I don’t see why this would be the one thing Mr. American Slice would be able to do right but in the unlikely event he does …
Yes and I’ll even wait a full six months after it passes to start egging on conservative friends and family about how Trump passed the socialized healthcare Obama wanted but they wouldn’t let him. I think it’s a fair compromise. 
For sure, since Turmp has zero interest in actually doing anything, there’ll be a whole swarm of assholes running their own schemes in that vacuum. But I’m not sure there’ll be chief asshole, or that it’ll be Pence, because I don’t think Turmp will acknowledge that anyone apart from himself is in charge.
With Bush, you at least got the sense that there was an organised cabal pulling the strings. With Turmp, the danger is that he will sometimes make decisions on his own, and they will be random shitty decisions, and his courtiers will just execute them and then get back to their private agendas. No one’s signed on to the Turmp clusterfuck thinking “I want to help build a winning team around this great man”. They’re thinking “this is my chance to loot the first-class cabins before the ship goes down”.
I think it’s safe to assume based on prior statements that Trump does not have even a loose grasp of basic principles of governance and bases his model of reality on:
a) whatever movies and TV shows he’s seen
b) a rejection of whatever CNN says or what he’s heard was reported in the NYT (can’t expect him to read)
I do agree, but it was a leap forward for the millions of uninsured Americans.
It’s like people have forgotten the market crash of 2008 already. Lots of people lost their retirement savings in 2008, which kind of killed the GOP’s tendency to talk about privatizing Social Security, but I guess they figure enough time has passed that they can try similar tactics again.
Biggest problem with Health Savings Accounts are you have to have money to put into them - something that most poor people distinctively lack.
No, the issue is exactly that the current structure of incentives rewards short-termist greed. It would take relatively little to change that; but it won’t happen, not until we’ve crashed again and again and again… they’ll tell us the problem is poor people not paying their debts, or tulips going out of fashion, or some other bullshit.
Yes, that is a problem, but totally unseen to them. They are not erroneously thinking “poor people will put aside money”. They are thinking “some people out there have some money, and this way we can get it”.
I had an emergency evac from the bush a few months ago; it took the crews of three bushfire trucks as well as the ambulance paramedics to pull me out.
It happened at work, so my employer covered the cost, but it was only $350 anyway.
A few years ago, I had a week-long hospital stay for a life-threatening injury, due to something I’d done that was both stupid and illegal. Cost to me: $0.
On the bright side that would mean people actually have health insurance so win … ish?
The R party have been post-politics since Mr. Turtle’s lege laid out the (failed? or just delayed?) strategy for denying Obama re-election. Since 2010 when gerrymandering was made a 50-state strategy, politics for the Rs has only been cover. Only cover.
Relabeled ACA is off the table for the lege. With a thieving, dying, billiarsepirant as POTUS with a passel of Juniors and grandkids on the way (to furthur shove the Drumpf name down the neck of the future), whatever motive the Resident Rump has will not be motivated by rati-… er, polls.
As ObamaCare is more or less rebranded RomneyCare, probably not a lot.
True, it is called insurance (referring to German system here).
But it is, in effect a single payer (tax payer system). It is paid for through cumpulsory payments by employee / employer. There is no way to get out of these payments.
Unless you are wealthy enough to pay for private insurance at which point you are exempt . And you loose all entitlement to mandatory cover. To such an extend that if you deliver a baby as a private patient and the baby has a disability you are required to pay for private health insurance for the child. Until you become a benefit recipient, at which point the state jumps in. The idea is that you have opted out of the communal risk pool and the community shouldn’t be required to pick up the pieces when things go wrong for you. After all you were unwilling to share the risk in the first place. Private health insurance is a status symbol in Germany, just as private education is in the UK.
The important point here is, that the German welfare system is based on the solidarity principle (going back to the 19th century labour movement) which following the ACA discussion is an alien concept to the GOP.
Actually, if you look back to the origins of health insurance in the US, it was set up on what could be called socialist principles post WW2.
Kenneth Arrow whose Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care (1963), is considered the founding document of Health Economics is very enlightened on the limitations associated with health insurance and he is very clear on the need for strong regulation to mitigate these. Arrow, a Noble Price winning Economist never said anything of substance about healthcare again. It became too contentious a territory.
Subsequently, the discussion on healthcare was hijacked by neoliberal think tanks in the general drive to ‘economise’ everything i.e. break it down into it smallest economic units.
By 1974 the discussion had significantly shifted from mitigating risk to quasi darwinian selection as [V Fuchs poignantly entitled Who Shall Live?] (http://garfield.library.upenn.edu/classics1988/A1988M686700001.pdf) suggests. [M Gossman on the Concept of Health Capital (1972)] (http://economics.sas.upenn.edu/~hfang/teaching/socialinsurance/readings/Grossman72(3.1).pdf) is even more depressing.
All under the radar of the the public, who were not that bothered, after all, they mostly remained in reliable employment (consequently with reliable insurance cover). HRCs efforts in 1992 should be considered in this context.
In my mind the public debate on healthcare is an instructive case study of the consorted (and depressingly successful) effort of neocons to take over the world.
We need to learn from them. There is something about overtone window in there. The text on Health Capital reads like something out of a horror book. My favourite 
quote:
Death occurs when the stock falls below a certain level, and one of the novel features of the model is that individuals “choose” their length of life.
I did ask myself whether Grossman has had any actual experience of life or death, to write something so stupid.
Also, healthcare costs are so out of control that regular Americans can never save enough money in an HSA to make it a viable option.
How long would it take to save $10,000 in an HSA? One year? Two years? A decade? That’s what one rabies vaccine costs, or a few nights in the hospital.
Unless someone tackles the actual costs of healthcare in this country, none of this matters.
I agree with this wholeheartedly. This is exactly what I think is happening.
“Industrialized Colonoscopy” isn’t something I would want to sign up for. 
I’d recommend keeping the Toyota instead.
Actually, it goes back further than that:
I usually stay out of discussions like this, because I sound insufferably smug, but come on, America. You’re better than this.
Here are the costs in Ontario:
tl;dr
Cost of hospital transfer: $0
Cost of ambulance to hospital:
$45 for those covered by the provincial plan (OHIP).
$240 for those not covered by OHIP.
That’s anywhere in Ontario, which is considerably bigger than Texas.
When my wife fainted and struck her head, the ambulance cost us $45. The hospital visit, examination, tests, x-rays etc. cost nothing.
Here’s an article complaining about the exorbitant costs of ambulances:
I just can’t fathom the kind of thinking that sees treating sick people as a business opportunity.
Either he misunderstands the limits of executive power or he understands them better than most legal scholars do. He either thinks, “I can do anything” (which is wrong) or “I can do anything a long as they let me get away with it” (which is right). My guess is that this will resemble the Rob Ford years in Toronto - at the beginning Congress will be too cowed to do anything about him and will just do what they are told. Maybe three years he’ll be mired in scandal and they’ll grow a backbone (or the Republicans will lose the midterms and be saved from having to stand up to him).
