The US Healthcare Mass Debate

[Tero]

The current speaker has lumped all that is bad with insurance and tax (not a tax that affects most of us) as Obamacare. All beautiful things come ftom Trumpcare!

It's hopeless. All democrats will be pushing single payer by 2018.

[Brian Peacock]

We should run a sweep on who out of Shelly Moore Capito of West Virginia, Susan Collins of Maine, Dean Heller of Nevada, Rob Portman of Ohio, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, or John McCain of Arizona will be first to be shot at by an irate mentalist.

[mistermack]

I'm not going to pretend I know much about Obamacare, or the US system.

But some things seem to stick out as problems that will always make the US system expensive, however much you fiddle with it.

The first is the national habit of going to court, and suing at every little opportunity.
That has to be paid for, and it's everyone who pays for it, in their taxes or premiums or both.
Someone should tot it all up, and keep a webpage so that everyone can see what they are paying out for the right to sue.
It's beginning to happen in this country too. It might sound like 'justice' but it costs a fucking fortune.
I would have a system where you sign away your right to sue, and face the fact that healthcare can involve risk.
A simple panel of about five people could adjudicate on exceptional claims, with no lawyers allowed on either side and strict limits on the size of awards.

The second thing that sticks out about Obamacare is the involvement of the insurance companies.
It's not in their interest to help any kind of 'Obamacare' along, so they are going to try to kill it.
And the way to kill it, and make money at the same time, is to push up the premiums wherever possible. Make it expensive and it will die.

[L'Emmerdeur]

Health insurance companies have a "statutory duty" to maximize stockholder value don'cha know (never mind that this is simplistic and largely false). So even if their profits have been very good under the ACA, they claim that they've suffered 'losses' (decreased profits) due to having to conform to the requirements of the ACA, and I expect that's true.

[L'Emmerdeur]

You've got to love (or something) the way that Republicans/conservatives have exploited the suffering of an infant to further their political agenda.

"A Cruel and Ignorant Campaign"

In other words, there never was any hope for Charlie [Gard] – and the claim that fresh research evidence provided some new hope was wholly without foundation and came from someone who had never even examined the child.

But here’s the really wicked thing about all this. The parents were reinforced in their refusal to accept this tragic situation, and the whole court process pointlessly prolonged, because of the pressure largely emanating from activists and media on the American political right (along with right-to-life campaigners) screaming that a baby was about to be killed by a socialised health care “death panel” enforced by the British government. This campaign led the parents to believe that such pressure could change the court’s mind. And so the parents were reinforced in their refusal to face reality.

The commentary emanating from America, however, was staggeringly ill-informed. The website American Thinker, for example, ran one hysterical piece after another. Thus the case represented “a perfect crystallization of the full heart and soul of socialized or ‘single payer’ health care”, a “tyrannically impersonal “medical system” in which “the individual human being is property of the State”.

“Little Charlie Gard appears to be under a death sentence courtesy of Great Ormond Street Hospital and the British Courts” in “a totalitarian state where the courts decide whether my child can live or die, where they can withhold medical treatment as and when they decide, where they can prevent treatment in another nation, where the rights of the individuals involved can be thrown on the floor and trashed like so much refuse”

…“the almost inhuman indifference to the plight of the parents by the Great Ormond Street Hospital, who insist that the parents should have no hope of improvement in their son and acquiesce in his death”…

“progressive death cult according to which individual lives are mere variables in an abstract calculus based on social utility and budgetary value.” And so on, and on.

...

Whether or not Great Ormond Street hospital was right or wrong in its diagnosis, its medical staff were only ever concerned with one thing: the best interests of their tiny patient. For this they have been subjected to vilification and death threats and portrayed as inhumane and murderers. This is unspeakable.

I write a great deal about the ideological bullying of the left, the lies published by left-wing media and the inhumanity and irrationality of so much allegedly progressive thinking. But I have never witnessed such concentrated ignorance, arrogance, stupidity and unthinking cruelty as has been displayed by the American political right over the tragic case of Charlie Gard.

[Brian Peacock]

[Tero]

Trum ready to sign beautiful skinny repeal!

A preliminary attempt to estimate the impact of Senate Republicans' "skinny repeal" bill — their last-ditch attempt to repeal at least parts of Obamacare — suggests that it would result in 16 million fewer Americans having health insurance, according to a copy of a Congressional Budget Office report Senate Democrats shared with Vox on Wednesday night.

It's not nearly as bad now. Though fails to erase Obama. The goal for Trump ever since the correspondents dinner years ago.

[Tero]

Trump's senators refuse to remove TERRIBLE Obamacare even a little bit!
It's terrible because it has Obama's name on it.

BREAKING: The plan by Senate GOP leaders to pass a more modest rollback of Obamacare was threatened Thursday night when key Republican senators said they would not support that effort without assurances that it would become the basis of negotiations with the House.

Sens. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said their support for “skinny repeal” would not be used to trigger a hasty vote on such legislation by the House before it heads home for recess. Many conservatives in both chambers object to the bare-bones plan being crafted by Senate GOP leaders because it does not go far enough to repeal Obamacare, a longstanding campaign vow from Republicans.

Senate Republican leaders continued working Thursday to round up votes for a scaled-back overhaul of the Affordable Care Act, as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) outlined a plan that would eliminate two of the law’s key mandates and a handful of other provisions.

[JimC]

Sounds like the death of a thousand cuts to me...

[Tero]

Senate now playing shell game/bait and switch with House.
http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/34 ... sufficient

[Tyrannical]

Trum ready to sign beautiful skinny repeal!

A preliminary attempt to estimate the impact of Senate Republicans' "skinny repeal" bill — their last-ditch attempt to repeal at least parts of Obamacare — suggests that it would result in 16 million fewer Americans having health insurance, according to a copy of a Congressional Budget Office report Senate Democrats shared with Vox on Wednesday night.

It's not nearly as bad now. Though fails to erase Obama. The goal for Trump ever since the correspondents dinner years ago.

#fakenews is everywhere.........

Those 16 million people hate Obama care so much they would gladly quit it if not for the penalty. Eliminate the individual mandate and the only people who keep Obama care are the ones that get it for free.

[Scot Dutchy]

#fakenews is everywhere.........

Those 16 million people hate Obama care so much they would gladly quit it if not for the penalty. Eliminate the individual mandate and the only people who keep Obama care are the ones that get it for free.

Gladly quit until they are sick of course.

[Tero]

so great McCain made it to vote!
http://www.rationalskepticism.org/downl ... p?id=15368

[Forty Two]

For the millionth time, there is no such thing as "Obamacare" health care. Obamacare is a law that mandates that people have health insurance, whether they buy it themselves, have it through an employer, or are covered by Medicare or Medicaid. Nobody has "Obamacare" coverage.

There are subsidies that some people can get, if their incomes are low enough to warrant subsidies. What's weird is that the law was passed to help people who could not afford to get health insurance. In the last four years about 12 million people signed up for insurance through the exchanges (only some of those got subsidies, and only some of those were uninsured before (many were previously ensured)). So, at least 38 million people still lack coverage. And, the law made it harder for most of them to get coverage because it tripled insurance premiums, raised deductibles to like $6,000 per year, and increased "copays" (the amounts people have to pay out of pocket), and most of those 38 million make too much money to be entitled to subsidies. About 25 million of them make higher than the national average income. But, now they're being asked to pay insurance premiums the size of a modest mortgage payment or rent, and they are less likely to buy the insurance now than they were before.

Obamacare is shit. It's a polished turd. And, the big problem is that the media is behind it and tries to sell absurdities like "22 million people will be thrown off their insurance" if this monstrosity is repealed. It's arbitrary, unfounded bullshit.

Obamacare must go. Either get rid of it, and move to an effective competitive market, or just fucking put us out of our misery and just enact universal single-payer and have done with it. Everyone knows that's where this is headed, so just do it, man, just do it. Pull the trigger, man! If you've got the guts!

[Tero]

There is no effective competitive market. Insurance just funnels patients into the same healthcare monopoly, a one size fits all service. It's like cable TV.