Quote:
Originally Posted by djchameleon
What really happened is that ACA was written up and conservatives didn't like it so they wouldn't pass it until provisions were in it to protect insurance companies. Now that it pass they are just pointing their fingers at Obama and the democrats saying see see it doesn't work and people have to leave their current junk policies and get something that's more expensive.
There was supposed to be a public option to combat the insurance companies and be competitive because the insurance companies decided this was a great time to raise their rates.
The conservatives decided to have that taken out so that the people would turn against ACA.
A similar system worked very well in Mass. but it's not working on a national level because they ended up tweaking the stupid bill so much just to get it passed.
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What are you even talking about? The ACA being signed into law had nothing to do with Republicans/Conservatives not passing it. The Republican-controlled House was working on their own version of the ACA but had previously sent a completely unrelated tax bill (H.R. 3590) to the Democratically controlled Senate, and that Senate completely stripped the wording out of it and replaced it with what we now know as the ACA in its place in order to get it passed in the Senate legally as a tax bill, because revenue-related bills can only originate from the House. (Which is why the supreme court was able to call the individual mandate a tax, and not a penalty. Had the Senate not replaced the content of a tax bill with the ACA content, we wouldn't have ACA right now)
Sneaky? Hell yea. But apparently it was legal.
When the House sent over a completely unrelated bill to the Senate, they weren't expecting the Senate to turn that into the ACA and effectively nullify the entire point of checks and balances in government. They should have expected it, but Republicans are retarded a lot of the time. Democrats knew that, and holding a majority in the Senate, Democrats knew they could get their free tax bill called ACA to the president's desk with no real opposition at all.
So, yea, I think it's reasonable to be a little opposed to having a tax bill leave your jurisdiction and be hijacked, only to have your minority members in the Senate completely unable to do anything about it.
As far as the not working thing, that remains to be seen. I'm sure most of us want it to work out, but if we're going to substitute wishful thinking for fact, then that's probably not going to go over well. So, hey, if the sh*t goes downhill, I'm not going to put blinders on and pretend sh*t is great. The right is probably jumping the gun on a lot of things, but I see the left doing the same damn thing.
Irrelevant of all the above, though, there is one simple fact that people should know: If you subsidize a public service, you'll need to take more taxes. And in relation to ANY insurance, if you reduce the amount of money insurance companies get from otherwise healthy people, there is simply not enough money for those companies to cover the sick. This is how insurance works. And that's why you see sky-high premiums in a privatized system when more people are subsidized by tax dollars in a government-run insurance program. But on the same token, if people aren't getting private health insurance, the same thing happens. At least people will be forced to choose between public or private, and maybe a greater number will choose private and drive down the private premiums. But if the public option is cheaper because of subsidies, that's what they'll choose, and the government will win out in the end.
Just give it time. The system will provide its own evidence as time goes on.