The US Healthcare Mass Debate

[Forty Two]

Simple! Standard republican plan:
1 cut funding to program
2 announce program is not work anymore
3 delete program

The only difference here is that people have been pointing out that Obamacare is not working and/or unsustainable for a couple of years.

[Forty Two]

It's getting hard to keep up here.... wasn't Obamacare really just a giveaway to the big insurance companies? Wasn't it just a Republican plan anyway, the same thing Mit Romney would have passed? Why do we want it, again? Was Mit Romney's plan, which basically Obamacare was taken from, a good thing?

No, it wasn't. And this just highlights the farce that your healthcare debate is in the US.

Agreed, and why Obamacare should be repealed in full.

[Tero]

Simple! Standard republican plan:
1 cut funding to program
2 announce program is not work anymore
3 delete program

The only difference here is that people have been pointing out that Obamacare is not working and/or unsustainable for a couple of years.

It never had a 10 year run, so we will never find out.

Tax payers subsidizing certain industries is nothing new. Health insurance is one of many.

The fact that insurance can survive through corporations, where the employer pays the subsidy, makes Obamacare a less attractive investment for them. Employees are a more attractive pool, healthy. When they get sick they are put into disability 6 months, then fired after 6 months. Problem solved! Die on your own!

[Forty Two]

It's not dead yet. So, we may. The House vote does nothing in and of itself.

Hasn't had a 10 year run? You mean, we can't conclude Obamacare sucks until 10 years go by, but Trump failed in his first few months in office and the AHA is a failure before it starts? Why doesn't the Republican plan get a 10 year run? Or at least a 3 year run?

Funny how Obama never got to a point where he was responsible for his own policies, and Obamacare never gets to the point where it has been given a fair shake...

[Tero]

It's a subsidized industry.

Like coal. Like Exxon.

Subsidies can come from guv'ment or your employer. There is no other way to run healthcare while the providers are private. The only thing that would give you "freedom" is catastrophic care with no preventive care.

[pErvinalia]

It's getting hard to keep up here.... wasn't Obamacare really just a giveaway to the big insurance companies? Wasn't it just a Republican plan anyway, the same thing Mit Romney would have passed? Why do we want it, again? Was Mit Romney's plan, which basically Obamacare was taken from, a good thing?

No, it wasn't. And this just highlights the farce that your healthcare debate is in the US.

Agreed, and why Obamacare should be repealed in full.

And replaced with what? And is this a realistic possibility?

[Tero]

We throw billions at coal and fossil fuel industries:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Fe ... _subsidies

Why would we not throw money at the insurance industry since we insist on not nationalizing healthcare?

[Brian Peacock]

Simple! Standard republican plan:
1 cut funding to program
2 announce program is not work anymore
3 delete program

The only difference here is that people have been pointing out that Obamacare is not working and/or unsustainable for a couple of years.

The CBO disagrees - the ACA was not in a so-called death spiral and insurance costs were rising inline with medical costs and insurers pofits.

[BarnettNewman]

Simple! Standard republican plan:
1 cut funding to program
2 announce program is not work anymore
3 delete program

The only difference here is that people have been pointing out that Obamacare is not working and/or unsustainable for a couple of years.

It never had a 10 year run, so we will never find out.

Tax payers subsidizing certain industries is nothing new. Health insurance is one of many.

The fact that insurance can survive through corporations, where the employer pays the subsidy, makes Obamacare a less attractive investment for them. Employees are a more attractive pool, healthy. When they get sick they are put into disability 6 months, then fired after 6 months. Problem solved! Die on your own!

According to Statistics Canada, Canadians spent a total of $141 billion on health care that year. The authors divided that number by the Canadian population, concluding that, on average, each Canadian contributes $3,961 for health care each year.
However, as the report notes, not every Canadian pays an equal amount in taxes. Dependents and children are not responsible for paying taxes, while high-income earners must pay more than low-income earners.
To account for this, the study broke average Canadian families down into 10 income groups, concluding that Canada’s poorest families pay $477 a year for health care, while the wealthiest earners pay $59,666 a year.

But, you know, death panels.

http://www.ctvnews.ca/health/true-cost- ... -1.2525114

[Tero]

Back when Lieberman was a politician:

The Democrats needed Lieberman’s vote to get reform passed, and insurers knew it. Shortly before the Senate was set to vote on the bill, Lieberman said he would vote for the bill only if the public option was stripped out.

Lieberman accused public option supporters of having an ulterior motive.

“A public option plan is unnecessary,” he told Fox News. “It has been put forward, I’m convinced, by people who really want the government to take over all of health insurance.”

https://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/02 ... nce-wolves

[Tero]

Senate rushing to propose their own crappy health care plan:
http://thehill.com/homenews/334862-sena ... hcare-vote

http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/ov ... -senate-on

[Brian Peacock]

CBO report and summary on AHCA.

The Congressional Budget Office on Wednesday released an updated analysis of the American Health Care Act, the House GOP healthcare bill, that economists and advocates said contained some alarming takeaways for the future of the fight against the opioid crisis.

While the nonpartisan CBO projected that 23 million more Americans would be uninsured by 2026 under the AHCA compared with projections under the current healthcare system, two other issues are contained within those numbers.

The first: The newly amended AHCA keeps largely in place the more than $800 billion in cuts to federal Medicaid spending over the next decade from the original version of the bill...

It does so by rolling back the Medicaid expansion established under the Affordable Care Act as well as other changes under the law. The CBO estimates that, under the AHCA, approximately 14 million people would come off the Medicaid rolls by 2026.

The second issue, and one not present in the previous version of the AHCA, is the so-called MacArthur Amendment, which would allow states to apply for permission to rescind some of the Affordable Care Act's regulations if they introduce policies designed to lower insurance premiums.

The CBO found that about one-third of the US population lives in states that would most likely make "moderate changes" to regulations under the MacArthur Amendment and about one-sixth lives in states that would make more extensive changes.

Christine Eibner, a health economist for the Rand Corporation, said that while there was a lot of uncertainty about how states would change regulations, it was reasonable to think state legislators would be under a lot of pressure to cut back on so-called essential health benefits, or certain conditions that insurers are required to cover, if other states are able to show that doing so brings down premiums. If that happens, substance-abuse treatment is viewed as the benefit "most at risk" to be cut, Eibner told Business Insider...

http://uk.businessinsider.com/cbo-score ... ?r=US&IR=T

[Tero]

Federal law could demand that all insurance companies operating in a state, with employer based plans, also have to offer plans to individuals. Subsidized or not. That way the two types of insurance would approach each other. Employers would pay about half of it for employees.

[Tero]

Obama funding was on shaky ground. Hillary was supposed to fix or uphold it. Single payer was never going to pass back then. Obama was forced to include insurance companies.

Judge Rosemary M. Collyer agreed with that assertion last year. She ruled that the Obama administration had no explicit authority to pay as much as $130 billion over 10 years to insurance companies to cover out-of-pocket health costs for millions of lower-income Americans obtaining insurance on the new health exchanges. At the same time, she found that the Republican-led House had the standing to sue the administration — a potentially far-reaching decision that many constitutional law experts predicted would be overturned on appeal, causing the suit to be dismissed.

Then November’s election upended all the calculations. Donald J. Trump won, and his interest in defending the executive branch against the House lawsuit was nonexistent given his antipathy for the health care law.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/03/us/p ... h-law.html

[Tero]

What of 2018? We are still here, waiting, congress goes to summer vacation and insurance companies are not required to offer any private plans, only corporate

While the ACA exchanges will likely be available in 2018, consumer choice may be severely restricted. Facing large financial losses, many insurers like Aetna, UnitedHealthcare, and Humana have started removing their plans from exchanges which has created a coverage vacuum where many people will have fewer, or no options for ACA compliant plans.

In the wake of uncertainty regarding Obamacare, many consumers have decided to pursue alternatives such as short-term health insurance, major medical insurance in case of accident or illness, though it does not cover pre-existing conditions. Agilehealthinsurance.com is a leader in short-term health insurance, and carries great low-cost options. Short-term health insurance has no open enrollment period and can be purchased at any point.

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