Corporations are in a way preferable to a fascist state, if for no other reason than the different corporate entities can provide checks upon each other.
[quote]
Most of my decision came down to my poor experience with Obamacare. In the ’90s, I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, a chronic illness that causes fatigue, memory loss, physical aches, and soreness. I found myself increasingly unable to perform my duties in law enforcement due to these symptoms, and eventually had to leave the job completely. After a stint working part-time for the government, helping to distribute food stamps and other services, I eventually was unable to work at all. I lost employer-based health insurance when I left the workforce and had to pay my health care costs out of pocket.
When Obamacare first came into effect, I was excited to get what I thought would be financial help with my costly medicine and treatments. But when I signed up, my premium came back at an astronomical price, more than my monthly mortgage payment. This happened because I had to declare my husband’s salary as part of our household income, which put me in an earning bracket too high to qualify for any financial assistance. My husband works for a small business, and while he gets paid fairly, his company does not offer spousal insurance. I’m left with a premium of $893, so high that I can no longer afford the cost of my medicines and treatments on top of the monthly premiums. I wish I could opt out completely, but the penalty for not signing up is much too great.[/quote]
She was unemployed and pre-diagnosed with a chronic illness. Under Obamacare, her medical insurance was expensive, but possible. Without Obamacare, she’d likely have no insurance at all.
I’m not going to call her dumb, but she picked Trump over Clinton because…? Magic? I can understand her urge to vote for Sanders over Trump or Clinton in that situation, but Trump makes no sense.
MFW $900 a month for health insurance is more than her mortgage. I need to move to the midwest. I’d be rich.
I’d really like to know the actual state she is living in, because I feel like her story is total bullshit. Her reason for voting for trump, is apparently that she had a bad time with Obamacare. Her story is that she’s doesn’t want to buy health insurance, but the fine is so high she must… interestingly enough, she describes that she has fibromylalgia, but the cost of the health insurance means she can’t buy her drugs… which seems weird, since the insurance would normally help cover the drugs. This would suggest she has fairly cheap drugs, where the co-pay for them isn’t significantly lower than the normal cost of the drugs… or her insurance doesn’t cover them? Honestly, this part is weird.
So she says she doesn’t WANT insurance, but is forced to buy it due to the penalties. Then claims that her premium is $893.
There’s just no way this is true. If she really doesn’t want insurance, then she could take one of the bronze plans, which are essentially just catestrophic coverage, and there’s no way the premium is $893 on the cheapest bronze plan. The average bronze level plan for a 50 year old is gonna be around $400 nationally. So this is suggesting that she’s paying for a plan with a lot of coverage, but then simultaneously claiming that she doesn’t want it?
Again, without knowing the state, I can’t say for sure. Maybe there’s somewhere that the cheapest plan is $900… but I’m pretty sure that’s not true.
But even beyond all that… What she’s saying is that due to her own needs regarding healthcare, she’s able to go along with all the monstrous stuff Trump said. I mean, that’s fine… but I’m not gonna excuse her for it.
Only if you have a ton saved up in most cases cause odds are you wont make a whole lot out here.
Daniel Dale must win the NotTheOnion award for interviewing Trump supporters arriving in DC for the inauguration. It is truly as if every day is opposite day.
It’s not about ridicule (at least not for me), it’s about pointing out that a vote for Donald Trump was a vote for getting rid of Obamacare or defunding Planned Parenthood or making Betsy DeVos the Secretary of fucking Education.
The first step is admitting you have a problem. This lady is way past that step. The lady in USA Today was still struggling with it. There’s probably a lot more like her. Hopefully they can be nudged to see that this really was what they voted for and convinced to withdraw their approval.
Trump has lost like 1/3 of his support already and he didn’t have a whole to begin with.
He went from 46% approval to 32%.
Dude isn’t even sworn in yet and literally hasn’t done anything (other than tank random stock prices with Tweets).
Yes, the Dale interviews are insane. “I like Trump because he is a Goddly man!” Or “I like that he is so honest!”
Or the best one was, “I love that he always admits it when he says something wrong!”
That last one is just like pants on head retarded. That’s a thing that he has, to my knowledge literally never done, ever, even when he’s been conclusively proven wrong, or has said horrific things.
Here’s my view on evangelicals in America:
“The best lie the devil ever told is that you could bullshit God and succeed.”
I just hope the folks who do lose their insurance remember who did it.
That’s how you get folks to stop falling for the Republican line.
These people are certified idiots. I would literally have been unable to not laugh in their face for these answers.
These are Trumps voters, no wonder he said he loved the uneducated.
They’ll blame the Democrats.
They’ve been doing it since Reagan and aren’t going to stop.
A little heads-up: WP has lifted their paywall temporarily for the inauguration (although it’s obviously fairly easy to bypass normally).
Note to readers: Donald Trump’s inauguration is Friday. The Post has lifted its paywall and is offering free, unlimited access to our digital coverage through Saturday.
I’m calling out VOX on this one for a completely fake story. This supposed Midwestern woman’s facts just do not add up. The article clearly states she is unemployed and has a chronic health condition. She then goes on to state her only concrete reason for voting for Trump was because Obamacare was so awful. “$893 premiums…more than my house payment…forced to take the insurance because the penalty would be worse”.
No.
10 minutes of fact checking clearly shows that if you go to healthcare.gov, pick any Midwestern state, plug in a family of 2 people, both 55, and give the employed member of the family a very comfortable $75,000 annual salary, then YES, you do not get any subsidies for choosing insurance, and YES, I do not doubt that really nice silver/gold level plans might cost $900 a month, BUT (and here’s where the story falls apart), the penalty for not taking insurance for this same couple is only $2,125 per year.
$893 per month is $10,716 per year in premiums. $10,716 - $2,125 is $8,591. That means if they chose to NOT take insurance, they could still spend $715 per month on her “costly medicines” (and other healthcare costs) and still come out even with the cost of taking this fictional $900 plan. It just doesn’t make sense.
More likely, if this woman is real, she voted Trump because as a “self-proclaimed news junkie” in the Midwest, she was tuned into conservative media 24/7 and was convinced Hillary was an evil baby-eating sex-ring leading occult-practicing enemy of the State. Now she realizes she’s not going to see Hillary prosecuted for imaginary crimes, and she understands the enormity of the error of electing a complete egomaniacal fuckwit to the Presidency. Obamacare is just her excuse to not look completely stupid.
It’s Vox so… it’s probably bullshit.
Actually, she wrote “the penalty for not signing up is much too great”. Which is true, because if you pay the penalty then you get nothing in return. Any amount of money flushed down the toilet is too much. But if she understands that, then the penalty is working as intended.
So I think this is exactly where the dilemma is. Basically, she’s looking at two candidates who seem pretty horrible, and she is mostly leaning away from whoever is being talked about most, like a lot of people who were caught in the middle this cycle. One of those two candidates is promising to give her a $2k / year or so tax cut and telling her how his opponent is so bad she must be thrown in jail, not allowed to run for President. Now, I think we’d all agree that what she should have done is to actually find out what these candidates were proposing, look into the actual evidence about the email bullshit, and just generally be more offended by the deplorables. But she didn’t do those things, she listened to the media cacophony, picked out the messages that seemed most salient, and found a justification to go along with her peer group’s judgment and her perceived financial best interests. This probably describes a lot of people who voted Trump.
Does it really not make sense? You are telling me that you believe the value this woman is getting out of the $10,716 plan is less than $8,591, and yet she should be happy to go ahead a pay for it? Or that she shouldn’t feel that removing the $2k / year tax would make her life better? Look, she is certainly disregarding the positive aspects of having health insurance beyond just what it pays you in a given year, and therefore the negative consequences of not having that insurance (both for her family and for society as it has to make up for the results). She is also disregarding the positive things that Obamacare does for other people, and in broader sense, all the other horrible shit that Trump and the GOP will do. The problem she has, though, is not understanding how dangerous it is to not have health insurance - she’s been betting on not having any major healthcare problems, but if she does end up with something that costs $250k to cure, she and her husband will have the choice between massive financial burden and letting her die. Her kind of votes against Obamacare (that is, people who want lower taxes in exchange for informed decisions to forego the option to have health insurance because it saves you some money if you get lucky) are the worst kind, but it’s because of the dangerous level of ignorance or callousness that underpins them, not because they don’t make sense or don’t happen in the real world.
I’m pretty sure these folks are talking about Gandhi. They’re talking about Gandhi, right? Yeah. That’s got to be it. Gandhi.