ACA vs ObamacareFollow

Profit in the system would be my guess.

The big argument I always hear about US health care and their aversion (phobia really) to public health care is that the private sector is more efficient and they don't want the big bad government telling them what to do. Competition is supposed to be some magical thing that will keep health care costs low blah blah blah.

The thing is none of that applies to health care because health care is not an optional kind of thing. You can't tell the hospital not to fix your broken leg because you don't like their price and are going to shop around. ALL the private sector does in health care is add profit margins. Health care has to be strongly regulated anywhere you go because it's a life or death industry so the private sector is going to be just as inefficient as the public sector. Public sector control also means the care you get is actually care, not a sales pitch.

Being a developed nation the US isn't about to let people die in the streets so you end up paying for everyone's health care anyway, you just do it at an inflated rate due to private sector involvement and the need for emergency services because the poor people couldn't pay for preventative care.

I just don't get why you wouldn't want universal health care, you're not going to let sick people die in the end so why have some ridiculous convoluted system of private insurance companies taking an extra piece of an already expensive pie? I mean really, you're paying monthly premiums for a service you may or may not use just in case you need it TO PREVENT YOURSELF FROM DYING everyone needs it regardless of economic class and it can only be provided by professionals so give it to everyone because you're going to give it to the people who can't afford it anyway, no brainer.

The only folks against it are those who stand to profit from the status quo and those who have zero knowledge of the industry or the economics, but will believe anything the [insert political affiliation] media wants them to believe. People like Gbaji will argue at great lengths about things they cannot possibly understand because... (wait for it...) that's what they were told, and they have no other comprehensible frame of reference.

Ya, last couple years...

I started working here in 2003, shortly after graduating High School. Back then premiums for the health insurance plan were rising. In preparation for Obamacare, I'm sure.

Is that were the true objective then Obamacare would only mandate life or death medical care (ok. And broken legs and other kinds of injury based stuff). It's a bait and switch argument. You scare people by talking about "life and death", but then actually push for relatively unrelated coverage. Care to explain how birth control is a non optional "life and death" medical need? The whole life and death thing is the boogieman used to scare people into allowing the government to do far more than just make sure they don't die, or suffer a broken leg without medical care.



That's complete BS. And it's a parrot of the same fearmongering I was just talking about. We already didn't let people die on the streets. So no need for a change in that regard. The problem is not the cost of emergency life saving care. That has never been the problem here. The problem is the increasing cost of optional medical care and procedures. We can debate endlessly why this is the case, but if it really was about people showing up at emergency rooms for health care which could have been avoided if only we'd provided them with some kind of magical preventative care (exactly how many emergency room visits do you think would be avoided with that btw?) we'd save billions of dollars!

It's just not true. The math doesn't add up at all.



The ACA makes the process of preventing people from dying vastly more convoluted and expensive than it was before. Actually, it arguably doesn't do a single thing in that regard (which is why it's so amusing that this is what you brought up). What it does do is create another layer of cost. Seriously. That's it. I fully admit that I'm opposed this socialized medicine for purely ideological reasons, and if Obamacare even at least represented a functional form of socialized medicine we could debate the issue on those ideological grounds. But that's simply not the case. Obamacare simply takes the existing health care system, with all its flaws and costs, and just mandates that we use that same system to cover more things and mandates that more people buy the result.

The insurance industry is not changed. The health care providers are not changed. The health care plans are not changed. The method of buying health care isn't changed (other than in purely cosmetic ways and with an additional layer of government involved for some people). All Obamacare does is mandate what the insurers must cover and requires that everyone must purchase the resulting insurance. Period. Obamacare is the equivalent of reforming an auto industry that's cranking out poor quality cars at too high a price by passing a law requiring everyone to buy those cars and justifying it with the bizarre notion that if more people buy the cars, then the price for each car will go down.




Sure. Then take everything out which isn't directly involved in preventing me from dying.

Let's stop lying about what's really at stake here. It's not about me paying a monthly premium for a service I may or may not need just in case I need it to prevent myself from dying. It's about forcing me to pay a monthly premium for a service I don't need at all, so that other people can afford services that they want. This is not about preventing people from dying. If you honestly think that, then it's another indication of how you've been lied to.

It's used to treat medical issues like endometriosis and menorrhagia, the latter of which I have. Without it, I'd run so low on iron I'd risk hospitalization (this happened to me before I was diagnosed) and yes, eventually death from anemia.

Next?

The one that keeps showing up in the Weekly World News, maybe.

That's a pretty sharp jump between 2001 and 2004 -- Any chance that Bush guy was an Islamonazisocialist and the insurance companies all knew it?

Apparently we just kind of ignore things that happened in and around 2004 and any cause and effect associated with that time frame.

I've been doing that for awhile now with Gbaji's posts, I've just been lazy in the last couple of posts. When you address every point by point as they come as opposed to the whole post, you end up repeating yourself a lot, hence my statement "read above". Ideally, I place all of his related comments into one quoted box, then spoiler tag it.