Allowing a state to decide on that model is a far cry from forcing it down the throat of the entire nation
And exactly how did passage of the OCA hurt you? In any event, you miss the context of the discussion. The point was that an unsubstantiated allegation was made that the OCA is socialistic and un-American. It was then pointed out that the OCA is modelled on several GOP-originated ideas and retained private companies as compared to the (better and more efficient) single payor option. Application of the OCA to the entire nation is what you object to here, but that application as compared to the state of Massachusetts is not a distinction between that which is socialist and that which is not. And whether doing so makes it un-American in your eyes, it is constitutional and similar to many other federal laws adopted under the Commerce Clause. "forcing it down the throat of the entire nation..." Nice provocative language. Unfortunately that says more about your having a penchant for overstatemetn and emotionalism than it does about who was forced to do what.
Gotta love ObummerCare. Its pretty much one giant tax meant to redistribute the wealth. Ya know, "spread it around"
I think most would prefer neither of those fuck ups! http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/03/01/obama-obamacare-health-business-column/5841331/
Nothing like the entertainment value in watching the GOP rail against a health plan that their think tanks came up with two decades ago. The problem with the ACA is that it's a bad heath plan that the Democrats decided to enact as opposed to the current GOP preference for no plan at all. Give babies axes and cribs and let them sort it all out. That's the GOP plan for government now.
ObamaCare is not a fuck up. It takes time for a huge program like this to work out the kinks and operate smoothly. I mean just look at the computer glitches in the initial rollout. But it got fixed. And consider all of the opposition by the Repub party. From day 1 they have been calling it a disaster but never elaborating on why it's a disaster. They have stonewalled any attempts to fix or change it for the better. And even sued BO for giving small business an extension for covering employees something they actually agreed with him on. Why any average working guy or gal would be against it: I don't get it. Of course in polls many people said they liked the ACA but hated ObamaCare.
The Affordable Care Act is a disaster primarily because it doesn't address the major problems that the health care industry faces, those being the rise in the cost of care and the gross over-capitalization of the healthcare industry by the big institutions to milk fees and payments out of the patient base. HMO's and big hospitals are going to bankrupt the healthcare system eventually. Hospitals used to be non-profits. Now they are big business.
Forget the axes and cribs, just give em 'anchors' and the nearest E.R : ) From your lips to God's ears--the guy's a trainwreck--however that leaves the country in whose hands? Another calculating, disengenuous slob whose incompetence is matched only by her warped sense of entitlement. Donald Trump & Hillary Clinton: this is the best the United States can come up with nowadays?
This isn't because of ObamaCare it's in spite of it. But overall with more business due to more sign ups haven't the increases in policies gone down. I don't understand Repub opposition esp when uninsured people have been using ERs and those costs have been huge. The ACA would cut down on this. I think I read in the past that some hospitals have even had to close because of this. Again it's a capitalist program that goes through private companies and gives customers a choice. The assumption is that everyone needs health care and should pay for it based on income. Almost all advanced nations have some type of socialized medicine. I have no problem using my tax dollars to subsidize or partially subsidize those who cannot pay full price. If there was a Dem Congress and cooperation on the state level maybe they could fix it.
I would call the failure to address those problems more a missed opportunity than a disaster. In fact the cost curve has gone down significantly since the law was passed and is being implemented. There are cost containment elements. But it remains true that costs were skyrocketing, people were being thrown off existing policies for making claims, people with medical histories could not move to a new job becuase of pre-existing conditions, policies had annual and lifetime caps, and all those horrors led the GOP (other than Romney in Mass.) to propose Nothing. Let the free market work. No matter how badly it works.
Local hospitals have been shutting their doors for sixty years across the US. That's because bigger, better financed corporations and trusts have been putting them out of business. How did this happen? Three parts, all roughly equivalent. 1. The emphasis in health care shifted gradually from post incident care to preventive medicine. This made hospital beds less efficient as an income producer and made large diagnostic mills more profitable. To stay in business you needed a ton of very pricey equipment and a steady stream of customers to keep it billing steadily. You also needed a feeder network of smaller outfits to channel people your way. You didn't want local hospitals around because they'd cut into your business by getting some of the necessary equipment and grabbing customers from you piecemeal. You wanted small medical practices and clinics feeding you patients instead. 2. The insurance industry went through a major largely unnoticed revolution, with Medicare and HMO's coming onto the scene sequentially in 1965 and about 1980. HMO's had actually been around since WWII but the few out there (Kaiser primarily in the pacific NW) were very efficient and owned the institutions they channeled people into so the model worked. The post-1980 crowd were just money-grubbers trying to catch a wave and the survivors in that wave were the best at money-grubbing. Medicare created a fee for service arrangement that in many ways was the opposite of the good HMO's that existed when it was created. It tried to be sparing in costs and cost of service but all this did was to incentivize doctors and eventually hospitals to do as many procedures as possible and bitch wholeheartedly about how poorly they were compensated for doing those. It did create a lifeline for the elderly, who had not been able to afford healthcare reliably before it was created, but the model was all wrong at the time and has only become slightly better over the years as obvious problems were discovered and then dealt with (or not.) 3. The big institutions and HMO's became very good at both providing services and getting the maximum compensation out of the insurance companies and guarantees from Medicare. Many of the medical teaching grants the federal government provides to local institutions are written directly into the laws that establish and regulate Medicare. If the local institution (huge regional concerns by now) want the free grant money they also have to service Medicare and Medicaid. It's a mess. National healthcare would have been much cleaner and less expensive (MUCH MUCH less expensive, see Canada) but of course anything that smacks of socialism is frowned upon in this establishment even if the alternative is unwieldy, expensive and likely to get worse over time.
When you're dealing with 300 million people sometimes a little socialism is the most efficient way to manage things. Esp when unmanaged private industry abuses the basic tenets of the free enterprise system as they do in health care. They had plenty of chances to run a good and a fair ship but didn't. It was only after abuses and people being ripped off that there was an obvious need for drastic change. Still the ACA is basically a capatalist endeavor.
It's called economies of scale. Some things like highways and health care work better when they're bigger. Also some people are just sick and tired of being exploited. Maybe you're not.
The guy is such a phony. Because of politics he won't call out Trump. But he'll advocate shutting down the government for things that Trump says he's advocating.
govt knows best. Yup. Reagan was right with the most terrifying words in the english language being "I'm from the govt and I'm here to help"
