In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up!
NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action.
On November 16 2013 13:13 paralleluniverse wrote: The whole policy cancellation issue is completely overblown.
The ACA has a grandfather clause that allows plans that don't meet the minimum requirements to stay temporarily, as long as they don't change too much, including not raising the price sufficiently above medical inflation. Therefore, the plans that are now being cancelled both do not meet the minimum requirements and have changed in a way that is not covered by the grandfather clause. Not meeting the minimum requirements alone is not grounds for being disallowed under the ACA.
Other than the first line, this is all true. However, what's lost here is how limited and toothless the grandfather clause is.
Obama did not promise to freeze the insurance market--no changes to any policies. Policies naturally get changed and cancelled all the time. What's different here is that these policies have changed so they're not really the same policy (otherwise they could have stayed under the grandfather clause), they're subpar policies that don't meet minimum standards, and there's a relentless war to destroy Obamacare.
The devil is in the details. There's a difference between meeting Obamacare's fairly arbitrary standards and being a good plan. Of course, there always inevitably will be problems when a bureaucracy forces a "one size fits all" approach. What's been particularly fun has been seeing liberal media figures complain about their canceled coverage that was perfectly fine from their perspective.
This is exactly the problem Democrats are facing today. They are unable to persuade people that their plan was cancelled because it was so crappy. Americans are not that dumb and know that it worked well for them, whatever demonization of the insurance companies goes on. Liberalism thrives on the negative impact of social programs being invisible on the personal level and spread amongst the many. This is one case where they aren't getting away with it. Ordinary Americans, some who believed Obama's promise to not raise middle class tax rates, see increased costs and frustrations that can be laid directly at the feet of Obama and congressional Democrats. That's why both of their poll numbers are falling so low.
If you had told me a year ago that Bill Clinton would lead the Democratic revolt against Obama and Obamacare, I'd say you were crazy. It's just his status as something of a revered figure within the Democratic party that made it stick.
Even if it takes a change to the law, the president should honor the commitment the federal government made to those people and let them keep what they got.
--President Clinton on Tuesday
Clinton is not someone the media can dismiss as a Tea Party extremist, but the man that brought sex appeal to old school progressivism. Obama only had a weak response: essentially he would legislate from the executive using selective enforcement. Insurers could continue to offer illegal plans, because he would make sure his agencies and the judicial wouldn't punish them for doing so. Maybe this time around, Democrats are ready to write a law that won't be just a presidential promise. A law that will guarantee them a defensible position next time they have to appeal to voters to re-elect.
40 House Democrats defected from the Obama line today and voted to change Obamacare from the House. I think the Democrats won't easily recover their credibility on changing the face of American medicine. Eventually, the bungling can't be explained away.
(Reuters) - Medical bills are behind more than 60 percent of U.S. personal bankruptcies, U.S. researchers reported on Thursday in a report they said demonstrates that healthcare reform is on the wrong track.
More than 75 percent of these bankrupt families had health insurance but still were overwhelmed by their medical debts, the team at Harvard Law School, Harvard Medical School and Ohio University reported in the American Journal of Medicine.
Many good arguments can be made about the problems with Obamacare, but saying that the pre-Obamacare system "worked well" for Americans isn't one of them.
On November 16 2013 13:13 paralleluniverse wrote: The whole policy cancellation issue is completely overblown.
The ACA has a grandfather clause that allows plans that don't meet the minimum requirements to stay temporarily, as long as they don't change too much, including not raising the price sufficiently above medical inflation. Therefore, the plans that are now being cancelled both do not meet the minimum requirements and have changed in a way that is not covered by the grandfather clause. Not meeting the minimum requirements alone is not grounds for being disallowed under the ACA.
Other than the first line, this is all true. However, what's lost here is how limited and toothless the grandfather clause is.
Obama did not promise to freeze the insurance market--no changes to any policies. Policies naturally get changed and cancelled all the time. What's different here is that these policies have changed so they're not really the same policy (otherwise they could have stayed under the grandfather clause), they're subpar policies that don't meet minimum standards, and there's a relentless war to destroy Obamacare.
The devil is in the details. There's a difference between meeting Obamacare's fairly arbitrary standards and being a good plan. Of course, there always inevitably will be problems when a bureaucracy forces a "one size fits all" approach. What's been particularly fun has been seeing liberal media figures complain about their canceled coverage that was perfectly fine from their perspective.
This is exactly the problem Democrats are facing today. They are unable to persuade people that their plan was cancelled because it was so crappy. Americans are not that dumb and know that it worked well for them, whatever demonization of the insurance companies goes on. Liberalism thrives on the negative impact of social programs being invisible on the personal level and spread amongst the many. This is one case where they aren't getting away with it. Ordinary Americans, some who believed Obama's promise to not raise middle class tax rates, see increased costs and frustrations that can be laid directly at the feet of Obama and congressional Democrats. That's why both of their poll numbers are falling so low.
If you had told me a year ago that Bill Clinton would lead the Democratic revolt against Obama and Obamacare, I'd say you were crazy. It's just his status as something of a revered figure within the Democratic party that made it stick.
Even if it takes a change to the law, the president should honor the commitment the federal government made to those people and let them keep what they got.
--President Clinton on Tuesday
Clinton is not someone the media can dismiss as a Tea Party extremist, but the man that brought sex appeal to old school progressivism. Obama only had a weak response: essentially he would legislate from the executive using selective enforcement. Insurers could continue to offer illegal plans, because he would make sure his agencies and the judicial wouldn't punish them for doing so. Maybe this time around, Democrats are ready to write a law that won't be just a presidential promise. A law that will guarantee them a defensible position next time they have to appeal to voters to re-elect.
40 House Democrats defected from the Obama line today and voted to change Obamacare from the House. I think the Democrats won't easily recover their credibility on changing the face of American medicine. Eventually, the bungling can't be explained away.
(Reuters) - Medical bills are behind more than 60 percent of U.S. personal bankruptcies, U.S. researchers reported on Thursday in a report they said demonstrates that healthcare reform is on the wrong track.
More than 75 percent of these bankrupt families had health insurance but still were overwhelmed by their medical debts, the team at Harvard Law School, Harvard Medical School and Ohio University reported in the American Journal of Medicine.
Many good arguments can be made about the problems with Obamacare, but saying that the pre-Obamacare system "worked well" for Americans isn't one of them.
Let's talk about good arguments. The one the Democrats were banking on was that the dropped plans weren't any good to begin with. That one blew up in their face. Americans were confronted with a more expensive plan with no choice to stay on their own plan. Their anger is now at the forefront and Democrats are left red-handed.
Two Problems with what you were saying. I'm not talking about the abstract notion of the system in general, in fact, employer based systems suffer from the problems with pre-existing conditions and that's currently enshrined in law with tax breaks on health insurance plans. We're talking about a universally bad step in the current system that is now under tremendous pressure to be reversed.
Second problem, I have no clue why you put "worked well" in quotes, since neither I nor anybody else you're quoting used that.
Here's what Comrade Barry the Republican was supposed to do, rather than shitting all over the National Anthem.
What do you guys think of Park Geun-hye? She seems extremely impressive to me, not willing to kowtow to Leftist agitation and President Barry's almost Blair-Bush style clientelism - also able to give speeches in Chinese & English - a great asset in the 21st century.
I think Park has been okay. But living in Japan, they regard her coldly because she has shown the right wing nationalist tendency to speak aggressively against Japan, particularly on its war crimes and on Dokdo island. Japan also has a right wing nationalist government trying to get people to accept tough reforms by speaking out against China and both Koreas.
It depends on whether you admire a more assertive Korea that refuses to be pushed around.
Edit: she is an interesting contrast of Korea's globalized perspective to Japan's mercantilism. Park can speak English and Chinese, as you noted. Japan's PM Abe can only speak Japanese. Korea has a free trade agreement with the US, while Abe is struggling to get some constituencies to sign off on even reducing barriers. For both Park and Abe, they are each the only major leader they have not yet met.
Fair points, I don't really like Abe tbh... he's just a populist and a demagogue, i don't think he's too serious about governing properly or fixing stagnant Japan (unfortunately, because Japan direly needs it)
I think Korea has quite a bit to offer, although education reforms are needed imo... children are spending like 10 hours a day (literally) just cramming and rote memorising, Finland's children study about half as much yet get the same results in international league tables - but they also end up as well rounded people instead of awkward but smart nerds... and of course not everyone is academic, so what happens to the people that can't keep up in the Korean education system? Japan suffers from the same kind of thing, only it's worse because they have Corporatism.
On November 16 2013 13:13 paralleluniverse wrote: The whole policy cancellation issue is completely overblown.
The ACA has a grandfather clause that allows plans that don't meet the minimum requirements to stay temporarily, as long as they don't change too much, including not raising the price sufficiently above medical inflation. Therefore, the plans that are now being cancelled both do not meet the minimum requirements and have changed in a way that is not covered by the grandfather clause. Not meeting the minimum requirements alone is not grounds for being disallowed under the ACA.
Other than the first line, this is all true. However, what's lost here is how limited and toothless the grandfather clause is.
Obama did not promise to freeze the insurance market--no changes to any policies. Policies naturally get changed and cancelled all the time. What's different here is that these policies have changed so they're not really the same policy (otherwise they could have stayed under the grandfather clause), they're subpar policies that don't meet minimum standards, and there's a relentless war to destroy Obamacare.
The devil is in the details. There's a difference between meeting Obamacare's fairly arbitrary standards and being a good plan. Of course, there always inevitably will be problems when a bureaucracy forces a "one size fits all" approach. What's been particularly fun has been seeing liberal media figures complain about their canceled coverage that was perfectly fine from their perspective.
This is exactly the problem Democrats are facing today. They are unable to persuade people that their plan was cancelled because it was so crappy. Americans are not that dumb and know that it worked well for them, whatever demonization of the insurance companies goes on. Liberalism thrives on the negative impact of social programs being invisible on the personal level and spread amongst the many. This is one case where they aren't getting away with it. Ordinary Americans, some who believed Obama's promise to not raise middle class tax rates, see increased costs and frustrations that can be laid directly at the feet of Obama and congressional Democrats. That's why both of their poll numbers are falling so low.
If you had told me a year ago that Bill Clinton would lead the Democratic revolt against Obama and Obamacare, I'd say you were crazy. It's just his status as something of a revered figure within the Democratic party that made it stick.
Even if it takes a change to the law, the president should honor the commitment the federal government made to those people and let them keep what they got.
--President Clinton on Tuesday
Clinton is not someone the media can dismiss as a Tea Party extremist, but the man that brought sex appeal to old school progressivism. Obama only had a weak response: essentially he would legislate from the executive using selective enforcement. Insurers could continue to offer illegal plans, because he would make sure his agencies and the judicial wouldn't punish them for doing so. Maybe this time around, Democrats are ready to write a law that won't be just a presidential promise. A law that will guarantee them a defensible position next time they have to appeal to voters to re-elect.
40 House Democrats defected from the Obama line today and voted to change Obamacare from the House. I think the Democrats won't easily recover their credibility on changing the face of American medicine. Eventually, the bungling can't be explained away.
(Reuters) - Medical bills are behind more than 60 percent of U.S. personal bankruptcies, U.S. researchers reported on Thursday in a report they said demonstrates that healthcare reform is on the wrong track.
More than 75 percent of these bankrupt families had health insurance but still were overwhelmed by their medical debts, the team at Harvard Law School, Harvard Medical School and Ohio University reported in the American Journal of Medicine.
Many good arguments can be made about the problems with Obamacare, but saying that the pre-Obamacare system "worked well" for Americans isn't one of them.
Let's talk about good arguments. The one the Democrats were banking on was that the dropped plans weren't any good to begin with. That one blew up in their face. Americans were confronted with a more expensive plan with no choice to stay on their own plan. Their anger is now at the forefront and Democrats are left red-handed.
Two Problems with what you were saying. I'm not talking about the abstract notion of the system in general, in fact, employer based systems suffer from the problems with pre-existing conditions and that's currently enshrined in law with tax breaks on health insurance plans. We're talking about a universally bad step in the current system that is now under tremendous pressure to be reversed.
Second problem, I have no clue why you put "worked well" in quotes, since neither I nor anybody else you're quoting used that.
I think it's pretty clear that many of the dropped plans weren't any good to begin with. If medical bills are going to force people to go into bankruptcy anyway they would have been better off not wasting money on crappy health insurance in the first place. However, you may be right that the new plans won't be any better, or that they will be too expensive. The jury's still out; we'll have to see how things work out when/if they get the stupid website working. It is still possible that people with dropped plans will be able to get better and/or cheaper coverage than they could previously.
First problem - the current system is not "universally bad." At least some people with preexisting conditions will be able to afford health insurance for the first time in their lives. Again, healthcare.gov is a travesty, but it is probably fixable. Once it is up and running we may find that Americans are satisfied with the new options they have.
Second problem - in the post I quoted you said "Americans are not that dumb and know that it worked well for them, whatever demonization of the insurance companies goes on." Neither the shitty cheap plans nor the system in general worked well, hence the bankruptcy statistics from the article I posted.
Since they couldn't get the website working on time, we don't know yet whether Obamacare will end up making the system better, but I doubt it could make things any worse.
On November 16 2013 15:32 zlefin wrote: It's a pity republicans didn't try to do anything constructive on obamacare; then the rollout might've gone a lot smoother.
Your right the reps should have been more aggressive in trying to fix obamacare. They should have taken a page from the democrats and threatened to cut off funding for the military and the government in order to get something constructive done.
On November 16 2013 15:32 zlefin wrote: It's a pity republicans didn't try to do anything constructive on obamacare; then the rollout might've gone a lot smoother.
Your right the reps should have been more aggressive in trying to fix obamacare. They should have taken a page from the democrats and threatened to cut off funding for the military and the government in order to get something constructive done.
Sigh, let me explain this to you. They believe the ACA is bad. therefor they tried to repeal it. This failed, not only that after the last elections it was obvious it would never be successfully repealed. Therefor you change your angle and instead of trying to stop it and failing you accept it will exist and instead try to limit the damage it does. You examine its flaws and attempt to fix them. The Democrats would have been a lot more receptive to evidence of flaws in the ACA and ways to fix it then they would be for its repeal.
But as is so often in American politics, shouting at your opponent is more important then the good of the people.
Wasn't it the republicans that actually succeeded in cutting off funding for the government in order to destroy the ACA? I feel like Sermokala's post is from the Bizarro world
On November 16 2013 15:32 zlefin wrote: It's a pity republicans didn't try to do anything constructive on obamacare; then the rollout might've gone a lot smoother.
Your right the reps should have been more aggressive in trying to fix obamacare. They should have taken a page from the democrats and threatened to cut off funding for the military and the government in order to get something constructive done.
Well that's an interesting take on the shutdown debacle.
what the American Republic needs is New Conservatism, something like the new British Whig movement which is making headwinds in the United Kingdom... perhaps American Conservatives could learn from the Mother Kingdom? Seems to be the only way to defeat this rancid, left-wing cocktail of Statism and Cryptosocialism that the Democrats prescribe.
On November 17 2013 04:41 Scorpion77 wrote: what the American Republic needs is New Conservatism, something like the new British Whig movement which is making headwinds in the United Kingdom... perhaps American Conservatives could learn from the Mother Kingdom? Seems to be the only way to defeat this rancid, left-wing cocktail of Statism and Cryptosocialism that the Democrats prescribe.
I hate to break it to you, but the Democrats are the new conservative alternative to the Republicans steering into being a reactionary party. The actual upper class is generally much more socially liberal than society at large. What there might be space for in the American political spectrum right now would be a new populist party led by someone like Huckabee: someone who espouses Christian values not only in terms of traditional values, but in terms of economics, unlike the Pharisee GOP.
On November 17 2013 04:41 Scorpion77 wrote: what the American Republic needs is New Conservatism, something like the new British Whig movement which is making headwinds in the United Kingdom... perhaps American Conservatives could learn from the Mother Kingdom? Seems to be the only way to defeat this rancid, left-wing cocktail of Statism and Cryptosocialism that the Democrats prescribe.
No thanks. Y'all can keep your new British Whig movement (what is that by the way? lol) along with your conspicuous overuse of capital letters. You are right in some respect though. The UK has an excellent socialized medicine system, and conservatives would do well to learn from the (M)mother (K)kingdom in that regard. But don't expect flag waving Tea Party'ers to take very kindly to your suggestion that they learn how to be better conservatives from those would have continued to tax our tea.
On November 17 2013 04:41 Scorpion77 wrote: what the American Republic needs is New Conservatism, something like the new British Whig movement which is making headwinds in the United Kingdom... perhaps American Conservatives could learn from the Mother Kingdom? Seems to be the only way to defeat this rancid, left-wing cocktail of Statism and Cryptosocialism that the Democrats prescribe.
No thanks. Y'all can keep your new British Whig movement (what is that by the way? lol) along with your conspicuous overuse of capital letters. You are right in some respect though. The UK has an excellent socialized medicine system, and conservatives would do well to learn from the (M)mother (K)kingdom in that regard. But don't expect flag waving Tea Party'ers to take very kindly to your suggestion that they learn how to be better conservatives from those would have continued to tax our tea.
Glad I could cure your ignorance, farvacola. For what it's worth I'm not exactly happy with the NHS - the Labour Party created it and it is fairly corrupt, although I'm not sure what that has to do with any points I made? Very confusing post you made, friend.
On November 17 2013 04:41 Scorpion77 wrote: what the American Republic needs is New Conservatism, something like the new British Whig movement which is making headwinds in the United Kingdom... perhaps American Conservatives could learn from the Mother Kingdom? Seems to be the only way to defeat this rancid, left-wing cocktail of Statism and Cryptosocialism that the Democrats prescribe.
No thanks. Y'all can keep your new British Whig movement (what is that by the way? lol) along with your conspicuous overuse of capital letters. You are right in some respect though. The UK has an excellent socialized medicine system, and conservatives would do well to learn from the (M)mother (K)kingdom in that regard. But don't expect flag waving Tea Party'ers to take very kindly to your suggestion that they learn how to be better conservatives from those would have continued to tax our tea.
Glad I could cure your ignorance, farvacola. For what it's worth I'm not exactly happy with the NHS - the Labour Party created it and it is fairly corrupt, although I'm not sure what that has to do with any points I made? Very confusing post you made, friend.
Nice try, but you're tangling with the best when it comes to being smug in all the wrong ways, and your silly link to something that is not what I asked is quite telling. I'm well acquainted with Whiggism and the likes of those addressed in Edmund Burke's "An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs" in a historical sense, but neither has anything to do with the legitimacy of the movement you call New British Whiggism, which seems backed up by nothing more than a youtube interview with a conservative MEP. Perhaps there is some fledgling conservative movement which calls itself New Whiggism, but in making vague suggestions that American conservatives take notes out of the book of a movement which you yourself can do nothing but youtube-ify, it seems pretty clear that you have no idea what you are talking about or are simply looking to make yourself feel better about your fringe political identification.
Edit: Getting back on track, the Democratic Party is reacting predictably.
The institutional apparatus of the Democratic coalition is shifting gears as party strategists, outside groups and the people who finance campaigns prepare for what they believe is an inevitable 2016 presidential bid by Hillary Rodham Clinton.
As President Obama struggles with the debacle of his Affordable Care Act rollout and fights to regain his political standing, his party’s machinery is pivoting to the next White House campaign. Concrete steps are being taken to wage a general-election contest with Clinton as the presumed nominee.
All of this may seem premature, and in many ways it is. Obama’s presidency, weak or strong, has three years left. Clinton hasn’t said definitively whether she will run in 2016. If she does, she must prove herself as a candidate — and there are enough memories of the mistakes that she, and particularly her team, made when she ran in 2008 to make any Democrat nervous.
Still, the signs of activity, and the implications of those efforts, speak to Clinton’s unique position in the Democratic Party and to the understanding that the sophistication of modern politics — especially on the scale of a presidential campaign — requires far more lead time and preparation than it did a generation ago.
A formal Clinton campaign would lie well into the future, although informal discussions among key advisers have been going on for months. But the outside entities that are part of any presidential bid are making themselves into promoters and protectors of Candidate Clinton.
“There’s an amazing amount of outside activity, but more important, structural formation,” said one prominent Democratic strategist with a long history in presidential campaigns, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid . “There’s a real apparatus out there.”
On November 15 2013 02:36 xDaunt wrote: Why is there so much discussion about the esoteric around here when Obamacare is imploding in grand fashion on the world stage?
Concisely explain how it's 'imploding in grand fashion'
I sort of suspect you're slightly exaggerating
Huh? Have you not glanced at any remotely fair news site over the past couple weeks? Democrats are publicly shitting themselves over all their constituents losing their health care coverage as a result of Obamacare. You know that you are in deep shit when Bill Clinton comes out and basically calls you a liar (saying that Obama "should keep his word").
I read those stories too, lol (not nearly as dramatically as you describe), so I'm wondering, what's your understanding of exactly how it's going to 'implode on the worldstage in a huge way' or whatever, and could you explain it
Let's set the failure of the website aside for a moment. The real disaster for democrats is that the hidden costs of Obamacare are being laid bare for everyone to see. People who had good, legitimate health coverage are losing their plans by design under Obamacare. Obamacare only works if millions of healthy people are thrown off their current plans and forced into more the more expensive exchanges where they can subsidize care for others. As I mentioned previously, I'm one of those people, and there are millions more.
No social program has ever been a free lunch, and Obamacare isn't any different in that regard. What is different is that people are seeing the real costs of a policy like Obamacare in very stark, unmistakable terms that have real consequences for them personally beyond just paying a little more money in taxes. Various conservative commentators are talking about how this may be the "death knell" for liberalism. I'm not ready to go that far yet, but it is very clear that the repercussions will be fatal for many democrat politicians.
And the democrat politicians know it too. That is why all of the democrat senators who are up for reelection next year met with Obama privately last week on these very issues. That is why Diane Feinstein, a democrat senator in a solidly blue state, has demanded that legislation be passed allowing people to keep their current plans. That is why Bill Clinton came out and said the same thing, triggering a revolt among all elected democrats to fix Obamacare and allow people to keep their coverage.
Unfortunately for them, they aren't going to get that fix. Republicans won't give it to them. Frankly, it wouldn't matter if they did. The insurance plans that are being destroyed right now aren't coming back. The damage has been done. All that's left is for democrats to explain to their angry constituents why they had to peddle Obama's lie that people could keep their health plans if they wanted to. Republican politicians will just eat popcorn.
Oh, and does anyone think that tea party politicians who did everything possible to stop this from happening aren't going to benefit politically from this? Just some food for thought.
So yeah, this is a huge political story.
1) Republicans will pass the bill which would allow people to keep their current plan. This is a step in the right direction, and will also score points in undermining one of the key ingredients for the Obamacare to succeed.
2) Obama called the 2010 election a shell-lacking. If he thought that was shell-lacking, wait till what happens in 2014. Democrats are in a deep shit trouble right now... UNLESS the mainstream media bails them out again.
You think the failed Obamacare execution is just going to erase the memory of Republicans throwing a temper tantrum and messing with both our economy and the world economy as a whole during the next election cycle? Keep dreaming. That stunt is one of the most embarrassing and pathetic things ever seen in our legislative history, so it's not going to be as clear-cut as you think. Both sides have messed up and there's going to be voter backlash against both sides.
Oh, and stop with the complaining about the "mainstream media". The right has the abomination that is Fox News. You get no room to complain about "mainstream media bias".
People are going to remember that Republicans did it and now they are going to understand why republicans did it.
Yea, no... the millions of people severely affected by a completely pointless and childish government shutdown definitely won't forget or forgive...
On November 16 2013 13:13 paralleluniverse wrote: The whole policy cancellation issue is completely overblown.
The ACA has a grandfather clause that allows plans that don't meet the minimum requirements to stay temporarily, as long as they don't change too much, including not raising the price sufficiently above medical inflation. Therefore, the plans that are now being cancelled both do not meet the minimum requirements and have changed in a way that is not covered by the grandfather clause. Not meeting the minimum requirements alone is not grounds for being disallowed under the ACA.
Other than the first line, this is all true. However, what's lost here is how limited and toothless the grandfather clause is.
Obama did not promise to freeze the insurance market--no changes to any policies. Policies naturally get changed and cancelled all the time. What's different here is that these policies have changed so they're not really the same policy (otherwise they could have stayed under the grandfather clause), they're subpar policies that don't meet minimum standards, and there's a relentless war to destroy Obamacare.
The devil is in the details. There's a difference between meeting Obamacare's fairly arbitrary standards and being a good plan. Of course, there always inevitably will be problems when a bureaucracy forces a "one size fits all" approach. What's been particularly fun has been seeing liberal media figures complain about their canceled coverage that was perfectly fine from their perspective.
This is exactly the problem Democrats are facing today. They are unable to persuade people that their plan was cancelled because it was so crappy. Americans are not that dumb and know that it worked well for them, whatever demonization of the insurance companies goes on. Liberalism thrives on the negative impact of social programs being invisible on the personal level and spread amongst the many. This is one case where they aren't getting away with it. Ordinary Americans, some who believed Obama's promise to not raise middle class tax rates, see increased costs and frustrations that can be laid directly at the feet of Obama and congressional Democrats. That's why both of their poll numbers are falling so low.
If you had told me a year ago that Bill Clinton would lead the Democratic revolt against Obama and Obamacare, I'd say you were crazy. It's just his status as something of a revered figure within the Democratic party that made it stick.
Even if it takes a change to the law, the president should honor the commitment the federal government made to those people and let them keep what they got.
--President Clinton on Tuesday
Clinton is not someone the media can dismiss as a Tea Party extremist, but the man that brought sex appeal to old school progressivism. Obama only had a weak response: essentially he would legislate from the executive using selective enforcement. Insurers could continue to offer illegal plans, because he would make sure his agencies and the judicial wouldn't punish them for doing so. Maybe this time around, Democrats are ready to write a law that won't be just a presidential promise. A law that will guarantee them a defensible position next time they have to appeal to voters to re-elect.
40 House Democrats defected from the Obama line today and voted to change Obamacare from the House. I think the Democrats won't easily recover their credibility on changing the face of American medicine. Eventually, the bungling can't be explained away.
(Reuters) - Medical bills are behind more than 60 percent of U.S. personal bankruptcies, U.S. researchers reported on Thursday in a report they said demonstrates that healthcare reform is on the wrong track.
More than 75 percent of these bankrupt families had health insurance but still were overwhelmed by their medical debts, the team at Harvard Law School, Harvard Medical School and Ohio University reported in the American Journal of Medicine.
Many good arguments can be made about the problems with Obamacare, but saying that the pre-Obamacare system "worked well" for Americans isn't one of them.
Let's talk about good arguments. The one the Democrats were banking on was that the dropped plans weren't any good to begin with. That one blew up in their face. Americans were confronted with a more expensive plan with no choice to stay on their own plan. Their anger is now at the forefront and Democrats are left red-handed.
Two Problems with what you were saying. I'm not talking about the abstract notion of the system in general, in fact, employer based systems suffer from the problems with pre-existing conditions and that's currently enshrined in law with tax breaks on health insurance plans. We're talking about a universally bad step in the current system that is now under tremendous pressure to be reversed.
Second problem, I have no clue why you put "worked well" in quotes, since neither I nor anybody else you're quoting used that.
Nope. Cancelled plans are a good thing in states with exchanges running, for example in CA. This idea that there's no choice but to pay more isn't right. There's plenty of choices and low cost plans, with subsidies if you're poor, that meet the minimum requirements on the state exchanges that are running. The dropped plans weren't any good, because they didn't meet minimum requirements. So the problem isn't cancelled plans (which is good), it's that in combination with a screwed up federal website (which is bad), preventing people from seeing the alternative coverage options if they don't live in a state with their own working exchange.
Notice how Republicans offer no alternative to Obamacare. That's because any health reform that disallows insurers from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, or disallowing them to drop people when they get sick, the starting point for most health reform discussions, will look like Obamacare or European-style universal healthcare.
If insurers must insure everyone, then to prevent adverse selection from collapsing the health insurance market, an individual mandate is necessary. And then to prevent insurers making a loophole around the mandate with dirt cheap policies that offer essentially no protection, minimum requirements on health policies are necessary (which is what all the recent furor comes down to). Therefore, disallowing subpar policies is a necessary implication of letting everyone get insured, and not fucking over sick people by letting them die or go bankrupt.
So there are a few choices with healthcare: (a) you let poor people who can't afford healthcare go bankrupt or get no healthcare when they get very sick, or (b) you continue to require hospitals to treat people in the ER even if they can't afford healthcare, thereby socializing the costs of catastrophic care, or you do health reform which will either be (c) an insurance-based reform that must look like Obamacare as explained above, or (d) European-style universal healthcare, i.e. medicare for all.
On November 16 2013 13:13 paralleluniverse wrote: The whole policy cancellation issue is completely overblown.
The ACA has a grandfather clause that allows plans that don't meet the minimum requirements to stay temporarily, as long as they don't change too much, including not raising the price sufficiently above medical inflation. Therefore, the plans that are now being cancelled both do not meet the minimum requirements and have changed in a way that is not covered by the grandfather clause. Not meeting the minimum requirements alone is not grounds for being disallowed under the ACA.
Other than the first line, this is all true. However, what's lost here is how limited and toothless the grandfather clause is.
Obama did not promise to freeze the insurance market--no changes to any policies. Policies naturally get changed and cancelled all the time. What's different here is that these policies have changed so they're not really the same policy (otherwise they could have stayed under the grandfather clause), they're subpar policies that don't meet minimum standards, and there's a relentless war to destroy Obamacare.
The devil is in the details. There's a difference between meeting Obamacare's fairly arbitrary standards and being a good plan. Of course, there always inevitably will be problems when a bureaucracy forces a "one size fits all" approach. What's been particularly fun has been seeing liberal media figures complain about their canceled coverage that was perfectly fine from their perspective.
This is exactly the problem Democrats are facing today. They are unable to persuade people that their plan was cancelled because it was so crappy. Americans are not that dumb and know that it worked well for them, whatever demonization of the insurance companies goes on. Liberalism thrives on the negative impact of social programs being invisible on the personal level and spread amongst the many. This is one case where they aren't getting away with it. Ordinary Americans, some who believed Obama's promise to not raise middle class tax rates, see increased costs and frustrations that can be laid directly at the feet of Obama and congressional Democrats. That's why both of their poll numbers are falling so low.
If you had told me a year ago that Bill Clinton would lead the Democratic revolt against Obama and Obamacare, I'd say you were crazy. It's just his status as something of a revered figure within the Democratic party that made it stick.
Even if it takes a change to the law, the president should honor the commitment the federal government made to those people and let them keep what they got.
--President Clinton on Tuesday
Clinton is not someone the media can dismiss as a Tea Party extremist, but the man that brought sex appeal to old school progressivism. Obama only had a weak response: essentially he would legislate from the executive using selective enforcement. Insurers could continue to offer illegal plans, because he would make sure his agencies and the judicial wouldn't punish them for doing so. Maybe this time around, Democrats are ready to write a law that won't be just a presidential promise. A law that will guarantee them a defensible position next time they have to appeal to voters to re-elect.
40 House Democrats defected from the Obama line today and voted to change Obamacare from the House. I think the Democrats won't easily recover their credibility on changing the face of American medicine. Eventually, the bungling can't be explained away.
(Reuters) - Medical bills are behind more than 60 percent of U.S. personal bankruptcies, U.S. researchers reported on Thursday in a report they said demonstrates that healthcare reform is on the wrong track.
More than 75 percent of these bankrupt families had health insurance but still were overwhelmed by their medical debts, the team at Harvard Law School, Harvard Medical School and Ohio University reported in the American Journal of Medicine.
Many good arguments can be made about the problems with Obamacare, but saying that the pre-Obamacare system "worked well" for Americans isn't one of them.
Let's talk about good arguments. The one the Democrats were banking on was that the dropped plans weren't any good to begin with. That one blew up in their face. Americans were confronted with a more expensive plan with no choice to stay on their own plan. Their anger is now at the forefront and Democrats are left red-handed.
Two Problems with what you were saying. I'm not talking about the abstract notion of the system in general, in fact, employer based systems suffer from the problems with pre-existing conditions and that's currently enshrined in law with tax breaks on health insurance plans. We're talking about a universally bad step in the current system that is now under tremendous pressure to be reversed.
Second problem, I have no clue why you put "worked well" in quotes, since neither I nor anybody else you're quoting used that.
I think it's pretty clear that many of the dropped plans weren't any good to begin with. If medical bills are going to force people to go into bankruptcy anyway they would have been better off not wasting money on crappy health insurance in the first place. However, you may be right that the new plans won't be any better, or that they will be too expensive. The jury's still out; we'll have to see how things work out when/if they get the stupid website working. It is still possible that people with dropped plans will be able to get better and/or cheaper coverage than they could previously.
First problem - the current system is not "universally bad." At least some people with preexisting conditions will be able to afford health insurance for the first time in their lives. Again, healthcare.gov is a travesty, but it is probably fixable. Once it is up and running we may find that Americans are satisfied with the new options they have.
Second problem - in the post I quoted you said "Americans are not that dumb and know that it worked well for them, whatever demonization of the insurance companies goes on." Neither the shitty cheap plans nor the system in general worked well, hence the bankruptcy statistics from the article I posted.
Since they couldn't get the website working on time, we don't know yet whether Obamacare will end up making the system better, but I doubt it could make things any worse.
I would expect to see widespread satisfaction and no political pressure on Democrats, even blue state Democrats, had the only plans cancelled been the ones that served their customers poorly. The reverse is indeed true. Their failure with the website is nearly matched with their failure to collapse the current system in a manner where insurance agencies get all the blame. If you liked your current plan, too bad, it's not grandfathered in ... it's now illegal. If you liked your current doctor, sorry, you can't be assured he'll be in your new plan. The trade offered by Obamacare is no good.
On November 16 2013 13:13 paralleluniverse wrote: The whole policy cancellation issue is completely overblown.
The ACA has a grandfather clause that allows plans that don't meet the minimum requirements to stay temporarily, as long as they don't change too much, including not raising the price sufficiently above medical inflation. Therefore, the plans that are now being cancelled both do not meet the minimum requirements and have changed in a way that is not covered by the grandfather clause. Not meeting the minimum requirements alone is not grounds for being disallowed under the ACA.
Other than the first line, this is all true. However, what's lost here is how limited and toothless the grandfather clause is.
Obama did not promise to freeze the insurance market--no changes to any policies. Policies naturally get changed and cancelled all the time. What's different here is that these policies have changed so they're not really the same policy (otherwise they could have stayed under the grandfather clause), they're subpar policies that don't meet minimum standards, and there's a relentless war to destroy Obamacare.
The devil is in the details. There's a difference between meeting Obamacare's fairly arbitrary standards and being a good plan. Of course, there always inevitably will be problems when a bureaucracy forces a "one size fits all" approach. What's been particularly fun has been seeing liberal media figures complain about their canceled coverage that was perfectly fine from their perspective.
This is exactly the problem Democrats are facing today. They are unable to persuade people that their plan was cancelled because it was so crappy. Americans are not that dumb and know that it worked well for them, whatever demonization of the insurance companies goes on. Liberalism thrives on the negative impact of social programs being invisible on the personal level and spread amongst the many. This is one case where they aren't getting away with it. Ordinary Americans, some who believed Obama's promise to not raise middle class tax rates, see increased costs and frustrations that can be laid directly at the feet of Obama and congressional Democrats. That's why both of their poll numbers are falling so low.
If you had told me a year ago that Bill Clinton would lead the Democratic revolt against Obama and Obamacare, I'd say you were crazy. It's just his status as something of a revered figure within the Democratic party that made it stick.
Even if it takes a change to the law, the president should honor the commitment the federal government made to those people and let them keep what they got.
--President Clinton on Tuesday
Clinton is not someone the media can dismiss as a Tea Party extremist, but the man that brought sex appeal to old school progressivism. Obama only had a weak response: essentially he would legislate from the executive using selective enforcement. Insurers could continue to offer illegal plans, because he would make sure his agencies and the judicial wouldn't punish them for doing so. Maybe this time around, Democrats are ready to write a law that won't be just a presidential promise. A law that will guarantee them a defensible position next time they have to appeal to voters to re-elect.
40 House Democrats defected from the Obama line today and voted to change Obamacare from the House. I think the Democrats won't easily recover their credibility on changing the face of American medicine. Eventually, the bungling can't be explained away.
(Reuters) - Medical bills are behind more than 60 percent of U.S. personal bankruptcies, U.S. researchers reported on Thursday in a report they said demonstrates that healthcare reform is on the wrong track.
More than 75 percent of these bankrupt families had health insurance but still were overwhelmed by their medical debts, the team at Harvard Law School, Harvard Medical School and Ohio University reported in the American Journal of Medicine.
Many good arguments can be made about the problems with Obamacare, but saying that the pre-Obamacare system "worked well" for Americans isn't one of them.
Let's talk about good arguments. The one the Democrats were banking on was that the dropped plans weren't any good to begin with. That one blew up in their face. Americans were confronted with a more expensive plan with no choice to stay on their own plan. Their anger is now at the forefront and Democrats are left red-handed.
Two Problems with what you were saying. I'm not talking about the abstract notion of the system in general, in fact, employer based systems suffer from the problems with pre-existing conditions and that's currently enshrined in law with tax breaks on health insurance plans. We're talking about a universally bad step in the current system that is now under tremendous pressure to be reversed.
Second problem, I have no clue why you put "worked well" in quotes, since neither I nor anybody else you're quoting used that.
Nope. Cancelled plans are a good thing in states with exchanges running, for example in CA. This idea that there's no choice but to pay more isn't right. There's plenty of choices and low cost plans, with subsidies if you're poor, that meet the minimum requirements on the state exchanges that are running. The dropped plans weren't any good, because they didn't meet minimum requirements. So the problem isn't cancelled plans (which is good), it's that in combination with a screwed up federal website (which is bad), preventing people from seeing the alternative coverage options if they don't live in a state with their own working exchange.
Notice how Republicans offer no alternative to Obamacare. That's because any health reform that disallows insurers from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, or disallowing them to drop people when they get sick, the starting point for most health reform discussions, will look like Obamacare or European-style universal healthcare.
If insurers must insure everyone, then to prevent adverse selection from collapsing the health insurance market, an individual mandate is necessary. And then to prevent insurers making a loophole around the mandate with dirt cheap policies that offer essentially no protection, minimum requirements on health policies are necessary (which is what all the recent furor comes down to). Therefore, disallowing subpar policies is a necessary implication of letting everyone get insured, and not fucking over sick people by letting them die or go bankrupt.
So there are a few choices with healthcare: (a) you let poor people who can't afford healthcare go bankrupt or get no healthcare when they get very sick, or (b) you continue to require hospitals to treat people in the ER even if they can't afford healthcare, thereby socializing the costs of catastrophic care, or you do health reform which will either be (c) an insurance-based reform that must look like Obamacare as explained above, or (d) European-style universal healthcare, i.e. medicare for all.
You're dead wrong for the very reasons Obama insisted time and time again that if you liked you plan, you could keep your plan. These cancelled plans riled up the people that were used to the affordable costs and used to their doctors. Now they're told the new plans are more expensive and their doctor is not on it while the old plan is unavailable. It has been decreed by the central planners that you must cover this and that and the other thing if you are to offer health insurance, and the reaction is more high prices that aren't necessarily defrayed by these wonderful governmental subsidies.
With all the damage Obamacare has already done to American medicine, the alternative now is wholesale repeal. How about not forcing people onto more expensive plans and releasing a website they spent 3 years on and $500 million that's a piece of work? You can't have meaningful debate on reforming employer-based largely-untaxed health insurance when the Democratic Party and Obama are hard at work destroying all private insurance. Let's have healthcare assistance for the poor done right, and tax reform and regulatory overhauls. Let's not have a government bureaucrat sitting down at the table with you and your insurance provider telling you what you must purchase under the law. The promises that only bad plans are gone are ringing hollow no matter how much the lie is repeated.
EPT
