Yes, it was screwed up, but is that any surprise when Congress passes a 900-page law that they “had to pass so you would know what was in it” that results in this?
Congress tried to craft a politically acceptable mish mash of government and private market and the result was this colossal mess that nobody was going to get right and certainly not in the limited amount of time they had.
That law applies only to the impoundment of appropriated funds. It doesn’t have anything to do with failure to enforce positive laws.
“Our policy is to create a national health service in order to ensure that everybody in the country, irrespective of means, age, sex, or occupation, shall have equal opportunities to benefit from the best and most up-to-date medical and allied services available.” - Winston Churchill
It’s not entirely clear that the national health service Churchill envisioned in his 1944 speech was the same as enacted by the Labour Government after the war. In any event, Churchill neither publicly supported nor opposed the service as enacted. In 1951, he did oppose increased taxes to fund it.
Let’s be clear here…the Democrats in Congress crafted and passed this mess…with the full cooperation of the White House.
The Republicans may be complete chuckleheads, but they had nothing to do with the ACA.
Absolutely true. I should have said the Dems in Congress. Of course it says something about the state of liberalism that they had to come up with this in order to get every Dem in the Senate on board.
That is positively Nixonian. Doesn’t that give any fans of the President pause? Now the President can pick and choose which parts of some laws he wants to enforce?
European leaders, and especially the conservatives, were worried about the threat of communism. They had a chance to steal an issue from the left and make it their own. The veterans returning home were also a rising force. They had sacrificed everything for their country, and they wanted to make good on that debt. That helps explain why Churchill endorsed public healthcare, and why Bismark created the German health system in an earlier era
That’s not really true. It’s based on the Republican proposal from the 90s. They also worked with the Dems for a while there, inserting their own changes and amendments, such as the Grassley amendment, before voting in lock step against it.
I can’t imagine insurance companies making new changes at this point. Those canceled plans are still illegal. The president is just saying he won’t enforce that provision for a year. The liability of selling an illegal policy doesn’t make business sense.
It really is true; Republicans didn’t raise or champion the idea, it isn’t called “RepublicanCare”, and it was passed without any Republican votes. It doesn’t matter who wrote a policy paper 20 years ago. It’s just as obvious and cloying as if everyone loved it, Republicans trying to squirrel in for the credit based upon the same argument. Democrats own this balls to bones. Suggesting otherwise is just a lame attempt to obfuscate and avoid blame for this.
Told myself not to respond to the troll thread. I’ll blame insomnia.
Sobering and poignant piece on the state of health care in Texas, bastion for the uninsured.
http://www.texasobserver.org/a-galveston-med-student-describes-life-and-death-in-the-safety-net/?=fb (Saw this link and quote from Broken Forum.)
There’s a popular myth that the uninsured—in Texas, that’s 25 percent of us—can always get medical care through emergency rooms. Ted Cruz has argued that it is “much cheaper to provide emergency care than it is to expand Medicaid,” and Rick Perry has claimed that Texans prefer the ER system. The myth is based on a 1986 federal law called the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), which states that hospitals with emergency rooms have to accept and stabilize patients who are in labor or who have an acute medical condition that threatens life or limb. That word “stabilize” is key: Hospital ERs don’t have to treat you. They just have to patch you up to the point where you’re not actively dying. Also, hospitals charge for ER care, and usually send patients to collections when they cannot pay.
A public option was thwarted by the likes of Max Fuckus I mean Baukus and other ‘blue dog’ Dems in the pocket of the health insurance industry. It’s not "liberalism’ per se that created a Rube Goldbergian solution to a fundamentally broken health care delivery system. The Dem’s have conservative members who in a different age would be more likely to reside in the Republican party, which of course these days is impossible unless you’re certifiable.
None here are constitutional lawyers. We do not know the legal parameters by which the executive branch can amend laws. I’m not sure if this falls under the purview of signing statements or some other mechanism, but the action (which fwiw I disagree with) cannot be labeled “Nixonian” if we are without facts.
This is true. The GOP does not have a plan or a solution. That they react with glee and do nothing to improve upon or fix those parts they take issue with just shines brightly the light on the core and guiding GOP principle: Fuck the poor.
The hyperbole and media frenzy over the botched roll out is also symptomatic of a nation without patience or perspective. If it doesn’t work now it can’t work. We don’t know that yet. But it should be blindingly obvious that the assertion an unfettered capitalist market is somehow the panacea for the state of health care in this country is demonstrably wrong.
And in counterpoint to the OP:
Saying that Obamacare is based on a Republican proposal is really misleading. The conservative think tank, Heritage Foundation, was one of the early champions of market-based state insurance exchanges. That’s the origin of the “Republican proposal.” However, the Heritage formulation did not envision any role for the federal government in health insurance, nor did it envision all the layers of regulation the ACA has heaped on top of the exchanges. And it certainly didn’t envision them as a gatekeeper to determine Medicaid eligibility. Most of all, as a market-based approach, it did not envision the government dictating the contents of insurance policies, which has lead to the cancellations that are currently causing the Administration so many headaches.
Because the status quo for the uninsured is super awesome. Ask Texas.
There’s a popular myth that the uninsured—in Texas, that’s 25 percent of us—can always get medical care through emergency rooms. Ted Cruz has argued that it is “much cheaper to provide emergency care than it is to expand Medicaid,” and Rick Perry has claimed that Texans prefer the ER system. The myth is based on a 1986 federal law called the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), which states that hospitals with emergency rooms have to accept and stabilize patients who are in labor or who have an acute medical condition that threatens life or limb. That word “stabilize” is key: Hospital ERs don’t have to treat you. They just have to patch you up to the point where you’re not actively dying. Also, hospitals charge for ER care, and usually send patients to collections when they cannot pay.
And nothing says paragon of virtue that insurance companies are when they consider victims of domestic violence a pre-existing condition. The individual market the GOP and the MSM is concern trolling about is 5% of the market. There’s really a lack of balance in the reporting, but for some perspective Getting Past The Health Insurance Plan Cancellation Hysteria
All in all, there’s a lot of hype about policy cancellations. Some valid, some not. Everyone will have access to health insurance in the future. Some will pay more for it than they do now. The people with the lowest incomes will generally pay less. But truly awful policies that don’t provide any sort of safety net are going away. That’s a good thing. And people with pre-existing conditions will be able to get coverage. That’s another good thing.
Many of us on the left were not and are not happy with the ACA and the current state of affairs isn’t helping matters. But despite assertions to the contrary, the free market and the purity of the profit motive has not and cannot fix our broken health care delivery system. The GOP solution is of course to do nothing.
In response to the troll OP: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/11/15/jonah-goldberg-is-kind-of-a-dick-about-other-peoples-misfortunes/ and
Chris Hayes: Get it together
ACA’s supporters love to keep raising this, but, in truth, it is today nothing more than a straw man. 42 states have laws that specifically prohibit using domestic violence as preexisting condition. In one of those that does not, Mississippi, the Insurance Commissioner, Mike Chaney, has said that he would charge any insurer that tried to use it with violating the Fair Trade Practices Act. In another, North Dakota, the insurance commissioner looked at the companies that wrote 98% of the health insurance policies in that state and found that none of them used domestic violence of a preexisting condition. Also, several years before Obamacare, the health insurance industry’s trade association, AHIP, supported the National Association of Insurance Commissioners’ model law outlawing the practice. You would have a very hard time finding a major insurance company that still uses that practice. Does this make them paragons of virtue? Of course not. But misleading arguments are poor justification for lousy policy.
This is an excellent point. Even if the President makes some sort of official announcement that his administration won’t enforce a law (an action which would be deliberate abandonment of Executive branch Constitutional responsibility, but we’ve all seen how much the current powers that be from all sides of the aisle care about that recently, but I digress) an insurance company would still expose itself to a lot of risk by breaking the law.
What penalties does the ACA have for insurers who violate it?
As critical as I am right now about the ACA, I’d rather suck it up than go back to the old system, because I know how bad it is.
It’s an illustrative example of what insurance companies can do absent government regulationin the pursuit of their primary goal, i.e. profit. While not necessarily ‘evil,’ they will do what they can to maximize said profits and that can and often is in direct conflict with the health of an individual. The health insurance industry is inherently discriminatory (age, genetics, gender.) IOW it might be economically sound policy to deny coverage due to a pre-existing condition but it certainly isn’t ethical. And while ACA regulations may be too heavy handed, the GOP has done nothing to fix it or even made any rational proposals that I’m aware of (tax cuts, tort reform and interstate competition* will do nothing to help the under or uninsured.) So far as I can tell they are perfectly happy with the status quo pre-ACA.
*Insurance companies can already sell insurance across state lines, they merely need to be licensed in those states.
From the HELP Committee report on Bipartisan contributions to the ACA
Amendments to the Affordable Health Choices Act
788 amendments filed
287 amendments considered during the markup
161 Republican amendments accepted
36 Democratic amendments accepted
49 Republican amendments rejected
2 Democratic amendments rejected
Beyond a discussion limited to health insurance, I have a philosophical problem with regulating against what people could do, if they aren’t doing it. Putting that aside, your link points to the bad results of allowing medical underwriting and I agree that eliminating that is one of the good things that the ACA accomplishes. My problem with the ACA is that you don’t need a 900-page law to get rid of something that could have been accomplished in a 19-page law. One of the interesting things that the ACA does is to address the “discrimination” you point to. The law’s rating provisions states that there can be no more than a 3 to 1 variance in rates by age. Seems more fair than allowing insurers to rate anyway they want by age, right? The effect of this provision is to drive rates down for old farts who are pre-Medicare like me (great for me!), but drive rates up for young adults (bad for most QT3ers!). Couple that with the ACA’s very weak individual mandate and the early results are as you would expect: The “young invincibles” are staying away. If that trend holds, the system will effectively become a financially unsustainable high risk pool. So great, it’s more fair, but fairness can’t be an end in itself.
Most folks generally have no problem with varying automobile insurance rates based on driving record because they recognize that driving is voluntary behavior. Nobody voluntarily gets sick. But, of course, there are a lot of voluntary lifestyle choices that people can make to reduce the chances that they’ll be users of the healthcare system. So, if we say that everyone should pay the same for healthcare, whether through insurance premiums in a private system or tax dollars in a public system, should we also mandate healthy lifestyles? It would certainly be more “fair” to those who eat healthy foods and exercise regularly wouldn’t it? How far are we willing to extend mandating “fairness?”