https://www.politico.com/magazine/sto...nts-213487?o=0
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bossman you absolutely crack me up to tears. ok, let us talk about ahca. ok, can you explain to me who exactly it is affordable to? the people that dont pay dick in? the middle class people that have seen their premiums sky rocket along with their out of pocket expense? or the rich people that dont need fucking insurance coverage to begin with i got a couple real world stories for you that have no political affilation related to them whatsoever:
i am a military retiree and get government funded health insurance for myself and my family. before the ahca took effect it cost me around 300 bucks a year and around 3-4 bucks co pay for visits. after it took effect it is now currently just under a grand and my co pay may be anywhere from 7-50 bucks or more depending on what type of care i need or my family. meds cost before were never more than 3 bucks. now it can be up to 25 bucks.
a city worker buddy of mine from the gym: he has what is possibly a hernia. he cant go seek medical care because they are going to do x rays and an mri. his deductable is currently 5g and he pays over 1 grand a month for his coverage. before his deductable was 1g and his monthly family plan was 300. so when and if he goes to the doctor now it comes out of his pocket even though he is paying for coverage until he meets his deductable.
so i can go on and on cause i know all kinds of military retirees and normal day to day folks running around. i am no rocket scientist, i am not an economist, and i am not an accountant either but holy fucking bat shit batman, how the fuck on this planet we live on is that affordable for anyone? people cant even go to the doctor because they cant afford a 3-4 or 500 dollar bill at the drop of the hat.
maybe you can explain to me the practicallity or mathmatical way that this liberal math is working out for us people that make under 60g a year or less? or normal 40 hour a wk hourly paid people can foot these bills? i am all ears on the affordability in the affordable health care act
Affordable Care Act
Obamacare
First, the ACA didn't reform the health care system. It just threw trillions of dollars at an already dysfunctional system. In the next 10 years alone, ACA spending will be at least $1.5 trillion.
To our already burdensome tax system, it also adds many new taxes, including an individual mandate excise tax, an employer mandate tax, a 3.8 percent surtax on investment income, an excise tax on comprehensive health insurance plans, a hike in Medicare payroll tax, a Medicine cabinet tax, and many more.
The law's subsidies—available to lower-income people to make the ACA plans more appealing—are also a huge drag on the economy, since they drop sharply as income increases. As such, it's not surprising that the Congressional Budget Office projects the ACA will reduce work by an amount equal to two million full-time jobs and lower the nation's economic output by half of 1 percent. However, University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan thinks the negative effects of the ACA will be twice as large as the CBO projects.
The ACA's many mandates increased individual market premiums by close to 50 percent between 2013 and 2014. And those mandates are burdensome, even for employer-based plans. For instance, a new study by Harvard and Stanford Universities finds that the popular dependent care mandate will have very unpopular consequences: It lowers wages for workers at firms with employer-based coverage by $1,200 every year. And here's a prediction: Politicians will be quick to blame the reduction on greedy employers, and rather than remove the mandate, they'll try to fix the problems with more mandates.
Second, remember the whole "if you like your plan, you can keep it," debacle? The ACA led 5 million people to lose their plans in 2013, and many more have lost their plans since then.
Third, as my Mercatus Center colleague Brian Blase notes, 2016 enrollment will likely be at least 10 million people below the expectations when the ACA was passed. The nature of enrollment is also a big problem for the law's future. Blase's recent work highlights that people with at least middle-class income are still largely shunning exchanges and enrollees are skewing much older and sicker than expected. This is why premiums increased 12 percent on average this year even as exchange plans get worse. The news that the ACA is being gamed as people wait until they're sick to enroll for coverage reveals the law's poor construction.
While exchange enrollment is well-below expectations, about 13 million more people are enrolled in Medicaid in 2015 than in 2013. That anyone would be proud of throwing more people into Medicaid has never made any sense to me. The best that can be said about Medicaid is that it gives poor people something they didn't have before. However, it's hardly the best way to give the poorest in America better health outcomes.
First, the empirical evidence shows that Medicaid often provides second-class care. Poor access and poor health outcomes are often the fate that awaits Medicaid beneficiaries, including the need for greater reliance on emergency rooms and higher mortality rates. Also, a new paper by economists at MIT, Harvard and Dartmouth found that Medicaid recipients only benefit by 20 to 40 cents for each dollar of Medicaid spending. Can we all agree that this is a terrible return on taxpayer dollars?
Finally, insurers in the exchange have reported that customers appear to be gaming the new system—not just by signing up when they need care, but by then dropping it. As a result, the largest insurer in the country, UnitedHealth, is talking about withdrawing from the exchange in 2017, leading some to wonder if the whole system will collapse.
In view of these poor performances, you've got to wonder how Clinton would like to build on it or call it the best accomplishment of her political party.
COPYRIGHT 2016 CREATORS.COM
Veronique de Rugy, Ph.D., is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and a monthly columnist for the print edition of Reason.
that's a great read and breakdown on what and how it works but these people dont care. they say the stats and numbers are right wing propaganda. i have on the ground real world effects on what it has done to people that i know that has zero to do with pplitics. just like the question i posed to bossman: how is this affordable? who is it affordable to? and how the fuck did this help out the middle class working man and their families? fuck politics on this one, freaking common sense isnt so common.
the key indicators that this was going to be bad was this:
you have to vote it in to read the contents(how much freaking sense does that make)
congress and their families are exempt from the program (red flags and bells to me)
again go back to number one: oh its so freaking great but we have to pass it before you can read it
finally raising taxes only hurts the working class the majority of the time and nothing can be handled out for free. medicad anyone?
I always remember the post office when I think of govt.. they been in charge of that forever and NEVER has it been out the red.. govt does nothing but screw things up.. red or blue it just don't matter. half truths are half lies .. right , lip stick on a pig is still a pig. I got a article on bernies plan too.. enlightening to say the least but then again in the end its really what you individually want to believe..
Bernie Sanders is a democratic socialist who thinks the United States needs a "political revolution." His plan to replace our health insurance system with "Medicare for All" is in some ways a dramatic break with the status quo. But it rests on an old and thoroughly conventional formula: Promise voters they will get more and better health care without paying for
You Don't Have to Like Any of These Candidates, But You're Gonna Loathe Some More Than Others
Simply expanding Medicare to include everyone would be a big enough step. But Sanders' plan is to Medicare what a Tesla is to a Toyota.
It would encompass "the entire continuum of care," including long-term care and dentistry. There would be "no more copays, no more deductibles, and no more fighting with insurance companies when they fail to pay for charges." In sum: Every person will have everything he or she wants in the way of care and will pay zero at the point of service.
Contrast that with Medicare, which doesn't cover long-term care or dentistry. It also imposes a deductible for hospital stays and a copay on doctor services. In 2010, the average Medicare recipient spent $4,734 for out-of-pocket costs.
Such obligations are an inconvenience and a burden to patients, but they serve two useful purposes: reducing what taxpayers have to pay and discouraging care that is only marginally helpful. This approach serves to contain costs. Sanders' change would serve to increase them.
He argues that his system will be more far cheaper than private insurance because it will cut down on "overhead, administrative costs and complexity." But a lot of private insurers' costs come from scrutinizing claims to prevent fraud, overtreatment and unnecessary treatment. Agreeing to pay all charges without review, as Sanders proposes, is an invitation to be fleeced.
One reason he thinks the single-payer approach will work so well is that countries like Canada and Britain use it and spend far less than we do on health care. He takes care not to mention one major tool they use to hold down costs: limiting access to procedures that insured Americans take for granted.
"One in four Canadians reported waiting four months or more for elective surgery, similar to the proportion of patients in the United Kingdom (21 percent) but much higher than in Germany (almost 0 percent) and the United States (7 percent)," the Canadian Institute for Health Information found in 2012. One in five Canadians needing knee or hip replacements has to wait more than six months.
The Guardian newspaper reported in 2012 that Britain's National Health Service "has come under growing criticism for making it harder for patients to have operations for routine conditions such as hernia, cataracts, grommets, wisdom teeth, or hip or knee replacement, and denying infertile couples IVF."
Single-payer advocates will argue that such limits are a small price to pay for guaranteeing coverage for everyone. It's a plausible cause that Sanders, alas, is unwilling to make. He would have us believe there will be no limits.
He's hardly unique in pretending we can all get everything we want for a pittance. George W. Bush did the same thing in pushing a new program of Medicare prescription drug coverage without raising payroll taxes to pay for it. It cost the government $78 billion in 2014—only 15 percent of which was covered by premiums from seniors.
When Barack Obama proposed the Affordable Care Act, Republicans charged it would hurt retirees by robbing $700 billion from Medicare. Never mind that the health care plan offered by Rep. Paul Ryan, now speaker, included the same savings from Medicare.
The GOP charge was unfair, but the administration was equally deceptive in claiming that the economies would be wrung out of private insurers and hospitals, at no inconvenience to patients. That's like saying that if you require utilities to take expensive steps to clean up pollution, consumers won't end up paying more.
Obamacare was also supposed to provide more for less—requiring health policies, for example, to cover an array of preventive services at no cost to the patient. This type of coverage, the president insisted, "saves money, and it saves lives." More fantasy: Rutgers economist Louise Russell has found that four out of five preventive options save less than they cost.
Both parties have long operated on the assumption that, as Oscar Wilde put it, "Nothing succeeds like excess." The United States has the most expensive health care in the world because Americans refuse to take "no" for an answer. Sanders won't ask them to.
© Copyright 2016 by Creators Syndicate Inc.
Steve Chapman is a columnist and editorial writer for the Chicago Tribune.
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VIEW COMMENTS (57) | LEAVE A COMMENT
This was to appease low income voters. they are the only demographic that benefited. (did they really?) I pay more because i have earned insurance through years of hard work?
just a political ploy for the dems.
"Over the past seven years, Americans have heard an awful lot about Barack Obama and his presidency, but the actual substance of his domestic policies and their impact on the country remain poorly understood."Quote:
Originally Posted by bossman
LMAO! ^^^^
i hate to call names and point fingers but just like you just pointed out: how stupid can someone be to believe that nonsense? i understand that their is enough blame to go around for both parties but holy shit the left actually believes this bull shit that they put out there. i literally just pointed out how much my government provided health care for me went up for my military retired health insurance and that isnt even privatatized like everyone else's is. then the people i know here who work with the city and other employments dbl and tripled across the board. i just cant see how anyone can say or even believe that this is a good thingQuote:
Originally Posted by Swiper
There will always be articles biased in favor of Obama and against....I have personally seen the negative effects of the ACA on small business. I have seen 3 people I am close with cut from their existing policy, great policies with BCBS and whatnot, self-paid policies. They then had to pay to get a more expensive policy, and not because of the insurance company.
I am of course a Republican but I am an openminded one. That being said, I try hard to be openminded about Obama but I struggle.
My aunt is a nurse, she got the best health insurance you could probably get before all this obama horse shit, now she has to pay about $150 more a month, something like that.
Some people just don't any business running anything, Obama shouldnt be allowed to have a job plunging toilets much less being a president.
the only positive aspect of this garbage that i could see is for the poor people getting insurance. but on the flip side of that at what cost to the rest of the nation? you already have medicad in every state that is supposed to help these people out. if he carried so much about taking care of people he would have pushed for more job creation and getting more folks back into the work force. that way they could be getting health insurance from their employer. most full time employers provided a medical program for their employees. granted it wasnt free but it was their for them but with all the bs mandates and other bs written into this garbage of a law, at the end of the day it hurt the working class and cost more full time jobs than it actually helped people.Quote:
Originally Posted by mikeyg51
again what i just said above, no matter how much you want to help out those less fortunate than you, you cant do it for free and someone else is going to pay for it and suffer. nothing in this life is free and i mean nothing. this income inequality and other bs rethoric that they spew doesnt do dick. they drive the middle and lower class down further and the only ones that profit are the ones that are already fat cats to begin with. you cut a billionaire income a few million it's no big deal, they just fire people, move shit over seas or something along those lines. now if you ram another 1-10g of deductions out of someone making 30-70g a year that's a huge huge chunk that most of those people cant afford.
and while on the subject here. fast food, grocery stores and other jobs in service like that are not life long jobs. these are entry level jobs for those that are going to school, supplementing income etc..... these arent careers for 95% of the people in them. so driving the min wage in these positions up sky high creates another burden on everyone. the end result, they let people go, the make machines to do those jobs and the costs of services go up. all these things i have pointed out does nothing but hinder the poor and the middle class even further. it's simple math and common sense
VERY well said Guns....I know many people that are actually letting employees go because they are reaching their limit of employees (i forgot the exact number, maybe 20 in some instances or 50 in others??)...my point is they want to help their employees but paying the penalty is actually cheaper because they are running SMALL businesses and don't have the money to provide all these extra costs! Everyone I know seems to have an issue with Obama Care.....I don't want to just jump on the Hate Obama bandwagon because I was on that from day one! But if he had done something great then I'd give him credit. I just feel like this is costing us so much more than it is helping.
And what Animal said is exactly my point from earlier: people that HAD insurance had to pay more after this law took effect....i thought it was only to help ppl who were under or uninsured? I didn't realize it should penalize ppl that didn't have the exact policy that obama wanted