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Read the rules in the OP before posting, please.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 July 01 2017 09:09 Buckyman wrote:
I blame the Democrats on health care and health insurance only because the Republicans had no say in the matter until this year. I'm not thrilled with how the Republicans have handled it either.
Judging the Republicans by the same standard, they're apathetic rather than hypocritical.
factually false; the republicans had tons of say in the matter.
and claiming malice is absurd at any rate.
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On July 01 2017 09:09 Buckyman wrote:Show nested quote +On July 01 2017 09:05 zlefin wrote:
it's a claim clearly based on hate and bias, rather than a careful study. the way you phrase it is filled with venom. it's easy to see hwat you want to see; it's far harder to carefully assess whether it's actually correct or not.
the actual motivations are better in most of the cases, and fairly understandable. (and at any rate, the republicans are clearly no better)
and you've still got no real case for blaming the dems over the republicans. I blame the Democrats on health care and health insurance only because the Republicans had no say in the matter until this year. I'm not thrilled with how the Republicans have handled it either. Judging the Republicans by the same standard, they're apathetic rather than malicious.
Pretty sure they could have join in during the 2008-2010 congress. They decided to tow the party line and run against the bill in 2010.
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Well my state isn't part o that list, I'm screwed.
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On July 01 2017 09:08 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On July 01 2017 09:03 Buckyman wrote:On July 01 2017 08:55 Gorsameth wrote:
4) Larger risk pool = lower price, which is what the mandate is for. I believe this is exactly wrong for health care. Health care is astronomically expensive right now because of too much insurance. Within an insurance pool this principle holds, but only as long as no one pool is large enough to trigger the 'too much insurance' problem. We currently have at least three different pools that are large enough to each force the costs significantly upwards. So the increased costs more than offset the benefits from a larger pool.
5) Money has to come from somewhere. Where would you like to money to pay for your healthcare to come from? Since you said you cant afford it yourself.
I could afford it before the premiums started doubling repeatedly under Obamacare. Besides, it's not like America spends more money on health care for rich people than poor people. Right, the mythical "America" problem. Because every other first would country doesn't seem to suffer from this 'to much healthcare' issue. And right, you had one of those plans that didn't actually cover anything and could dump you the moment you got seriously ill. Well be glad that never happened.
It is not too much insurance that is the problem, it is that you are RELYING ON PRIVATE HEALTH INSURANCE in the first place. The whole concept is a bloodsucking monstrosity, consuming everything in its path. Do you really think insurance companies want to be nice, and would bother to make anything cheaper than a state run "free healthcare for all" principle would? Hell no! You are inserting parasites into your healtcare chain. Then, private hospitals and pharma companies follow their lead, and make sure you get an overblown, ineffective and expensive HC sector, that is almost impossible to scale down.
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United States24761 Posts
To be fair, the public options aren't sunshine and rainbows either. I currently get active duty tricare which means my health coverage is free and not private. The other morning I had symptoms of strep throat so I called the 'nurseline' to receive direction regarding what action to take. They recommended I go see a medical provider (not surprising) but that means I need to ride a crowded train in rush hour 60 minutes each way to get to the clinic, while I'm potentially sick and contagious.
I was feeling well enough I even offered to drive my car to another medical facility that would be quicker and wouldn't involve being in a crowded space, and they flatly refused because it wasn't my designated facility... until they tried to make me an appointment at my home facility and there "weren't any appointments available that day." So I went to option B which was an emergency room (because god forbid I get clearance to go to an urgent care center) and I had to wait three hours. Finally I see the doctor (not sure she was actually a doctor), they take a throat swab, and I'm evaluated.
Four days after that evaluation, I still had not heard back the results of the throat culture (nor an x-ray from like three weeks ago, but I digress) so I try to get in touch with my 'home' clinic again. This requires me to use an online messaging system similar to the TL pm system where I communicate with a nurse who conveys my questions to my primary care physician. The nurse first instructs me to contact the practitioner who originally saw me for my strep symptoms, even though it was an ER doctor at a facility that normally won't even accept my calls because it is not my 'home' facility. After I explain that, the nurse provides me with the results (positive for strep but fortunately negative for group A) and actual medical direction.
In this particular instance I think I would have preferred to the private option.
+ Show Spoiler +I'm not actually arguing for status quo in the US or anything but let's be honest about what we are aiming for... it's far from perfect.
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that's not so much an issue of public vs private; but of stupid bureaucracy, which is admittedly more common in public, but still happens a fair bit in private.
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States really don't like it when the feds try to oversee or interfere in any way with their election process.
edit: of course the liberal states go with "omg voter suppression," the usual ratcheting up to 11, but used to that from them by now.
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in fairness; voter suppression is an actual thing Republicans do at times; and this new thing looks designed for voter suppression.
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Good, now there's no one left to get in Trump's way!
Pesky science.
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I suppose getting rid of white house staffers is one way to cut the budget. Now if only Congress got rid of the Awan brothers...
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I would put nothing past Bannon. Or any of those people. They are all hungry enough and stupid enough to do it.
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On July 01 2017 07:51 NewSunshine wrote:Show nested quote +On July 01 2017 07:35 Danglars wrote:On July 01 2017 07:06 WolfintheSheep wrote:
Look everyone, Danglars is neither agreeing nor disagreeing with what you're saying the health care changes will result in.
He doesn't like the language you are using to describe those changes, and would like you to frame it in vocabulary that will appeal to his sensibilities. Clearly another supporter of literal slavery. You do know we fought a civil war over that, right? Words matter. You know the concept behind the ACA is pretty much the same as the single-payer system that the rest of the civilized world uses to successfully give their populace healthcare, and that you dismiss the idea as "wealth transfer"? I've heard that term before plenty of times by ignorant folk who don't understand how a society works. Fundamentally that's what taxes are, but taxes exist for a reason. I would gladly pay an upped tax out of my check if it meant health insurance was a thing of the past. That doesn't make me a "slave to the infirm". If you want to say words matter, try choosing words that aren't blatantly ignorant.
The ACA has some very burdensome regulations on what qualifies as private insurance and how government should be involved in that system. That concept is about as far from single payer as you can get. If you want to go for the line that the concept of the ACA is fucking up private insurance to pave the way for single payer, I probably already agree with you.
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On July 01 2017 08:02 Gorsameth wrote:
How the fuck did we jump from healthcare to slavery. You seriously lost me where that one came from...
Danglers, you want people to be able to afford healthcare, guess what? So do the Democrats. You could have had single payer, you could have had the government from a strong position as the sole insurer of all Americans tell the pharmaceuticals and the Hospitals to drive down costs.
All it took was for some Republicans to reach across the isle and declare support for it when the Democrats were trying to find the votes for it.
Instead it was 'nothing Obama wants can pass' and so we end up here. Where the Democrats did the best they could, which wasn't good enough. And now the Republicans want to tear it all down and leave everyone fucked.
I know you don't like the Democrats, and you say you don't like the Republicans either but for fuck sake at least the Democrats tried to do something.
Every other first world nation has managed to get itself a healthcare system. Their not all perfect, they have their issues but they exist and prices are a hell of a lot lower here as a result.
Stop putting your head in the sand and pretending America has to be special. The only thing your country is being special in, is being more stupid the everybody else.
WolfintheSheep, a known advocate for slavery, wanted to say that the real issue is my sensibilities about language. If you cede the ground about how things are characterized, no intelligent debate is possible.
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On July 01 2017 08:23 Mercy13 wrote:Show nested quote +On July 01 2017 07:19 Danglars wrote:On July 01 2017 06:55 Mercy13 wrote:On July 01 2017 06:15 Danglars wrote:On July 01 2017 03:34 Mercy13 wrote:On July 01 2017 02:22 Danglars wrote:On July 01 2017 01:58 Mercy13 wrote:On July 01 2017 01:26 Danglars wrote:On July 01 2017 01:13 TheTenthDoc wrote:On July 01 2017 01:10 Danglars wrote:
[quote]
You don't find it even a little funny that a full repeal vs a very expensive Obamacare 2.0 gets the same coverage score? I don't even like the bill and was rolling my eyes. To play off your post, you don't have to act like a humorlous bore even if it's politics. Full repeal vs. replacement doesn't matter when they all delete the Medicaid insurance expansion in one way or another. Everything else is a drop in the bucket compared to that. If anything, this just shows that none of their "2.0s" are actually designed to increase coverage in a meaningful way. Which is almost certainly the case since the authors of these bills don't care about the coverage numbers at all. When you consider that health outcomes for people on Medicaid are provably no better than the uninsured, the value of coverage numbers related to expanded Medicaid coverage decays massively. And making insurance shittier for all makes nothing matter on a wide variety of fronts. Congratulations, you're covered, you don't qualify for subsidies, you're paying almost full price for your medication, and your plans more than twice as expensive with more than double the deductible! Join our statistic of coverage successes! If you're referring to the Oregon study, you have to wildly misinterpret it's results to reach that conclusion. Is the expansion the crucial measure saving millions from death? I wouldn't need to cite the study if the rhetoric wasn't already at the level of Medicaid expansion acting like the divine intervention of God. Those despicable individuals whose tweets several cited a few pages back remind me how detached the debate has become from solid grounding in the federal programs, the ACA changes, and the bills under consideration in the House (formerly) and Senate. Are you referring to the Oregon study? If so I'm happy to cite it. It had it's limitations, but still reached some interesting conclusions: The Oregon Experiment — Effects of Medicaid on Clinical OutcomesMedicaid coverage did not have a significant effect on measures of blood pressure, cholesterol, or glycated hemoglobin. I assume this is what you're referring to when you say that access to Medicaid has been proven to not improve health outcomes. As you are probably well-aware, these three measures are not the only way to measure health outcomes. It should be noted that the sample size of the study was too small to look at morbidity or cancer treatment, among other things. The study did find that access to Medicaid increased the percentage of people who reported that their health had improved over the previous year, and reduced financial hardship from catastrophic medical expenses. Keeping in mind that this study had a small sample size and was limited to one state, it is totally reasonable to have a discussion around it about whether the amount we spend on Medicaid is worth the identified benefits. It would also be great to discuss improvements which can be made to Medicaid so that the treatments provided do a better job of treating blood pressure, cholesterol, etc. However the current debate isn't about the best way to provide healthcare to poor people. The current debate is over whether a tax cut for rich people should be paid for by taking health coverage away from millions of poor people. Conservatives supporting the healthcare bill (I know you're not in this group) don't give a shit about health outcomes. Oh, is that the status of the current debate? Tax cuts for rich people should be paid by taking away health coverage from millions of poor people? I almost took you seriously. But if that's your game, the current debate is on making healthy people the slaves of the poor and infirm, and crashing the insurance markets while trying to dodge the blame. If you want to up it to Warren/Clinton/Sanders heights, you can add on making forcing free citizens to pay for the massacre of innocent women and children. I'm a little tired of the policy as atrocity game, but if you want everyone to emerge callous and flip it around every time, you're doing an excellent job. I'd be happy to revisit and invest the time necessary into these long back and forths when Congress comes back from recess and the discourse is less reminiscent of Calling your political opponents kulaks. I'm already mad enough that I'll probably be forced to vote Trump again if this is the opposition's stance. I'm genuinely confused about what you think the purpose of the bill is if not to cut taxes for rich people... Specifically the taxes in the ACA which were designed to pay for the Medicaid expansion exchange subsidies. If they left those taxes in place there's all kinds of things they could do to reform the healthcare system in a more conservative direction that would arguably be better than the status quo. Unfortunately the goal of this effort appears to be to cut taxes, not to improve or even reform the healthcare system in a conservative direction. It's keeping the basic structure of the ACA in place, while removing hundreds of billions of dollars from the system. I don't see how anyone could argue in good faith that this approach will lead to improvements over the status quo. Color me confused that you can call your approach genuine. I'm genuinely impressed ACA wants to wealth transfer from healthy to sick and poor, Senate wants to fund from more deficit spending. It fixes nothing and does a lot of kicking the can to the states. Obamacare needs a fix to put a stop to millions of Americans that cannot afford (and forbidden to purchase) health insurance that works for their families. It's got very little support. Status quo is simply untenable. + Show Spoiler +Bankrupting the country is also not the way out. Entitlement spending left unfixed consumes the federal budget in timespans that make climate alarmists do a double take. But I mean if you're all about status quo and fixes to a bill that broke the system are just cover for policies that benefit the 1%, we should probably just repeal it now and replace with jack shit because the debates over. I'm confused about what you're trying to argue. I was talking about the Senate bill which appears to be primarily motivated by a desire to cut taxes, rather than a desire to improve the healthcare system. You seem to agree that it's a shitty bill, but you disagree that it cuts taxes primarily on wealthy people? Or do you just think that cutting taxes for wealthy people is only incidental to the goals of the bill? If so, what do you think those goals are? Do you think this is primarily a deficit reduction bill rather than a healthcare bill? I totally agree the ACA needs fixed. I fail to see how the Senate or House bills currently being considered accomplish this however. You probably think that allowing the states to waive essential benefits and pre-existing condition coverage is a step in the right direction, but even assuming that's the case any marginal improvement from those changes would be wiped out by the increased costs to consumers these bills would cause.
The sincere desire of the Senate bill is to fund Obamacare from deficit spending, and leave the repeal of its Medicaid cuts to 2020 when Democrats take power. The second and important part is making States responsible for fixing Obamacare's health insurance destroying provisions, which is a nice tack to Federalism, but wholly insufficient solution to the federal government's destructive expansion into the industry. It fails on all counts. Saying its some kind of tax cut funded by poor people is Breitbart-level.
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On July 01 2017 08:33 Plansix wrote:Show nested quote +On July 01 2017 07:41 Danglars wrote:On July 01 2017 07:22 Plansix wrote:
Why does entitlement reform always come with cutting entitlements and the taxes that fund them? It would be like if I was going balance my budget, but also not buy cloths any more because I have enough for the rest of my life. They bankrupt the country and you get no money to spend on anything if left untouched. One hundred trillion in unfunded liabilities is where these stand; that's a whole lotta rich people you don't have sitting around to fleece. And you accuse people of hysterical language and partisan dialog.
The federal debt is a real and persistent threat as long as money doesn't grow on trees. It's pretty anti-science to want attention to global warming and ignore the costs associated with growth in entitlement spending.
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EPT
