Yeah, and rolling coal!
I am assuming that if they had just called it Romneycare, that would have quashed a bunch of objections.
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It also depends a lot on where you are.
Many of the implementation details of the insurance exchanges were left up to the states. Some states royally fucked it up. Where I live, it is a modest improvement over how things worked before.
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My dream is Trump ending up in Guantanamo when it’s confirmed that he’s a Russian asset.
The Siberian Candidate.
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Hmm… I’d have said “mud”, but good point.
(and by that I mean “feces”)
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It also worked quite a lot worse if the medicaid expansion was refused, which is a lot of red states.
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@RexTillerson is a parody account. I don’t believe he has an actual Twitter presence (or if he does it’s on the down low).
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The Manchildian Candidate
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As for the Republican opposition, I think a lot of it is because Obamacare busts one of their core articles of faith: that the free market always and everywhere is better than the government. And once people internalize the idea that they can have affordable access to health care, they will never go back on that, which is yet another nail in the coffin of the “small government” fantasies.
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And it is Zulu Time.
No shit.
By the standards of any country with a real public health system, the ACA was a diabolical shitshow aimed at maximising insurance industry profits while maintaining a bare minimum standard of coverage for the poor.
If you tried to transform Australian Medicare into an Obamacare clone, there would be rioting in the streets of Sydney.
The ACA was superior to the prior non-system, and it’s vastly better than the barbarity that the GOP are attempting to reintroduce, but that doesn’t mean that it was good.
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Probably, doesn’t have the verified check next to it, but i guess the fake account doesn’t better to that shity source so long as they brainwash people
But it was possible, which puts it the one critical step above good.
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“I’m so tired, I can sleep for a thousand years . . .”
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IKR?
Christ, what an as-
Wait, that’s an insult to assholes!
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I’ll give it a try here.
In some cases, yes. E.g. I already have coverage in another country but I pay American taxes and the IRS dings me for not having American insurance.
Oh boy did they ever, part of the reason I’m not covered in America! (Even with the penalties it’s still cheaper to go outside the country.)
For some, yes. I don’t get why those people think the free market will magically fix insurance companies when they are are a protected class politically and legally, but the stupid is strong everywhere.
Again, for some, yes.
Expanding a bit on the penalties and costs here. 20 years ago health insurance costs were literally 1/20 what they are now. There’s a lot of reasons for the rapid rise, but they all come down to greed in various ways.
I’ve run the numbers, and even without any insurance at all it is literally still cheaper for someone to pay the penalties and take a vacation to a foreign country whenever they need healthcare than it is to follow the current system. (And yes, that includes all travel costs and lost income.)
At this point the system is so screwed up with insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and politicians forming an unholy triumvirate from the bowels of hell Congress that the only viable solution may be to scrap it completely and go to socialized medicine across the board. Are there flaws in that plan? Of course, but they’re a hell of a lot smaller than the grotesque monstrosity we have now!
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Some years ago, before the situation in Venezuela became Mad Maxian, my mom needed to get some dental work done. She figured out that it was cheaper to take time off work, fly to Venezuela, get the work done, see family, and go shopping, than it was to get that same work done here in the US. That’s depressing because not everyone has that kind of time and money to go abroad like that, but the fact that it’s still cheaper is really something.
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To be clear, health insurance costs rose very quickly over the past few years as insurance companies essentially freaked out over the unknowns. If the ACA had been left to do its job, in the state it was when it had passed, most likely costs would have gone down… that was the whole goal (along with widespread adoption). But when the government is constantly see-sawing, trying to eliminate the ACA, getting rid of parts of it, changing bits, taking it to court, etc, insurance companies say “oh crap, we need to cover our butts just in case” and raise rates.
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I would argue that the biggest problem with the individual markets in the ACA wast that the penalties that were a part of the individual mandate found a sweet spot where they were big enough to anger many people but NOT big enough to persuade very many people to buy insurance.
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ha! Tremendous medical costs. From what I gather, gender reassignment surgery costs as much as a missile.
A small one, at that.
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I hate this kind of cynical conspiracy-theory claptrap. No, Obama didn’t intentionally propose a system designed to fail. Obamacare is quite literally “Romneycare”, the system we’ve had here in Mass. for quite awhile, and it’s not failing.
What’s true is that it was designed as a sort of lego brick, a system that could be built upon and evolved into a single payer program. If it’d been left alone, Hillary/Bernie and a Democratic Congress could have adapted it to UHC relatively easily (easier than starting from scratch, anyhow).
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