1812

He hasn’t even been inaugurated yet. :)

1813

Even if the infamous Russian tape turned on liveleak.com, I’m not sure it would even hurt Trump. His supporters would still find a way to be the victim: Trump was the target of a terrible Russian attack!

1814

It is also clear that literally, nobody had read the bill in the 24 hours from the time the final bill was put online until the purely partisan vote occurred.

1815

Because that would have made a difference.

1816

Yes having bipartisan support for ACA would have made a profound difference on it’s support in 2017. Virtually all of the lasting social programs in this country from SS to Civil Rights to Medicare have a bi-partisan support. Partisan measure get and deserve the fate we are seeing for ACA.

1817

Said support never would have happened though, because binary politics.

I mean Obama literally stole the GOP plan and the GOP opposed it because Obama suggested it.

1818

That is Democratic talking point with very little basis in fact. ACA is very different than what Ryan is proposing and even quite different than Romneycare, and that’s even before the last minute bribes were put in place to secure all of the Democratic votes. Lasting change in this country only comes as result of a bipartisan agreements.

1819

You’ve been alive for the last 16 or so years, right? I mean, I assume so, because you post here.

A bipartisan bill giving everyone a unicorn and a blowjob would have been great too. But please, tell me with a straight face that you believe that after Obama’s election the GOP has EVER FUCKING ONCE negotiated in good faith at the federal level. On ANYTHING.

I know politics is about power, but the GOP gave up on governing more than a decade ago.

But yeah, it’s the Democrats’ fault for being meanie meanie mean means.

1820

The bolded part is key.

This was basically her way of saying “It may sound confusing to you now, but after we pass it, believe me you’re going to love it!”

1821

The ACA is an intricate bill with numerous mechanisms, each of which depend on all of the rest, that together operate in a way to provide health care to nearly Americans.

Do you think complex systems write themselves? Saying that “nobody read the ACA” is like saying “nobody read the source code for Windows”. After all, no single person re-read all 50 million lines of code that were pushed to your PC on 1/10/2017. So what?

1822

I agree with strollen that the ACA was inarticulately presented to the American people, and it’s passage done without consideration of conservative reservations.

I do not change Obama for this, I think he wanted to garner some degree of Republican support. Instead, I would lay the blame on Pelosi.

I feel like this contributed to building up a really deep resentment on many on the right. But it didn’t create it. It has already existed gong back into the 90s at least.

1823

From my experience with my family, resentment from the right goes back to Carter.

Carter ruined the economy. Reagan made it better. Therefore all Republicans are perfect and all Democrats are the worst.
It’s like the inverse of FDR from the previous generation in a lot of ways.
I suspect the next generation will start with Bush and invert it again until some Democrat fucks up terribly in 30-40 years and it happens again, though to be fair, I think they’d probably be correct given how the GOP lost it’s fucking mind around that point.

1824

Virtually every Republican I knew including elected officials (state not federal) and the sane radio talk show hosts in Salem media were more than willing to work with Obama in Jan 2000. The country was in a financial crisis and he had big electoral and popular vote win.

Certainly, the partisanship is worse now that it was 20 years ago, and one of the thing I have learned/had my mine changed is the Republican are more to blame for this than Democrats. But is BS to place the blame entirely on Republicans. It still possible to get stuff done in a 55-45 split where 45 Democrat and 15 Republican get together to pass something that 10 Democrats and 30 Republicans. I dare say most of the time you’ll be in the 10 unhappy Democrat side.

Now after ACA was ramrodded through it certainly made it harder to work in bi-partisan fashion, but that’s not the fault of Democrats.

I can give you example of scores of bi-partisan pieces of legislation but lets just start with one that got passed without Obama help. Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013 which was opposed by many Democrat and Republican special interest.

The thing about ACA is I’m not one of these semi-mythical Republicans that hate Obamacare, but would love it if it had a different name.

I’ve been buying my own healthcare insurance for 17 years and spent many hours on forums with people trying to figure out how to retire before Medicare and struggling with insurance.

I oppose virtually every provision of ACA with one exception letting kids stay on their parent’s policies through 25.

I think the rest are uniformly awful on philosophical and/or practical ground and the funding mechanism and accounting border on fraud.

That includes: lifetime insurance caps, pre-existing conditions, young people subsidizing old folks, and men subsidizing woman. The ridiculous mandates and toothless penalties. Coercing states to set up their own exchanges. The minimum standards for what “real insurance” are much too high.

The subsidy mechanism is an absolute mess that results in marginal effective taxes rates approaching 50% for people making ~40K and discourages marriages. The subsidy can and are being gamed all time.

As bad the individual subsidies are the insurance companies subsidies are even worse a massive tax break for insurance companies. Have you looked at the language of risk corridors? OMG. Nor have they worked in many places with many exchanges have only 1 or 2 participants in many areas.

I could probably go on for 5 pages. But the reason most Republican oppose ACA isn’t because Obama is black or Democrat, but because ACA is as bad a law as Trump is a person.

1825
1826

Serious question.

My mom had a brief medical issue that is sometimes associated with early stage breast cancer. She caught it early enough and had it dealt with and had zero complications coming from it and is essentially in no more of a risk of cancer or anything else now than she was a decade before it.

Over 10 years later she was still unable to have health insurance because that one condition flagged her and no one will offer insurance to anyone who has ever in their lifetime had any condition that can be correlated with cancer.

How is that fair that she got a one time use of insurance and is now banned from life, having to worry about every medical issue might put her into unsurmountable debt?

Also guess what happens if she does go into unsormountable debt over it. She’s not paying very much of it off in her lifetime since she worked as a Rabbi making less than $30k per year, so we are all still paying for her healthcare bills, just indirectly. Even more so when she can’t afford preventative care and ends up having more major medical conditions later that could have prevented, and if she couldn’t pay for the preventative care why would she be able to pay for the major operations that resulted?

Though she did find a solution. She moved to Australia where they don’t care about any condition that’s been certified gone for 3+ years. She even told the insurance companies that she had that issue and they flat out said they didn’t care.

Let’s look at another related aspect of pre-existing which was 100% happening. Insurance companies would sign people up and if they had to pay for a major operation they would look at literally any inconsistencies. Oh look you forgot to mention that when you were 10 you had a very mild case of Asthma, therefore you had a pre-existing condition you didn’t tell us about and we are dropping your coverage. That really was happening.

Pre-existing condition doesn’t mean I have cancer right now and I want coverage. There are a lot of other aspects to it that are completely unfair and have the real potential to ruin peoples futures for absolutely no reason.

1827

Ah, good old Keefy is at it again.

1828

That’s like saying my city council is willing to work with France. Great, only it’s completely meaningless since they don’t have any ability or authority to do anything at all. Federal is all that matters on federal issues. [quote=“Strollen, post:1824, topic:126890”]
I oppose virtually every provision of ACA with one exception letting kids stay on their parent’s policies through 25.
[/quote]

I don’t even have words for whatever this is. Well I did, but I couldn’t remain remotely cordial so I’ll just abstain.

1829

Bi-partisan support worked in the past because politicians were beholden to the general populace, not just those who vote in the primary.

If you want to bring that back, you’re going to have to have strong electoral reform, and in a way Republicans will hate, because the poison that’s infecting America is starting at the state legislative level.

I don’t disagree with you, but the solution to this is going to be a combination of jungle primaries and non-partisan legislative districts.

I’d say Louisiana is a success in terms of its political system- they are a lot less crazy than the rest of the South, and even California is a success. Kamala Harris is much more moderate than her opponent, who might have won in a primary and gone on to win against a weak opponent in California’s Senate race last year.

That said, I’d argue that the blue dog wing of the Dems was pretty much Republican by 2009, so it was bipartisan in a sense. The Dems were a lot broader of a coalition than they are now- mostly because the moderates have been shunted out of power after 2009. The symptoms of our poison started to become serious after 2009- they were milder before then.

1830

Good question.

I’ve posted this before on the ACA thread so I won’t go into more detail. On average we spend $10,345 per person per year on health care. That’s $862/month and since it includes kids under 17 and seniors over 65, the real cost for working folks is probably close to double that. Think of that $1,700/month of your paycheck goes to paying for health care.

The reason we don’t have affordable health insurance in this country is because we don’t have affordable healthcare period. Any healthcare reform that doesn’t address the underlying problem is re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

So I think all health care proposal, first and foremost have to pass this simple question. Will adopting this proposal raise or lower the cost of healthcare in this country? I wish I was smart enough to know what stuff would lower cost, I don’t know. But I can tell you which ones will drive up the prices. Not allowing insurance companies to charge higher price for people with pre-existing condition absolutely will drive up prices.

If Joe totals a car that’s probably bad luck, if Sue totals a car three years in a row, then odds are her driving was a factor. We don’t think twice about allowing auto companies to charge Sue more for insurance. Even though it is entirely possible that Joe was driving recklessly and Sue was just in the wrong place and wrong time three years in a row.

Many pre-existing conditions like your mom’s cancer scare are just bad luck. I’m pre-diabetes if I get diabetes is almost certainly more to do with my bad behavior than bad luck. But that’s not always the cause some cancers (lung and liver) are more related to live style choices, and in some case diabetes is just bad genes.

Pre-ACA, I had a financial incentive to make the lifestyle changes to get me out of the pre-diabetes category. Now I have none.

You didn’t need to be econ major to figure what would happen if your removed pre-existing as a factor in insurance pricing. Now we have years of empirical proof. The #1 reason that ACA is failing is because sicker people are signing up for insurance and healthy people aren’t.

I don’t claim to know what the solution is to your mom’s insurance problem. I completely acknowledge that health care in our country is broken. But just as the first rule in the Hippocratic oath is to do no harm, healthcare reform should do no harm. ACA had done huge harm.

1831

The only thing that works is single payer.

You can’t use market forces when you’re talking about literally dying. Now if some people want some platinum fancy pants, 1st class services or whatever they can pay extra for them.

The French system is basically that and seems to work out well for them.

But we’re talking about a country where paying for fucking roads, police and schools is asking too much of people so good fucking luck fixing anything ever.