ACA plans were cheap to start with… who was subsidizing them? some one had to… unless health care industry was eating up the cost?
[quote=“redditva, post:180, topic:57237, full:true”]
why not help those choosing between food and no food and every one use the walmart insulin?
[/quote].
Because the Walmart insulin sucks.
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It even says that, right on the box!
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You and I have this choice offered to us every day, along with the rest of America. So this sentence does not make sense.
But - if what you mean is - there are people who cannot afford food - this also does not have any place in our country. We are the richest country in the world, and we should not tolerate what many other countries in the world are able to take care of: BOTH abject poverty that makes you hungry AND lack of health care for everyone including the poorest.
Again this sentence is not only obscure but contradictory. Why should everyone use Walmart insulin including you and me? There are many countries in the world, none of which are as wealthy as we are, where nobody needs to use walmart insulin unless it is the best for them.
So let me return the question:
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Do you feel that it is ethically fine for us to have some of our people living in hunger and unable to afford health care?
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Why do you think that we are not capable, as a nation, to do what the rest of the Western world, 30 some nations, all of them poorer or much poorer than us, can do: guarantee that everyone can eat and get health care?
I think the real reason we have been unable to do it so far is that there are too many people who feel we don’t need to - a very big difference. I don’t believe in much, but I would love to believe that there is a hell for these people.
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I’m far more receptive to the concept of universal government ran healthcare than I am to a forced insurance market where some people pay more than others… that entire concept strikes me as fundamentally unfair. However, unfortunately I’ve had enough experience with the USA federal gov to know that they pretty badly screw up everything they get involved in, so that certainly causes me concern about the idea of them directly taking over healthcare…
I agree with you. Maybe it’s a contradiction? I do not trust the government to run anything efficiently on its own. Although I don’t think that insurance companies do a good job either. I am not sure what the answer is.
The US may not be quite as well governed as some model countries such as Finland or Sweden or something (likely much richer and with a much smaller, more homogeneous population) but I assure you it is light-years away from most countries, even those with functioning democracies, where you really cannot trust the government to be on your side at all. Seriously. Try just cashing a traveler’s check in India, getting a mortgage, going to the police when someone beats you up, getting a driver’s license, having a pothole fixed, getting clean water, filing for divorce, etc. etc. etc. and you will realize just how good our federal government is in comparison to other countries.
Ironically, almost all of the functional examples you just offered about government actually working in the USA are examples of state and local govt instead of federal.
I would agree that my dealings with state and local govt have been reasonably functional and efficient for the most part.
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Clean water is mandated through the EPA, even if local counties administer it. Getting a mortgage is often through FHA or similar, which is federal. And while getting a pothole fixed may be local, a lot of that money is coming from federally administered programs. In any case the point is you don’t have to bribe anyone here to get things done And if you were to create a Venn Diagram of “gun-wielding criminals” and “politicians” there would not be a 50 percent overlap between the two classes.
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From my vantagepoint, the cost of healthcare insurance under the individual mandate was/is still too high for many people working minimum-wage or marginal-wage (i.e., unable to afford to live independently of parents, spouse, roommates, etc.) jobs. There’s also the issue of the long-term unemployed, many of whom fall off the grid because the government seems to think they don’t exist if they’re not collecting unemployment insurance or Welfare. For many of these people, the penalty is well less than the cost of insurance – or, because they don’t have any income (and are living on the generosity of family and friends), they can’t afford either (and no income, no income taxes filed, no penalty).
The big insurance issue seems to have come about only when, as a population, we moved from “traditional indemnity” plans to HMOs, PPOs, and EPOs and when Medicaid/Medicare reimbursement policies forced healthcare providers to a single payscale and forced them into harriedly-quick and overworked appointment schedules. Now, instead of paying a relatively affordable fee each time you went to the doctor (and being able to just drop in if you became ill overnight), your doctor’s flat (unnegotiated) rate is closer to a week’s salary, because s/he has to scale it up to be able to afford the negociated-down payments from Medicaid/Medicare and the big HMO/PPO/EPO managers, and you can’t just pop in because s/he is scheduled full from dawn to dusk with “every 15 minute appointments” to meed Medicaid/Medicare’s demands – forcing you to go to an “urgent care center” like CVS Minute Clinic or MedEx or something similar.
The other things that have grossly changed since my youth are the proportion of an average person’s salary spent on housing (it used to be 25% of your net salary, now it’s more like 30-40% of your gross salary) and the number and amount of monthly utilities we have (it used to be just gas, electric, and telephone – now it includes mobile phones, cellular-enabled tablets, high-speed internet point-of-presence, internet services such as cloud storage and web space, television programming, and often radio programming).
You’re also presuming someone is able to get a new job within 18 months of losing the old one. Sadly, previous experience shows this is often NOT the case.
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I can tell you straight off that Obamacare made healthcare inaccessible to the thousands of part-time workers employed by my current (soon to be ex, but not by my choice) employer: the PPACA forced said employer to discontinue offering coverage to its tens of thousands of part-time employees because the minimalist program they offered (about $40/month for four office visits a year, plus Wal-Mart’s prescription card) didn’t meet PPACA standards. We’re talking about people working about 20 hours a week, often either going to school or semi-retired, otherwise between jobs and needing SOME sort of income (even if it’s just about minimum wage). The equivalent or cheapest PPACA exchange plan turned out to be something like four times the cost – as much as many of their weekly paychecks. And the prices have only gone up from there, while most of the insurers have left our market.
Wow read the fine print 
I understand because this cheapo insulin is nowhere near as potent as humulin, in order to get the same level of control you’d end up spending as much or more for that Walmart stuff as you fork out to the pharmacy … Walmart ain’t no public service organization 
Just tossing this into the voting discussion - my state is weary of the tea party politics it thought was so cool years ago - so the response this past November is something called “weighted choice” where if you have 8 candidates you rank them 1 thru 8 most wanted to least wanted. Then some series of math formulas occur after the votes are tallied and after that statistical domino process a winner emerges. This is to stop purposefully running a candidate to intentially “split the party” vote" tactic that’s been so effective over the past few years. Weighted choice voting sounds just as open to manipulation as any other process - don’t think it’s a solution. One person one vote must just be too simple for the times.
That must depend on where you live. Here, 100% of it comes from property taxes and (state) gasoline taxes. And our local water supply, which is entirely provided by the city, may be adhering to federal standards but the costs are 100% borne by the city taxpayers. The water treatment plant was built by city funds supported by a bond.
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It also ratcheted up the costs for those who still had insurance, often dramatically. Mine more than doubled.
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And mortgages are in almost all cases ultimately offered by commercial lenders instead of the govt… though govt programs do help to shape and structure that in some cases. And divorces and marriages are state and local transactions… etc
U will find a way like I did. What they really would like to see is for us to disappear. The doctors are taking us for a ride with their so called mew insulin that do not work. All they do is cause our kidneys to shut down in 3 yrs and cause us to become amputee in a few yrs. Don’t trust the new insulin, if test strips are 3yrs past expiration date, they work as long as they haven’t been exposed to moisture, u can reuse a cleaned syringe up to 3 times if cleaned with alcohol, insulin is 25.00 at Walmart, the list goes on. Everyone can use the insulin Walmart sells you DO NOT have to use pens or the pump. You can live one one shot a day and check your sugar twice a day as long as u watch what u eat and don’t smoke or drink alcohol. U do not need a script to get insulin or needles. Just stop paying the doctors and u will be able to afford your meds. I’ve been doing it for seven years and have never been better.
Despite any other issues that the ACA might have created (unintentionally)…all that I consider in weighing whether the ACA was successful or not were the following things:
Did the ACA result in the ability of EVERYONE to be able to get insurance where they may not have been able too before? Yes (It might have been/be expensive, but at least coverage is possible, subsidies or otherwise.)
Did the ACA result in the prohibition of Heathcare providers denying coverage, or hiking costs (discriminating against) for those with pre-existing conditions (Diabetes included)? Yes
Did the ACA result in the elimination of annual caps? Yes (important for Diabetes)
Did the ACA help cover children to the age of 26 who, at such a young age have other things in their young they need to be getting in order and are more priority at this stage in their lives? Yes.
So for all the premium, deductible, and other (again, unintentional because the costs weren’t spread/shared as anticipated/planned for) issues, that the ACA has created which have caused hardships for many…I am still a huge advocate of THE PROVISIONS that, without the ACA, would still not exist…provisions which directly help those with diseases with no cure (such as diabetes).
I just hope any replace plan covers these provisions…I don’t care if they call it ToiletCare when it’s done…
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Q. If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have?
A. Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it one.
If you can’t pay for it, it isn’t “possible”. As far as coverage goes, the ACA did more shifting around than it did expansion. The ACA giveth and the ACA taketh away. Spin the semantics any way you like, there are still large numbers of people without coverage including many of my neighbors. So “EVERYONE” just isn’t true.
Your other points are pretty accurate.
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