ACA is not failing and it did reduce the rate of increase in Healthcare costs; there, both of Strollen’s objections addressed.
Health insurance was in a death spiral before ACA-- that was why the number of uninsured kept going up. ACA was the attempt to pull the industry out of the death spiral. You are correct about the moral hazard problems of the ACA, but those would diminish as the penalties for not signing up increased.
Without the ACA, we’ll see vastly different insurance markets in rich and poor (Trump) states, as rich states try to lock in the benefits of the ACA by instituting things like Romneycare. Republicans in poor states cynically hope that they will benefit from this as the sick decamp for states where they will be treated decently, but they forget that health care providers are more mobile than old sick people. So there will be states with few doctors where few people can afford health insurance and health care declines to third-world standards, and states with a lot of doctors where everyone is forced to buy health insurance.
I imagine in many states you will need to prove health insurance to get a drivers license.
We’ve tied patriotism to ignorance. A lot of our young people run around saying America is number one without having even the slightest clue as to what the other countries are even about.
I had an argument with a member of a younger generation the other day about why the idea taxes is theft is not accurate just because taxes go to something he doesn’t like. I suggested he expand his worldview a bit when I said there are places in the world that don’t have relatively clean water to drink. He’s convinced fluoride in our water is killing us all and he’s already been to a a couple of southern states. His world view is so limited he doesn’t even think about people who actually drink water from rivers where sewage is dumped up stream from them and a new cultural experience is limited to a different state in the country he lives in.
It’s almost impossible to ask the voting public to consider other options or draw from them when their view is narrowed to 24/7 of Facebook snippets of only people who agree with them talking about only the country or local they live in.
There are memes now saying it’s not fake news just because you disagree with it. As if somehow facts are just an opinion so anything that is labeled as fake news is just the enemy trying to confuse you.
Yeah but retaliation for what? The only thing that makes sense is they’re retaliating against political correctness. Which basically means they’re angry they can’t be racist anymore.
The go-to insult amongst the Trumpsters I know is “snowflake”. They’ve latched on to safe spaces, trigger warnings, basically all the SJW shit playingwithknives posts about.
They don’t care about facts or common sense as long as they piss off liberals. I really don’t see a path out of this that doesn’t involve a war. I think literal life and death is the only thing that will snap people back to reality.
On some level, I think a bunch of them actually aren’t racist, and wouldn’t normally espouse racist beliefs. But they were convinced that there was some great conspiracy against them, that they must fight against, and that the conspirators were everyone who cared about things like racism.
It’s not just that they can’t be racist. They also can’t be sexist, homophobic, or xenophobic anymore. And that makes a lot of people very angry, because they have these voices in their head that say those things, and they want to just call a N and N, right? What’s wrong with that?
They also say things like: “So ISIS can behead people but we can’t waterboard them?!” and think that Trump is a genius for saying what we’re all thinking, but they are incapable of taking that next step and figuring out what comes after that.
Same line of thinking that went into the invasion of Iraq. “We’ll be greeted as liberators!” “What happens to all those ex-soldiers who aren’t so happy about being out of power?” “Shut up, son, and start making those Mission Accomplished banners!”
No. They are. These people believe that if you don’t wear a white hood, burn crosses and scream N***r all the time, then you’re not racist.
When someone confronts them on more subtle behaviors, like asking them if you call the police on a black man fixing his car in the middle of the night as a potential car thief, and you don’t do the exact same thing when you see a white man do it, why do you think that’s okay? All of a sudden it’s an attack on their freedom of speech, political correctness gone array, but what about the snowflakes and those evil made up SJWs… basically anything that deflects from what was just pointed out to them.
There’s case after case of individuals trying not to provide service to minorities, of making disparaging remarks about the looks of an entire race, and actually using the terms us vs. them followed by I’m not racist, and the last thing we should do is to validate that position.
They’re totally not racist. They just happen to actually be superior to everyone else, you see. They’re just being honest, the brave souls, and other people simply can’t handle it.
Yep. They’ll be all over Facebook and Twitter telling us why MLK was a terrible human being soon.
Oh wait, they’re already doing that. Had a “friend” and her brother bitching about how public schools have the day off. But they’re totally not racist. Just like they’re not racist when they post a video involving a black person and say insanely racist things about him running from the cops or whatever, cause you know, black people are all criminals. HAHA SO FUNNY HAHHAHA.
My opinion is that this is looking at the issue from the wrong direction.
First here are my high level beliefs.
No person, regardless of class, should be put in financial ruin because of a medical emergency. While some can be prevented many of them cannot.
We as a society benefit from everyone being as healthy as possible. I don’t even mean morally but economically and productivity wise.
We as a society benefit from people being as low stress as possible (again, for economic and productivity reasons).
Preventative care is important. I don’t just mean physicals but it’s important that when someone feels something bad going on they are not stressed out trying to weight the financial vs trying to get adequate care before it turns into an issue that requires an ER.
I mention these because trying to frame the issue with a single dimension that healthcare costs are too out of whack is not seeing the full picture. It is not feasible to have health care costs low enough that major emergencies can be paid off without causing major financial hardship for the majority of the people. We still need insurance to assist with those situations and in order for any insurance system to work the risk pool needs to be as wide as possible.
My boss from a few jobs ago was perfectly healthy in his low 20s when one day he was in major pain. His appendix burst and he had to be taken to the hospital and undergo surgery to have his appendix removed. Since he was healthy he figured he didn’t need insurance and now has debt he figures will take him 30-40 years to pay off, and that comes right out of any disposable income that he might otherwise be injecting into the economy (and has it hanging over his head). He’ll have his masters paid off before that.
Contrast that to my mother in law who tripped on an extension cord and split her kneecap into 3 pieces. She had a Centricare visit with x-rays and whatnot. She then had surgery consultation, actual surgery, and months of rehab to get things flexible enough to at least be able to walk again. The difference is she had insurance so they paid about $5k total and the rest was covered. While that can be a lot for a good number of Americans it’s not astronomical.
Both example are things that are are not going to be financially manageable by most Americans no matter how efficient you get health care prices. Even in countries like Mexico where people take medical vacations to get lower healthcare, it’s still not pocket change and the prices are only like that because their general economy is so much worse than ours (not saying this is the sole reason).
So no matter what we still need insurance, and in order for insurance to be viable the risk pool needs to be as wide as possible. The problem with the ACA that I see is two fold:
The individual markets have very small pools filled with people who are either part time, self employed or employed by very small employers that are not required to provide coverage.
A lot of people who did not have coverage before now have coverage.
The first issue is that the risk pool is now split up a lot more and it’s hard to get wide enough coverage to keep everyone’s premiums down. This is compounded by the second issue which isn’t just about sick people getting coverage but now someone who didn’t seek out care for a migraine or a hurt ankle because of the out of pocket cost can now go to a outpatient care center to have it looked out with the finances being somewhat manageable.
For instance I really badly hurt my ankle playing soccer and the next day I could barely move it or put pressure on it without it hurting. Even with the salary I take in (at the time I was making $95k plus I think my wife was working at that timie, and this is in Florida where the cost of living is low) I hesitated to go to a doctor to get it looked at because even though it might have been broken it might not have, but I didn’t want to pay a $75 copay just to be told it’s sprained and stay off it. I did end up going in due to the pain and it turns out it wasn’t broken. They did give me a good brace that allowed me to walk on it so I guess it was a net win but it was also a non-insignificant cost. However in the end it was worth it because if it was broken I could have done some permanent damage by trying to walk on it instead of letting it mend properly.
This is where lower healthcare costs can help. In fact I believe that health care costs should be lower so that we can get rid of insurance deductibles since those are the biggest scams ever (Higher deductible = lower premium, but in order to be able tot cover those deductibles you need to be in a higher income class).
Those instances are what will benefit from lower health care costs.
This is mostly a long way of saying that this isn’t a zero sum game and there’s no one solution to it. We need both. Healthcare costs need to come down so people are not afraid to go to the doctor when they have the flu, or their ear is hurting differently then usual, or a limb might possibly be broken. Getting those people healthy again without them worrying about how it’s going to hurt them financially will allow them to return to full productivity sooner. However we still need insurance for catastrophic and emergency issues and for that the ACA is helping.
I’m not going to sit here and say that ACA is perfect but it’s a step in the right direction. Yes it has flaws but it’s also allowing a lot of people to get healthcare they need that they couldn’t get before, and imo that’s a good thing for society. It does not mean we are done and there’s not more work to do, and it does not mean that we can’t still tackle healthcare prices (though that’s going to be very difficult with healthcare being for-profit plus the out of network scams going on with insurance companies and health care providers). We just need the political will to keep trudging forward, but that seems very unlikely in our political atmosphere (for the same reason we will never see single payer).
There are some non-racists who feel political correctness did go too far, and Hillary was tied in hard with that crowd (some of this is legacy from the 90s, and more of it was the feeling that Bernie was the anti-PC candidate, which was ludicrous)
Being opposed to PC does not make you a racist. Being a racist makes you a racist, and much of the heavy PC crowd is anti-white and anti-male.
That said, nearly everyone I knew who voted Trump out of spite like that- at least they now regret it. Just need to make sure they keep regretting it.
