for him to decide what’s good and not good. That decision is between a customer and a business.
There are ACA plans on the exchanges, subsidized. If the customers of these plans want them, 100% of them can get them. If they don’t want them, then they should be able to keep what they have.
It was not just a promise, it was a promise punctuated with, “Those who tell you otherwise are dirty stinkin’ liars!” It would really behoove him to keep his commitment to these people.
Are you conflating Obama with government in general, as in “big government” intrusion? Because it is definitely within the purview to make laws to further the well-being of the public. Does Obama make people wear seat-belts, for instance?
There are laws to protect people from buying really shitty mortgages. Well, at least fraudulent mortgages, really shitty ones are still available for those who wish to exercise their freedumb of choice. Mathtards, for instance, who are not fully aware of the Miracle of Compounded Interest.
So, what’ so different about insurance? If the government determines that a subset of insurance offerings are not suitable for public consumption, are they somehow overstepping their authority to regulate them sternly?
Is the dumbass consumer the ordained prey of the quick red fox? If we protect the dull from being taken advantage of by the clever, does this somehow disturb the natural order of things? Is he totally wrong, or are some of these policies actually that bad? The people who sell them, they don’t know they aren’t very good? Are we somehow obligated to allow this to happen, because freedom?
And this just in, by way of our good friends at Daily Kos…
Aetna CEO: The company is doing just fine with Obamacare
You’re overthinking it. he said quite clearly that you could keep your insurance plan. He also claimed he didn’t know that would not be the case.
Now he’s forewarned that plans are about to be cancelled, and he is in a position to prevent it from happening. I’d also be interested in the thoughts of democrats who claim they want people to keep their plans and are supposedly outraged that this didn’t happen. They should be heavily lobbying the President right about now.
Most of us probably knew this already, but Healthcare.gov is not completely out of the woods yet. This is something to keep an eye on, for sure.
“Overthinking”? Well, thinking, at any rate. Simple question, really, are some of these plans shitty? And if they are, shouldn’t something be done about it?
And while we’re about it, who are these Democrats who are “claiming” things and are “supposedly” outraged? Once again, you insinuate much and support nothing.
You see, how this works is, you got, you bring. You no bring, you probably no got.
Only if there’s reason to believe it’s going to *stay *in the woods.
And many of us lack the purity of friend adaher’s perspective, wherein the concept of lie is a pristine and discrete entity, impervious to nuance. Recently, for instance, “The President lied” was the first half of a common meme, “The President lied, and people died”. We don’t actually know how many, when the people who die are brownish and Muslim, large, round numbers tend to dominate. Somewhere north of one hundred thousand, it gets kinda blurry.
The President lied, and who is going to die? Gets a mite fuzzy on that point, it may well be that more people will be better served. But for adaher, that is beside the point, inconsequential when compared to the stark horror of a mendacious President.
By comparison, the health care debacle is likely to cause some deaths, deaths of people who are denied the Medicaid expansion by Republican governors because freedom. Are they lying? Hard to know, peering into the Republican mindset can be disconcerting, a writhing mass of grey and squamous tentacles, like a lunch date with Cthulu. But let us assume that they are not lying, that they sincerely believe that socialized medicine is worse than no medicine at all, that they sincerely believe that people without a sound investment portfolio should be content to rely on mud and leeches.
A thorny ethical problem, to be sure, complex and intricate. Are Republicans who sincerely put their fellow citizens to a life of suffering and yes, death…are such sincere ideologues morally superior to a President who lies to an opposite purpose?
I lean towards “No.” Actually, not just “No”, but “Hell! No!, Fuck NO!, you gotta be fucking kidding me NO!”. Perhaps that’s because as a depraved lefty, I lack the purity and clarity of adaher’s moral distinctions.
That’s OK, he can keep them.
And elucidator does an admirable job living up to his name.
Yeah, I don’t doubt for a second that the website will be fully operational eventually, but obviously, the longer it takes to finish the back-end, the more likely it is that new complications might arise. It certainly needs to be finished well in advance of the next open enrollment period, for sure.
True enough about the back end, but politically, the message is now “The website is fixed and over 8 million people have signed up”. That’s not going back.
Incidentally, the Oregon state site, also a massive screwup brought to you by CGI (why would *anybody *deal with those clowns anymore?), has been taken down in favor of the federal site.