The Glade 4.0

Hence the need for a definition of "pre-existing condition" versus "recently sustained/contracted" in the legislation.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

So, the way to reform healthcare is to start prosecuting sick people? Gee, I wonder why the Right has a reputation for lacking compassion.

Because being sick is an excuse for trying to play the system. It's no wonder the left has a reputation for irrational emotionalism.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

This makes no sense.

She has an illness and is covered on her parents until age 25.

Are you saying that by age 25, enough time to complete a bachelors, 3 year masters, and potentially a year of doctoral study post-high school that she couldn't obtain coverage from an employer?

Horseshit.

Millions of people graduate school from their bachelors and go into a fine job that has benefits.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

I didn't say it was impossible, just that it was unlikely. Especially in today's era of education creep and mandatory unpaid internships. If you did a poll of all 25-year old college degree holders, do you think a majority of them would have full time jobs with full benefits?

In addition, she's got it relatively easy. She's from a middle class family that has insurance and can afford to send her to college. How does it work if you don't have insurance and have a child with a serious genetic disorder? Do you have to quit your jobs to get them on Medicaid? What happens when they turn 18? Can they ever work at all without losing their medical treatment? Obamacare provides the family with heavily subsidized insurance that covers them until age 26, and then provides subsidized insurance to the 26 year old if they need it.

Xequecal:

Please, for the love of god, stop repeating demonstrable falsehoods as fact. Obamacare doesn't provide ANY coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, because it has been proven to provide almost 0 hospital and specialist care nationwide. None of the insurance networks that actually pay or are accepted by providers are adequately represented in the exchanges, particularly when it comes to the type of medicine your currently discussing. Stop trying to defend bad policy based on inaccurate anecdotes. Obamacare doesn't work, won't work, and cannot be made to work in the ways you want it. The goal of the legislation is to force the United States into a national, single-payer, single-provider system, because that's what your political ilk thinks works in the rest of the world. But, you guys aren't economists and health care administrators, so you have no idea how cumbersome, bloated, and dysfunctional the substantive government intrusion already is. You guys also don't understand or know who pays the bills, so you guys have been marginalizing large charity groups and healthcare subsidization from the private sector for as long as Obama has been in office.

Obamacare is, as Arafys said, an unmitigated disaster. It doesn't benefit anyone and in the long run it's going to HURT every human being in this country.

If you want healthcare reform, then you need to start by getting the government out of healthcare.

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As someone who recently experienced first hand the British healthcare system, I can say that you couldn't be more wrong.

For those who don't know, the UK system is true socialized medicine. Government owned and run hospitals and completely free to UK citizens.

Aside from taking a bit longer to get admitted than what we typically see in the US (much of that due to the fact that I was a foreigner), the healthcare quality that I received was hands down better than anything that I've received in the US.

lawlwut?

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The Dude abides.

Free in the sense that you don't pay for specific services. Obviously there is a cost in the form of taxes to the citizenry as a whole.

You know, the more you post these ridiculous absolutes, the dumber you're going to look. Even darksiege's anti-Obamacare piece admits that the person in the article can get both hospital and specialist care from exchange plans, even from the top hospitals, he just can't get both of them at the places he wants from the same plan. The article also mentions how he must pay 40 to 50% more if he wants to change insurance, and conveniently fails to mention that before Obamacare, he would not be able to change insurance at all.

I personally also think Obamacare is pretty terrible simply looking at it from the perspective of overall healthcare quality, it's insurance reform when we needed healthcare reform. It's a significant net negative, but claiming it helps noone over and over just makes you look dumb.

However, I also don't really see any kind of alternative. The interests of the health care industry and insurance companies are not aligned with what the public wants. The public doesn't want to see people completely cut off from non-emergency medical care, and the public cares about fault. The health care industry can not profit if you aren't sick and the insurance industry doesn't give a **** about fault, just how high risk you are. They don't care if you're high risk because you're a 400-pound fatass chain smoker or because you got a nasty genetic condition from birth, they don't want to deal with you either way.

The fact is, conservatives are simply unable or unwilling to own up to the consequences of the privatized care they want and that makes their arguments easy to take apart. I can bring up "look at all these expensive genetic conditions that poor to middle-class people would have no chance of surviving with private care!" and conservatives will fall over themselves backpedaling on their positions, and fall back to stupidly dishonest positions like, "Well if you took the government out, that would really cost a tenth of what it does now!" and "Well, XXXXX should just work 90 hours a week for the rest of their life starting at age 13 so they'd be able to afford something!" Very few are willing to make actual honest arguments like, "It doesn't matter if people die, it's wrong to use other people's money on their treatment." or "These super-expensive conditions are pretty rare, so we'd be far better off letting them go and having all that money improving the lives of everybody else on top of a more efficient private system."

...

Xequecal:

Public wants are not what the Obama Administration is telling you are public wants. You keep forgetting that 88% of Americans were FINE and wanted NO CHANGES to their healthcare when this process started; yet, you keep talking about marginal difficulties as if they were widespread, catastrophic norms facing all citizens.

I have more experience with pre-existing conditions than anyone on these forums. I suffer from Lupus, Agent Orange Syndrome, and have been treated for 3 different types of recurrent cancers. Let's talk about the quality of my healthcare and the very real reality that I'm losing all coverage on 1 January 2014 because of these changes. I haven't thrown my personal experience in the hat, because the overwhelming evidence indicates that most people won't actually have viable coverage. Obamacare does nothing to change how insurance companies are regulated and allowed to operate at the state level. Obamacare isn't a massive Medicaid or Medicare Expansion; the expansion for those programs was an after-thought.

You keep telling me this is going to make it easier for me to get insurance; there's not a hospital or practice within 200 miles of my home that accepts any of the Federal exchange plans available to me. Not one. Of course, I should say plan, since most of the Federal exchange providers aren't licensed to operate where I live. This isn't some easy fix; this isn't something that's improving the situation.

You guys are continuing to defend a bad bill of goods; continuing to forgive Obama's outright lies about what would change; and then telling me I'd backpedal on my position because of their falsehoods or some marginal, statistically insignificant portion of the population based on your morality? You're delusional dude.

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Khross, it's not surprising that Obamacare is bad for you, because you are a fairly wealthy individual. Obamacare is designed to help the poor and the lower-middle classes at the expense of people like you. Trust me, I also hate it when liberals claim that Obamacare improves health care for everyone, as this is stupid and absurd.

Xequecal:

Obamacare is bad for me because I'm losing access to healthcare entirely; that has nothing to do with my wealth.

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Are you losing access to health care? Or are you losing access to insurance to pay for said healthcare? (or unable to get your insurance to pay for health care at a local facility?)

It's a little of all three columns. My Oncologist is closing his practice this month. My Respiratory Specialist is closing her practice this month. My Endocrinologist has already shut down his practice. The exchange plans don't actually provide me any options for insurance or even basic care: none of the underwriters are licensed to operate in my general vicinity within Georgia; Florida has a different set of plans and most of the insurance on the exchanges is less than portable across state lines, because of network coverage problems. The largest underwriters aren't competing on the exchanges; they're just sticking with the group plans they can keep.

This implementation is horrible.

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No, this isn't true.



http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/health/policy/21poll.html?_r=0

My health insurance rates are going up by 52.7%. Me dental and vision plans are not changing one cent.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Dude, that's dated June, 2009. Do you honestly feel that's still an accurate representation?

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The Dude abides.

Why does it "still" need to be accurate? PPACA was passed in March 2010. The fact that people might have buyer's remorse today doesn't change the fact that they got what they wanted.

In light of recent revelation, you can't say they got what they wanted. What they wanted is what they were promised. That's not what they got, and buyers remorse hardly applies because of the lies.

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In time, this too shall pass.

Arathain:

You're doing a pretty good job of repeating the White House position on why we moved forward with Obamacare, despite the overwhelming antagonism towards any reform that affected existing coverage and provider networks.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/11 ... statement/


Americans were satisfied with their care; the possessive is quite operative and significant there. Reform for a broken system, because other people are suffering its impacts, is not the same as reform for me. The White House and our government deliberately misrepresented the situation; they convinced America that a significant portion of our population was incapable of securing coverage or care (as opposed to the majority of that number being willfully uninsured). And then there are all the comments from people astounded that they would have to bear the costs.

The White House lied; the White House is continuing to lie; and suggesting that most Americans support the particular reforms we got is just ludicrous. Most Americans wanted reforms that closed the "apparent gaps" our White House was talking about, not reforms that fundamentally altered everyone's access to coverage and care.

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And going bankrupt. With rationing for the elderly. [edit: Rationing now being extended beyond just the elderly]



Unfortunately, we don't have quality metrics from your anecdotal example. That said, I'm glad you perceive yourself to have received good care.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

What "mandatory unpaid internships?" Sounds like horseshit.

As to your second point, let's see:
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/cpstable ... 01_000.htm

[I used the 'all races' data point, feel free to drill down]

Feel free to look through the data, although there is no data specific to the 25-year old age only (they only come in age brackets).

However, the 18-24 bracket goes from "covered by own insurance" (as a percentage of the total polled) about 10% to 41% for the 25-34 bracket. Weird how that jumps when you aren't eligible for mommy and daddy's insurance anymore.

Uninsured rates (meaning a full year being uninsured, not just a portion) is about 25% and 27%, respectively.

However, while I can't easily pivot the table to reflect this breakdown by age, Associate degree holders are only 14% uninsured, with 43.6% getting insurance from their own work, while bachelor's and above are only 8% uninsured, with 53.8% getting insurance from their own work.

Therefore, I feel relatively comfortable saying that at least 1 in 3 degree-holding 25-year olds get insurance from their own company, with overall coverage rates being MUCH higher.



This is just Democratic party fear-mongering, honestly. The odds of the parent of any child with genetic disorders severe enough to warrant noting in your example refusing to work for an employer that provides health insurance benefits, pre-ACA, are slim enough I'd call them not just statistically insignificant but nil. That is, unless this hypothetical parent also is so lazy that getting a job being a full-time employee of basically any decent employer is beyond them.

That said, now that ACA is in place and people are losing their coverage, I would fully expect the parents of that genetically disordered child to have a significant problem receiving care, given that many employers are dropping coverage or reducing benefits, and that most of the nation's dedicated children's hospitals are having trouble making their way in-network on the exchanges (to the point that Seattle Children's has sued the government over being left out.


However, please continue to cite rampantly absurd hypothetical situations as factual without bothering to think them through. As you said to Khross:



Edit:
Furthermore, given that the subsidies decrease and diminish as income increases, this is another example of the government creating indirect incentives to remain a low wage earner. As you said, it's not meant to help "the wealthy."

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

If 25 year olds picked better majors, they wouldn't have to put up with mandatory unpaid internships, and would have better insurance coverage.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.