Obamacare is worthless

lol. Good to see the Onion still has it.

But that is fake news, surely they’ve enacted laws against those already, or are about to?

My guess is the Republicans are going to try and make this on Dems by making the ACA death spiral on purpose and blame the Democrats for obstructing reform.

The best thing the Dems should do is not negotiate, but not filibuster- make the Republicans own the changes and when it hurts, make sure the Dems say we didn’t vote for those changes- the Republicans broke it and can’t fix it- we can.

As I understand it, that’s exactly what’s happening (the Republicans trying to pin “not negotiating” on the Dems and the Dems not fillibustering). At this point, I don’t know what to expect. If these are the same Dems of old, the’ll eventually sign on in exchange for some token victory that was going to be included anyway. If this was the Republicans of old, I’d half-expect them to sit on their hands until next year and watch people start to die because they had no access to health care.

I also expect continuing problems with employer health insurance, including whenever possible push their employees to ACA exchanges if it remained in effect. But the fundamental reason that there will be more problems in employer health insurance are the same problems we’ve experience with individual health insurance policy. Health care isn’t affordable in the US, and you simply can’t have affordable health care insurance with affordable health care.

So despite it being mentioned otherwise, ACA had a number of provisions that DID affect employer plans. It’s not just the exchange individuals who have something to lose.

I remember my insurance plans were grandfathered for a bit mostly due to the maximum out of pockets because many health care systems are self-funded so there need to be some consideration there. They shift though, before the deadline.

At this point if the worst happens, that’s what they voted for: they have to feel the consequences (with apologies to those who didn’t vote for it, but most of them are in states that will protect them)

Folks need to learn that voting for idiots has consequencs, and the only way it’s going to happen is for the idiots to make people suffer.

Dems need to let Republicans own the problem, and only intervene if it’s clear the Republicans are trying to implement something to sneakily make the current system more broken to try and pin it on the ACA.

I know my grandfathering due to having paid for my own insurance pre-ACA ends this year, so I’m hoping they just allow folks to buy non-ACA insurance without penalty (and without subsidy, I’m ok with that).

I completely agree, and I have family that will be directly affected by losing ACA coverage.

Democrats shouldn’t do a thing. When they wanted the GOP to work with them making the ACA bill, they cried “death panels” and gave us endless Nancy Pelosi jokes. They made this bed, they get to sleep in it now.

I also think that the Democrats should, however, vote for changes that are reasonable and make sense, if the GOP ever puts those forward.

HR227-Q: "The Fix Healthcare In Greatening America Act:

Henceforth, we put forward the following reasonable, sensible changes for healthcare in America:

  1. Medicare shall be allowed to negotiate pricing with drug companies and hospitals
  2. Insurance corporate profits are capped at 3% of gross
  3. All abortions are posthumously declared murder and all women who have had or do have one shall be put to death by the spear.
  4. Barron Trump is cool and everyone has to say so."

DEMONCRATS VOTED FOR THE INSURANCE COMPANIES!!!

Just imagine how the nitwit above would feel if she had to pay 900 month and found out there was a 6 month waiting period for any pre-existing conditions.

I know the Dems want to play ball because some of them actually care about the people they represent, but it’s time to let the Republicans stumble with this which I think is fine because the bulk of Trump voters supposedly oppose bail-outs anyway.

Here is my cynical prediction. Congress will exercise their power to shut down the ACA with a simple majority. They will submit a series of terrible replacements over the next 2 - 4 years that have poison pills forcing the Dems to filibuster. The next political cycle will be dominated by the GOP saying “we tried to get you healthcare, but the Democrats blocked all our attempts”. They manage to repeal a law they hate while simultaneously blaming it on the Democratic party. The majority of the country swallows the BS whole and we end up with a super-majority GOP in the Senate.

The only reason I’m not 100% positive this is the guaranteed outcome is because it requires Democratic Congresspeople to have spines for the next 2-4 years straight.

I just want to jump in and say this: I really hate that we’ve had a lot of discussion and reasonable arguments on both sides for 450+ posts all under the stupid banner “Obamacare is worthless”. I, for one, would love it if someone updated the post title to just be about Obamacare generally. Obamacare is a huge change and made a lot of people happy and a lot of people unhappy for a lot of reasons. Calling it “worthless” is just one of many, many opinions expressed here.

This won’t work. Voters mostly don’t care about procedure. If they lose their healthcare in the middle of a Republican presidency and under a Republican Congress, they will blame Republicans. They campaigned on a promise to change our healthcare, after all.

Even the GOP knows that whoever votes for repeal will be held responsible, that’s why they want Democrats to vote with them, not oppose them.

I very much agree. Is there a way an admin can go back and retroactively change the thread title to “Obamacare Discussion” or something?

Well, considering the democrats have been riding this line during the republican majority in the legislative branch with mixed results. This tactic doesn’t work well. People don’t blame those not in power for their problems, they blame the people in charge. (Thanks Obama)

I just don’t think it will hurt anything, when the democrats can just come back with video evidence of the same lawmakers dismantling the ACA. It just doesn’t play.

The GOP are basically planning on holding the American people hostage. Wait and see.

The election of Trump is proof positive that the average Republican is utterly immune to facts, even video footage of their candidate doing what he said he did not. I’d be wary of putting much stock in their reasoning abilities at all.

If anything, the simplistic “Republicans in power, me sad, Republicans bad?” logic is really the best we can count on going into 2020 (2018 doesn’t matter because liberals don’t know midterms exist).

There is video of trump saying and doing crazy shit. It doesn’t matter.

You can show his supporters footage of him murdering babies, and they’ll just say it’s fake.

He could do it right in front of them and they’d talk about Clinton and Pizzagate.

At this point, Trump supporters are no longer perceiving reality.

They are proving what they want reality to be, or perhaps “want” isn’t the right word. In many cases, they perceive the world to be significantly worse than objective reality actually is. You see this with things like crime rates, where trump supporters believe things to be far worse than any objective evidence supports.

But their perception is so entrenched at this point, that when it comes in direct conflict with actual empirical evidence, even from their own senses directly, they choose the myth over reality.

At some point, they became pot committed. Now, acknowledging that they have been so thoroughly fooled has significant psychological consequences, and they are unable to face them directly. And perpetuating this only further entrenches their position, and its division from objective truth.

They are trapped in a psychological pen, separate from reality, and they’re just building the fence around themselves higher. And this is where they will stay until they are dead. At this point, the separation has become entirely self sustaining.