Obamacare is the law of the land

Those predictions are likely exaggerated. Deaths get the coverage, but the real story will be an increase in bankruptcies, divorces and suicides. For the uninsured or under-insured, any significant medical problem can break you.

And all so the already well-off can be even more so. Itā€™s disgusting, and not worthy of our nation.

Not just the well off. The already disgustingly rich.

I agree and disagree. My ranking of the legislation from worse to best is

  1. Senate bill (Like having your ball removed with a belt sander)
  2. ACA (balls removed via pliers)
  3. House bill (balls removed via rusty scissors)
  4. Status quo (balls removed by a doctor with a scalpel and shot of whiskey for pain control)

Now there is nothing to recommend any of these options and unless I have testicular cancer, Iā€™d rather keep my balls.

I understand that many people think that ACA is an important first step in providing health care. I think it is had made life marginally for those people who got on Medicaid, and Iā€™m sure has made a huge difference for those with pre-existing conditions and no or unaffordable insurance.

Against those positives, I look at all the negatives. Itā€™s created chaos in the healthcare for including for 90% who have employer insurance or Medicare. It is grossly unfair to young people who are forced to subsidize older folks premiums, despite having less income, wealth, and more debt on average. The exchanges are failing in many places. We have no idea what the costs are other than expensive.

Fundamentally, ACA focus on providing health insurance for all rather than health care. Plus it focused on expanding benefits rather than controlling costs and that makes it worse than status quo for me.

I hope the Senate bill fails. I think the only approach that would work is to get something that 40 Republican senators and 25 Democratic senators to agree on and the rest opposed. Hard to imagine that happening, but I believe Churchill when he said. ā€œAmericans Will Always Do the Right Thing ā€” After Exhausting All the Alternativesā€

Iā€™m just going to point you to David Andersonā€™s posts over at Balloon Juice. He actually designs(ed) health insurance plans for a living. I encourage you to take advantage of some access to actual expertise since you seem to have quite a few misconceptions related to the ACA. The Cliff Notes version is that the instability introduced by the Republican party and the president* is its biggest problem at the moment. Some particular markets - Iowa is a great example - have unique issues.

Ok I read 1/2 dozen post of his. Could you tell me a little more about what Iā€™m suppose to learn? Especially from a site which bills itself as consistently wrong since 2002?

To me, the simplest fix would be making guarantees that if you got a standard health plan, you wonā€™t pay over x% for your premiums, and y% for deductibles. Give some cost certainty.

Not sure whatā€™s a reasonable number for x+y 15% for an individual, +7.5% for a dependent?

Percentage isnā€™t going to save you if the overall cost keeps skyrocketing. Cost control has to be part of the solution, but thatā€™s a difficult conversation, all around.

Dude, for what itā€™s worth, I hear ya. I feel the same way. However, I tend to think of the ACA as what could have been, which is a baby step toward single payer. And based on your comments, I donā€™t think you lean that way, which is allowing the group to pick up the cost (through government taxation.)

I have family members in the healthcare system. I have friends in the insurance industry. All around, itā€™s fucked. When one of the fastest growing sectors is healthcare, you KNOW some fat cats somewhere are taking in all the wealth from it. And that is precisely the problem. It is out of control. In comparison to other countries, our health care costs are insane.

Iā€™m welcome to other ideas, but at least for me, I see no other option that is going to work, long term.

Iā€™m actually agnostic as to what we end up with as a country. Private insurance, single payer -multiple provider, universal catastrophic, single provider, or an army of Star Trek Voyager holographic doctors, I just it wanted to be cheaper and no worse.

As far as single payer is going. I think Democrats in general and CA Democrats in particular should be screaming mad about this.

Hopes of single payer supporters across the country were dashed Friday night when the Democratic Speaker of the California legislature killed a single payer health insurance reform bill by written by California Democrats.

California Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon announced Friday afternoon that he was ā€œholdā€ on the bill to bring universal, single-payer health care to the most populous state, effectively killing the bill for at least the rest of 2017.

ā€œI have decided SB 562 will remain in the Assembly Rules Committee until further notice,ā€ Rendon said in a statement.

Now, Iā€™m not sure if single payer will work for the country, but 100% in favor of using states as beta sites before we roll out programs to the rest of the country. I think CA is the perfect place to try out single payer.

Iā€™m no economist, but it seems to me that the cost of providing medical care has to come down, meaning the cost of procedures, the cost of drugs, etc. to do that, we need to help medical facilities lower operating costs and staff ways to do more with less money, via tax breaks etc. then we get premiums down but get more people insured and do the same thing for insurers so they keep a larger percentage of the money they make to offset that.

Our medical system is like one of those weird RPGs where all the damage is in the hundreds of thousands or millions for no particular reason when it could be single digits.

This is all a pipe dream, but until we find a way to reduce the magnitude of the numbers across the board, I donā€™t think there is a fix.

My solution is to keep living in California.

I just saw a tweet about Hillary Clinton referring to the GOP as the ā€œdeath partyā€ and my thought was why hasnā€™t this been shouted from the rooftops by the Democratic party for the past months? Dems are so terrible at branding. Remember death panels? Of course you do. Everyone does. Half the reason why the ACA is on life support right now is because of ā€œdeath panelsā€. Dems have got to get their branding act together and make it political suicide to vote to repeal.

Interesting language to distance oneself from the responsibility of actually understanding what oneā€™s party is putting in legislation?

ā€œTruly grossā€
From the party that gave us ā€œdeath panelsā€ and lied about ACA for eight years because what they really wanted was to repeal the ā€œburdensomeā€ ACA tax on the very wealthy.

ā€œSorry about your son, but he would have died 200 years ago.ā€ Odds that person is also ā€œpro-lifeā€?
ā€œAbortion is murder!ā€
ā€œFuck your son, learn some personal responsibility.ā€

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/879059303033970689

Iā€™m wonderingā€¦ if the Senate and House pass healthcare legislation, I wonder if Trump will veto it just to show that he has the power to do so. It seems like something he would do. Now that he has gone on record stating that the plan is without heartā€¦ He would LOVE to show all of the House and Senate GOP members that he controls them.

Nah, he wants to be able to say he won by passing something.