There are plenty of details that the ACA gets wrong. It does nothing to reduce medical bureaucracy & paperwork & doesn't address malpractice reform but at least it offers a path toward near universal coverage that doesn't involve a gov't takeover of healthcare and forces people who currently freeload to get insurance.
Jesus wept.
Some of you lot really believe your own hype don't you?
Why would you want to emulate a failing system?
This is exactly why I say this stupidity of BoboCare needs to be repealed and we then need a open and far ranging debate on a real health care reform. One that recognizes that the private sector is better able to provide good and affordable health care than the government.
2) As for the particular case of this health care law, here's what I don't get: If the federal government were to raise the income tax across the board 2% (which they are allowed to do) and offer a tax deduction of 2% for healthcare coverage, no one would have a constitutional objection. We have these kinds of deductions all the time for things like college tuition, mortgage payments, insulating your house, etc. Do these constitute an illegal individual mandate? What is the difference between such a tax deduction system and a flat-out mandate, other than simplicity?
or, i think, alternative to the single payer system that most of the Democrats actually preferred, but they couldn't get quite enough Democrat Senators to go along with, so we ended up with this compromise that is now being challengedBut if that’s true, then the individual mandate had nothing to do with a legitimate exercise of the Commerce Clause, but instead was an end-around Congress’s taxing powers. The mandate is a hidden tax cloaked in the guise of making people responsible for their own health bills.
This is the knotty question now facing the Supreme Court. The mandate was a way of avoiding Congress having to impose additional taxes of $360 billion on Americans. The designers of Obamacare were well aware that if the true costs of the bill were accurately identified and taxes transparently increased to cover them, the public never would have supported health reform. This is why they resorted to all manner of smoke and mirrors to hide the true costs and to reliance on hidden taxes such as the individual mandate to further hide from view the burden this plan would impose on Americans.
That would be like carefully shopping the 50 States and find the one that's doing the best, which is bullshit. The EU will all go the way of Greece over time, Spain, Portugal, France ....... all of them. Sooner or later they're going to run out of Germany's money to spend.
Starting off with a falacy like "boboCare"... A far reaching debate, would offer far more support for a more unified system. And, most of the polling on this issue was so irresponsible, that the Democratic party folded to a minority on opinion. Unless, you think pigeon-holing something by opening up a debate to careless remarks by people who know the limitations of the system, and will work until nothing changes at all, and we're stuck with 20 more years of "progress" by the demos and repubs.
Mark Zuckerberg has it right. Always be breaking. If it sucks, repeal it, or change the things that don't work, but don't have a Big Design Up Front, which is the opposite of small government, by the way, but I wouldn't expect people with a complete lack of comprehension of how to run a business or a government to know what any of that means.
Where i come from business is way more innovative and helpful to man-kind than the status-quo insurance companies. And, it's because it shouldn't be a business, because as a business it's a horrifyingly inefficient dinosaur that pails in comparison to what's happening on the West Coast, you know the place that pays the bills for all the republican welfare states, and funds a war that most of us could care less about, because we have education.
You don't like parents be able to include children up to the age of 26 on their family insurance policies?
You don't like insurance companies being barred from rejecting applicants for coverage because of pre-existing conditions?
You don't like insurance companies being barred from imposing lifetime limits on benefits?
You don't like poor families being provided with subsides to help them afford health care coverage?
No. If our current [horrible] system is unable to deliver acceptable coverage to fully grown adults then perhaps we should try to fix the market rather than make it even harder to evaluate how much exposure a set of empoyees represents. (Again, the big underlying problem is that so much of the insurance market is tied to employers. The best fix for that is not to tie even more individuals to the same system but to change the structural problem.)You don't like parents be able to include children up to the age of 26 on their family insurance policies?
No. In every other insurance market, the problem of unacceptable risks is handled by high risk pools. Telling insurance companies that they aren't allowed to underwrite (and then setting mandatory minimum loss ratios) is just stupid.You don't like insurance companies being barred from rejecting applicants for coverage because of pre-existing conditions?
This is a very bad "solution" because of the way health insurance pays losses (by treatment date, not injury date), and the massive tail risk in long development periods. It is impossible to estimate the costs incurred by a chronic condition when treatments may change dramatically in 15 years. Something that is untreatable today might suddenly be treatable in 20 years with something that costs as much as IVIG every three weeks. (that's not cheap) Here, creating high risk pools that are funded by premium taxes would be a far preferable solution.You don't like insurance companies being barred from imposing lifetime limits on benefits?
I don't mind that.You don't like poor families being provided with subsides to help them afford health care coverage?
One of the reasons Europeans have a better work-life balance is because their life isn't tied to their work in the very literal way our healthcare coverage is tied to our employment here.
these sounds great, but who's going to foot the bill?
Nothing like reinventing the wheel, eh?
these sounds great, but who's going to foot the bill?
Right. Everyone is lying about the life-expectancy of Americans versus the rest of the first world. Everyone is lying about per-capita spending for health care in America versus the the rest of the first world.
And congratulations on another excellent debating strategy: "I can't produce specific data to refute your data, so I'm going to make the unsupported claim that you're playing games with data."
I guess the Declaration of Independence shows nothing about the intentions of the founding fathers:
Jesus wept.
Some of you lot really believe your own hype don't you?
There can be no doubt that the obtuseness of the right is very discouraging. We can only hope that scientific investigations of the causes will lead to surgical of medicinal cures. One of the known symptom, of course, is paranoia. When you have that even the most innocent of words scream threat.
The problem with the healthcare reform is that it is fixing the wrong issue. Instead of working making medicine cheaper, doctor visit cheaper, they are making everything more expensive and force insurance purchase.
I'm actually someone who thinks going to the either extreme would be better than what we have now. A completely free market system would lead to lower prices and although there would be a difficult period, I think even poorer people would eventually be able to afford a certain level of care. A completely socialist system would also have some efficiencies.
What we have now is the worst of both worlds.
The difference in life expectancy isn't due health care.
Anyone who has spent time in northern European countries knows that life is simply better there. They are statistically happier with better work-life balance...and health care. I am not agreeing that Obamacare is the way, not in the slightest, but we do have a lot to learn from our European allies.
I'm actually someone who thinks going to the either extreme would be better than what we have now. A completely free market system would lead to lower prices and although there would be a difficult period, I think even poorer people would eventually be able to afford a certain level of care. A completely socialist system would also have some efficiencies.
What we have now is the worst of both worlds.
Regulations on healthcare that force a free market system to abandon many of it's free market principles keep our healthcare network from being morally repugnant.