Nice Nivin Reference
âFree Hugsâ man in Times Square punches woman for not paying him
Clearly the âFree Hugsâ man is an off-duty NYPD officer.
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This.
The stories we read about medical bankruptcies are about people that HAD insurance! If your co-pay is 20% but your bills are in the 100s of 1000s⌠even if you had a good middle class job youâd be fucked.
(And before anyone goes there, yes we have medical bankruptcies in Canada too, but thats more about lost income than hospital bills, and on average the amounts we declare bankruptcy over $8-16K depending on demographics.)
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It is. Thatâs why Americans oppose gun control, so they can relieve their stress with mass shootings.
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Wrong.
Obama campaigned on universal healthcare in 2008. He tried to pass the public option Americaâs Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009. But he only had a majority of Congress supporting it, not the required supermajority.
What you describe is what came after, in late 2009 and 2010, once that public option battle was lost in mid-2009. Once it was clear that Democrats could never pass a public option by themselves.
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About what? My 80% number was actually a little conservative. As of this February, CDC says itâs actually more like 83.7% of adults insured, and the number is even higher for children. And yeah, not all those plans are great, but some are. I didnât say the system is perfectâin fact, I specifically said it has big problems. But it isnât true that everyone is one accident away from bankruptcy. My statement was factual.
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Oh, I am not arguing about his campaign (I agree with you there), I am arguing about what he did in office. I guess we disagree about what constitutes âlevel bestâ and âtried to passâ. 
From my position campaigning with other public and clinical health professionals, there was never any serious effort put by the administration towards a robust public option, but there were early administration explorations of a weak public option. His âmarket-basedâ rhetoric was present nearly from the get-go.
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Thereâs an out-of-pocket maximum for the year which is good. But again, if you and your wife make say $80,000/yr and youâre supporting a bunch of kids ⌠and youâre already stretching thin, having a $20,000 out of pocket maximum is enough to cause major financial trouble.
But ⌠to many Americans ⌠tough shit. Theyâd rather them go into bankruptcy and all that comes with it â which really just jacks up the premiums for everyone anyway.
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I think the original statement using everyone is to highlight that the middle and working classes are one accident away from bankruptcy. I know we have an 80/20 plan that would seriously bankrupt us if one of us had cancer or had an accident.
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The problem with your assertion is that health insurance in the US no longer inoculates against having to declare bankruptcy due to lack of coverage, even a little. So citing statistics regarding the number of people who have insurance does not prove your point. Search on âpeople with health insurance declaring bankruptcyâ and you will find plenty of recent articles. The middle class has been in decline for over a decade, and their health care benefits have been dwindling accordingly.
Remember how Walmart was recently shamed into providing health insurance to much its huge army of minimally paid employees? Take a look at what that coverage provides. According to Forbes, âmany thousands of full-time workers employed by the company could find that a single serious illness or hospitalization could break them financiallyâ.
I havenât been able to find out what percentage of people have minimal âcatastrophicâ insurance plans from a quick search, but I suspect itâs a large number.
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Nobody (except for people making money on it) think itâs a good system.
Obama stated flat-out that his goal was single-payer European-style healthcare, but when he realized Congress wouldnât even talk to him, he lowered his sights to Massachusetts-style Romneycare, in which everyone is required to be covered by health insurance, and constructing the law in a way that future leaders could build on it to lead us into true socialized medicine. Sadly, even that meager step is too liberal for the GOP, and Congress has been taking it apart ever since. American citizens donât get a choice here except to sigh sadly and wait.
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My take is that the republicans are dead set against âObamacareâ due to tremendous fear. If reasonably priced, effective healthcare became widely available, people would, at least theoretically, be grateful to the democrats for decades to come.
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So am I. He tried to pass a public option. It was a major battle. But in the end he just didnât have the supermajority needed. What you describe came after.
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That image should be using 
.
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Absolutely. Thatâs essentially their gameplan in general: to prevent any possible progress whatsoever that might help people, whether itâs healthcare, veteransâ benefits, equal pay for women, medical aid for 9/11 first responders, aid to victims of the water crisis in Flint Michigan, etc, in order to make Obama as ineffectual a president as possible. Their stated goal is to destroy his legacy by preventing anything whatsoever from getting done.
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Catastrophic plans, as explained to me, have fallen out of favor as by product of Obamacare. Those plans do not âcountâ in the federal governmentâs eyes under the ACA. I used to have one â it was cheap and served me well. I had the protection I needed, but I paid every time I went to a doctor. Now I have an Obamacare approved plan â that costs $500 more per month, and I still pay every time I go to a doctor. But ⌠my plan covers like 80 thinks that Obamacare mandated be covered â none of which I needâŚ
So ⌠guessing not many people are covered by catastrophic.
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Whatâs it like? Itâs like $800 for a bandage, a Tylenol, and a fifteen minute evaluation from a distracted and sleep-deprived nurse.
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