US Politics Mega-thread - Page 600

On November 03 2013 17:20 IgnE wrote:
he's a remixing wordsmith

it's the remix baaaaaaabyyyyyyyyy

On November 04 2013 02:31 farvacola wrote:
Well I'm appaulled over here, though Gattaca is a great film

On November 03 2013 22:57 stk01001 wrote:


The laws been intact for less than a month, no one is in a position to say how it has worked at this point, and you won't even be able to BEGIN to make an accurate assessment until early next year. There is no need to "defend" the law itself yet. The parts of the law that have already been implemented for a while now have been nothing but helpful to many people (like being able to stay on your parents insurance until your 26). Yes the website was a debacle, fortunately the goal of the ACA was not to make an awesome website, it was to provide affordable healthcare to uninsured Americans and improve the quality of existing coverage. The government contracted a Canadian company to implement the website and they botched it, the explanation isn't that complicated. There should have been better oversight, I can't defend the administration there.

Obviously they could not get single payer through, but it was still worth passing the ACA because it's a step in the right direction. Not being able to deny for pre-existing conditions is huge. It's a great thing for the insurance consumer, because before an insurance company could basically just refuse to pay due to some trivial condition. There is also no more caps on reimbursement, before it was possible to still go bankrupt when you got sick despite having insurance, and this does in fact happen to millions of people. Your not supposed to go bankrupt if you have insurance. I love republicans because they are so fixated on bashing "Obamacare" yet they offer no solutions of their own to fix our healthcare system. They want to keep things status quo, and would in fact go the opposite way by defunding Medicare and Medicaid (but they wouldn't cut our defense budget). They are obviously against healthcare for the poor, that's what Medicaid is. Their plan for the poor is "hey, just go to the emergency room". Mitt Romney himself said it during his presidential campaign. And do you know what happens when the poor go to the emergency room? We, the taxpayers, end up paying for it through higher insurance premiums. Republicans themselves championed the idea of the individual mandate back in the early 90's, it's about "taking personal responsibility". Their sentiment then was that people should be forced to have health insurance so other people don't end up having to pay for them. Same idea as car insurance. Hey, be responsible for yourself. That's the mantra of the republican party right? Well now that it's Obama's idea, it's suddenly horrible. It's just comical.

I find your comment that the dems purposely passed the ACA knowing it would fail so they could get single payer is interesting. Shows the kind of delusional thinking that is so common in the party today. Same thinking along the lines of "the American people are so against Obamacare care they want us to shut down the government"

Congressional Republicans have stoked consumer fears and confusion with charges that the health care reform law is causing insurers to cancel existing policies and will force many people to pay substantially higher premiums next year for coverage they don’t want. That, they say, violates President Obama’s pledge that if you like the insurance you have, you can keep it. Mr. Obama clearly misspoke when he said that.

And of course "policies not worth keeping." So go ahead, continue to lower the bar, tell people what is good for them (as if some bureaucrat in Washington knows better than the person buying it).

How on earth forced subsidizing of the poor is about personal responsibility is baffling. The republicans don't want the taxpayer to be left with the bill. The only way that happens is if healthcare is cheap and competitive enough that the large majority of people can get it without government assistance. Now again, whether or not you think the market is the way to accomplish that, government money is NOT emphasizing personal responsibility, obviously.

WASHINGTON -- Efforts to roll back renewable energy standards in the states this year have largely failed despite the best efforts of conservative groups, according to a new report.

At least 37 bills have been introduced in 2013 to eliminate or weaken states' renewable portfolio standards (RPS), which set a minimum requirement for how much energy a state's utilities must draw from renewable sources like solar and wind. The new report from ProgressNow and a coalition of national environmental and state-based progressive groups found that only one of those efforts has passed so far this year.

"They have almost no success," said Brian Wietgrefe, national research director at ProgressNow. "It's because it works -- the policies work."

Thirty-seven states have some manner of RPS in place. But a number of conservative groups, including the Heartland Institute and Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform, have been driving efforts to amend or entirely remove those standards.

Perhaps the most influential opponent is the American Legislative Exchange Council, the conservative nonprofit that brings together lawmakers and corporate interests to develop model legislation. In October 2012, ALEC's board of directors adopted a model bill that the Heartland Institute wrote, called the Electricity Freedom Act. The bill describes RPS as "essentially a tax on consumers of electricity that forces the use of renewable energy sources beyond what would be called for by real market forces" and calls for their repeal. ALEC's list of advisers includes representatives of a number of energy companies that stand to lose money as renewables gain a bigger share of the market, including Peabody Energy, Koch Industries and Exxon Mobil.

On November 04 2013 07:28 DoubleReed wrote:


First of all, yes, that's probably true that bureaucrats (being guided by healthcare experts) know better than the person buying it.

Second of all, you act like people aren't massively restricted by what they can afford. You know, that's kind of the whole point of the law.

Third of all, healthcare providers are pretty widely known for exploiting loopholes and lawyers to get out of giving you the care they said they would give you. Things like this article from 2009 talks about how insurance companies dropped people from their insurance once they got sick. This stuff isn't hard to find. These are really only things that "bureaucrats" can solve. Consumers can't do much about that kind of abuse.



???

You can't have personal responsibility and insurance. They're completely antithetical to each other. Blatantly so. When people talk about personal responsibility with health insurance, they are talking literal nonsense.

And just a minor question: what's the difference between "subsidizing of the poor" and "forced subsidizing of the poor"?

On November 04 2013 07:55 KwarK wrote:
Of course the average person has no fucking clue how to pick insurance. He doesn't know the likelihood of a given affliction hitting him, nor how much it costs to treat, nor how it will impact his life. This is a lot of actuarial information that an average person has no access to and wouldn't know what to do with even if he had and yet he is supposed to work out which insurance plan best suits his situation? Insurance isn't a loaf of bread and treating it like one helps no-one.

Public healthcare in my country is decided by bureaucracy and I wouldn't want it any other way.

On November 04 2013 07:55 KwarK wrote:
Of course the average person has no fucking clue how to pick insurance. He doesn't know the likelihood of a given affliction hitting him, nor how much it costs to treat, nor how it will impact his life. This is a lot of actuarial information that an average person has no access to and wouldn't know what to do with even if he had and yet he is supposed to work out which insurance plan best suits his situation? Insurance isn't a loaf of bread and treating it like one helps no-one. Healthcare costing is where complex statistics, actuarial calculations, public health policy, specialised knowledge about pretty much every ailment and their treatments and cutting edge pharmacology all meet. You get bureaucrats working for the state or for the insurance companies but it's basically the same group of people trying to work out what is going to go wrong and how much it'd cost to keep you working in a giant equation that you couldn't begin to understand. Only in a private insurance system it pads their bottom line to mislead you about costs, deny you unprofitable care you need, sell you shit you don't and drop you the moment you need them to do anything.

Public healthcare in my country is decided by bureaucracy and I wouldn't want it any other way. If you really think you're qualified to judge your own healthcare needs then yeah, you are so stupid that you need the government to hold your hand. That's why it's the American public, pretty much uniquely in the world, who actually believe they're qualified it in spite of their constant catastrophic failures. No other nation has such incredibly unqualified self belief in their own exceptionalism.

On November 04 2013 08:13 Introvert wrote:


Everything now is complex. I guess it's time to do away with individual choice altogether! healthcare, cars, houses, etc. No, you are only qualified to get an abortion, marry someone, buy a phone, or smoke pot. Everything else just requires far too much thought.

In this country I have yet to see a bureaucrat make decisions that people can't. Hell, they are screwing it up right now.

This is what I mean, everyone would rather discuss why Obamacare is a good idea than actually look at what it's doing.
It's really amusing, but if you want to ignore everything that is happening because of the principle behind the bill, then that's up to you. It's rich to tell someone that their prices are going to double for equal or lesser care and then tell them "it's for your own good."

Government fails, and is currently failing.

On November 04 2013 07:55 KwarK wrote:
Of course the average person has no fucking clue how to pick insurance. He doesn't know the likelihood of a given affliction hitting him, nor how much it costs to treat, nor how it will impact his life. This is a lot of actuarial information that an average person has no access to and wouldn't know what to do with even if he had and yet he is supposed to work out which insurance plan best suits his situation? Insurance isn't a loaf of bread and treating it like one helps no-one. Healthcare costing is where complex statistics, actuarial calculations, public health policy, specialised knowledge about pretty much every ailment and their treatments and cutting edge pharmacology all meet. You get bureaucrats working for the state or for the insurance companies but it's basically the same group of people trying to work out what is going to go wrong and how much it'd cost to keep you working in a giant equation that you couldn't begin to understand. Only in a private insurance system it pads their bottom line to mislead you about costs, deny you unprofitable care you need, sell you shit you don't and drop you the moment you need them to do anything.

Public healthcare in my country is decided by bureaucracy and I wouldn't want it any other way. If you really think you're qualified to judge your own healthcare needs then yeah, you are so stupid that you need the government to hold your hand. That's why it's the American public, pretty much uniquely in the world, who actually believe they're qualified it in spite of their constant catastrophic failures. No other nation has such incredibly unqualified self belief in their own exceptionalism.

On November 04 2013 08:20 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

Buying insurance isn't really complicated. You aren't figuring your odds of getting sick, or the cost of getting sick - that's built into the price of the insurance. What you're figuring for the most part is what fits into your budget - co-pays, max out of pocket, etc.

On November 04 2013 08:19 KwarK wrote:
Obamacare is a shitty idea. A comprehensive nationalised system along with death panels and a tax to fund it is the right idea. You can have a private insurance running parallel with it if you like, most countries do, those who can afford it still get to pay extra to have extra if they want but it provides a simple minimum standard of healthcare for everyone.

Suggesting that healthcare decisions are somewhat comparable to buying a car is really, really dumb. Buying a car is pretty fucking simple, you have a few basic parameters (where you wanna go, how cool you wanna look, how much money you wanna spend etc) and you measure it against those. Assessing health insurance is mind boggling complicated. You can know your life intimately but you don't know what your statistically biggest health risks are, nor what the biggest financial risks (risk of incident multiplied by cost of it is), you don't know if your co-pay is a lot compared to your likely costs or not much, you don't know if you're overpaying or underpaying, you don't know if there is a bunch of other shit that could happen that isn't covered because it'd be too expensive and a billion other variables. Healthcare is really fucking complicated, which phone you want isn't.

On November 04 2013 08:25 Introvert wrote:


My point is that as things get more and more complex, then the average person will be less and less able to make the right decisions, on your view. You know what else is complicated? Investing. Maybe we should nationalize that too! Complexity doesn't mean a thing should be handed over to a bloated government.

Obamacare is a broken bill, but everyone jumps to its defense because it tried REALLY hard to do some good, but so far has done jack all. Nothing is better under it, I already addressed the only 3 "successes" that the bill has had so far.

On November 04 2013 08:30 KwarK wrote:

If a dumbass invests in a ponzi scheme and loses their savings society doesn't expect me to bail them out. If a dumbass relies on a shitty insurance policy which fucks him over then leaving him to die on the street isn't an option. We still end up paying for healthcare.

But yeah, your average person shouldn't be trusted with investing either. Shit like FOREX which encourages laymen to start trying to trade on markets built on variables they have no clue about is just feeding on morons. We let them invest because that particular brand of stupidity isn't a public issue. Healthcare is though and unless we want to let the stupid die in the street we need to treat it like it is. Your comparison fails.

Also you seem to have confused me with someone defending Obamacare.