Omnibus GOP Primary ThreadFollow

Obamacare beats no care if you ask me.
You should still work towards a proper universal healthcare system though. If that means you lose the "freedom" to choose whether you'll live or die when you get seriously ill then so be it.

No, it's about giving everybody access to basic preventative health care. The specifics about how to go about this are the current problem.

Relatively speaking, right?

Seeing as this is the Asylum.

So the GOP isn't going to offer up a solution? Or are they happy with the current system?

Okay lets say I believe the current system is bad, but I'm not really sold on Obamacare. I see it as a complicated band-aid solution and would love an alternative other than just undoing everything. While I may not be totally into the new system, there are things about it that seem like good ideas, and I don't just want to undo some of the provisions.

I guess In the end really I can't really see myself voting for someone who doesn't at least try to address the healthcare problem, and would love to look at some of the GOP alternatives when making my decision come November.

Edited, Mar 28th 2012 2:44pm by someproteinguy

Well...



Good bet it's exaggerated.



Note that you used the correct term here, but the conclusions (in the article) don't. Health care, is not synonymous with health insurance. At the center of the issue is whether insurance is the best method to deliver the exact sort of regular treatment/care which this study looked at.



This is exactly the sort of thing folks like me have been predicting and arguing about as an effect of pushing our regular care under the insurance umbrella (not just public hospitals though). The argument is that because our government has pushed health care into a "comprehensive insurance coverage" model, it has priced regular care out of the range of the uninsured pocket books. It has destroyed the family doctor model, and the small private practice. This in turn forces doctors to work as part of hospitals and larger health care centers, with all the overhead and bureaucracy that entails, which in turn drives prices up more. And over time, only those being funded via overpriced insurance and expensive grants can keep their doors open.

You don't need to go to a health care center with a large number of the modern equivalent of the "machine that goes ping" in them to be diagnosed and treated for diabetes (and get a prescription). Yet, that is increasingly the only option, and it's increasingly expensive. Using insurance for comprehensive care is just plain the wrong approach. But it's an approach that the same folks arguing for universal health care have pushed us into "to move us in the direction of a universal health care system". One step leads to the other.




I disagree with both of those ideas. In the first case, who gets to decide what is stupid? How about instead of the government making that determination for us, we allow the real world to do it naturally? Doesn't cost a penny either. Similarly, the degree to which a government is responsible for its citizens safety and health is directly proportional to the degree to which that government will impose authority over the choices and actions of its citizens on the grounds that it's fulfilling that responsibility.

Responsibility and authority come hand in hand. We cannot hold someone (or the government in this case) responsible for something they have no authority to control, so we should expect that government control must follow any degree of government responsibility. We should absolutely apply strict limits to what the government responsibility is, and thus its authority, else we give over our freedoms to the government.

And yet, this hasn't happened in countries with universal healthcare and I'm pretty damn sure I pay less for my health insurance than you do. Oh and for the record, pretty much everyone in this country has a doctor available within 5 miles. Just about every village has a doctor's office.

Edit: Also notice how this was happening BEFORE obamacare?

I consider not being insured stupid and people not being insured costs you tons of money because 911 can hardly work on a pre-paid basis and those who are uninsured are more likely to make use of it and won't pay for it (because, well, they can't).

So yeah, pretty much the only "freedom" you lose is the choice to get health insurance or not. @#%^ that bit of "freedom" if losing it means healthier citizens. Not to mention that more healthy citizens means more tax revenue to help pay for those who otherwise couldn't afford insurance.

Edited, Mar 29th 2012 12:59am by Aethien

'Obamacare' got me covered under my parents' plan for an extra year, so I've got no complaints with it.

The GOP put out a few half-assed proposals during the debate. By "half-assed" I mean they were just fact sheet type things with a few bullet points, not fleshed out plans. They largely boiled down to "Deregulate everything, turn any federal programs into block grants, tort reform".

More telling than their scramble to create a counter-proposal during the debate was their years of silence on the issue when they were actually in power and could have done something about it. Simply put, health care hasn't been a priority for Republicans.

Edit: They had a single larger plan at one point. I'm too uninterested to go digging it up but this was my response to it in 2009:

Edited, Mar 29th 2012 9:14am by Jophiel

Going to the doctor should be as simple as what I did this morning.

At 8AM I called my doctor's office, said "Can you see me today?" and they said "Sure if you can be here by 9:45 AM."

At 9:20, I drove fifteen minutes to the office, and was seen by 9:50 AM.

My doctor gave me a good once over, determined it was a return of the nasty pharyngitis and bronchitis from two months ago, and wrote me a handful of prescriptions for pills and a fancy cough syrup. The syrup and one of the pills was optional; the other was a Z-pak to clean out the bacteria I was coughing up.

By 10:15 AM I was out the door. My copay was $15. (My prescriptions, for all three, were $45, but the copay on the only "required" one was just $10.)

All this was possible because we actually have pretty damn good insurance, as paid for by the state since my husband is a professor.

Why can't everyone have that kind of insurance, such that when they get sick they can go to the doctor to make sure it isn't serious - and if it is serious, get further treatment as necessary?

Why is this such a bad thing?

So, gbaji's "ideal" healthcare should apparently be for-profit social security. You pay into when you're young, reap the benefits when you've earned due, and all the while people are skimming off the top while the people who didn't pay in while they were young die because they've always been poor. The American dream.

Routine visits to the doctor should not involve insurance. Insurance is terrible when applied to a predictable every day occurrence. Insurance works when you're insuring against something that is rare, but for an every day visit to the doctor all it's doing is making the entire system more expensive.

As long as insurance companies are covering that sort of thing though, you need to make sure everyone can get access.

Would it be possible for me to get insurance that only covered unexpected medical issues in the states? I kind of doubt it.

Edited, Mar 29th 2012 3:25pm by Xsarus

Obamacare had very little to do with improving your health care. It was largely implemented to improve access to health care for those unable to attain health care on their own. Be it due to low income, lack of income, lack of clean health (pre existing conditions). In that regard it is most certainly better, and guess what, it doesn't change what was available under the previous system. You can still go get private insurance, which may or may not offer more coverage than the basic public service.

Also your analogy is ******* stupid. If you don't like Big Macs or **** Sandwhiches go out and get something else for lunch. Obamacare isn't forcing you on to a government system, you can still go out and buy whichever healthcare package you deem reasonable, and said package is still acceptable.