Is anyone who would be helped by Obamacare "lazy" according to Repubs?

Obviously the ACA primarily helps those who are poor, and ultimately may cause average income families to pay more. In fairness small scale "wealth redistribution" of this nature is ALWAYS going to be unpopular (at least initially), but based on what I've heard from GOP supporters, those who would actually benefit significantly from it do not deserve it - In other words if you're poor, it's your own fault. Don't bring the rest of us "down" (I.e pay a little more) in order to help those who struggle to afford it or who get refused coverage for pre-existing conditions... That seems to be the position they have. As someone who comes from a nation where healthcare is a right not a privilege and where BOTH public and private hospitals exist (fair choice), which is a far cry from what Obama set out to achieve, I can't get my head around this. It seems ridiculously selfish and ignorant to view your fellow citizens in such a way... Especially considering that the ACA will undoubtedly save lives and benefit children who can't be blamed for their parents financial situation. Where's the compassion?

I truly believe there are some in the American right who would love to remove ALL subsidies and welfare for the poor and let nature take its course. And I'm shocked that these people call themselves "Christian". WWJD?

 

"It seems ridiculously selfish and ignorant"


thats America, that is their culture its what they are taught from birth and what they preach and believe, its a very selfish and ignorant society

 

AKA '(*)(*)(*)(*) you, got mine' school of thought.

 

exactly

 

Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, as for a long time there was a private sector answer to this called Mutual Aid Societies. Fellowships and organizations of people who banded together to share hardship, but thanks to Obamacare, even the last vestiges of this once great and common practice of ours will be wiped out, as they can't stand up to the subsidies.

The subsidies, must be understood, are a trap: subsidies never work to lower costs, only prices, and even that, only temporarily. People who are ineligible for the subsidies will see this right away, the rest of America will see it as their premiums tick up, until they're back to where they started and still climbing.

Move enough resources around, you will undoubtedly help someone. But there's two questions you have to ask:

1. Is what you're doing cost effective? Meaning, is there not some other way where you could be helping far more people, for less?

2. Is it sustainable? Is this something you can guarantee year after year to be there for people? Or do you only have the resources to do it for a short time?

Obamacare is not going to lower the % of our GDP going towards healthcare costs. By 2025, it will equate almost a third of GDP, and Obamacare itself will be responsible for nearly a quarter of the increase.

Imagine this, we have a debt that outstrips the economic output of the entire globe, and we are spending billions more with this new entitlement, without in any way reforming the entitlements we already had. Does that sound sustainable to you? Do you honestly think there is no better way for us to meet our health needs? Anyway you look at it, the fiscal reality remains the same: we won't be able to maintain it. It will collapse, and if we don't move before that, millions will be blindsided.

 

I can't think of too many things that the Left and Right don't disagree on that doesn't boil down to one side or the other holding on for dear life to some cherished all-or-nothing outlook. Rational balance doesn't seem to be a part of either side's repertoire.

Even though there may exist those on the Right that would take govt totally out of the picture when it comes to providing a so-called "safety net" for the needy, I'm betting there are a helluva lot more on the Left that go to the extreme in the opposite direction, by subsidizing and enabling poverty where it wouldn't otherwise thrive. Both sides need to learn a about the wonders of Pragmatism - and the horrors that result from being idealistic, policy making schmucks without a clue.

 

Mutual Aid Societies are completely unresponsive, that's why we have government welfare. You'll notice that most Western nations became welfare states during the Great Depression, mainly because these organisations were incapable of responding to it. In other words, if you lose your job a Mutual Aid Society might be able to help you, but if everyone loses their jobs... not so much.

Also I don't understand the relevance of your video... because Mutual Aid Societies still exist that means they're available to everyone and will be useful come what may? Hardly. Also $360 a month? If the needy could afford that then they could probably afford health insurance!

Presumably with a universal health care system, as countries that have one tend to have around half the healthcare expenditure of the United States.

Yes, it will. The bulk of America's exceptional healthcare spending is because the bloated profit margins in the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. Outside of that, Obamacare is only the start and it largely seeks to reduce healthcare costs for its own sake. Later healthcare reform will likely focus on reducing cost by having the government negotiate better prices and reduced intensity (less superfluous treatments, Americans are somewhat prone to demanding things they don't really need because their insurance will pay for it).

This is irrelevant: America's debt is sustainable. Take an economics course.

 

You just love throwing BS around hoping you don't get called on it again, eh ?

http://www.politicalforum.com/showthread.php?t=322374&highlight=devilmay+gay+mcdonald%27a

 

According to Alex de Tocqueville, they were not. And in age where a homeless man whose found to be needy, is instantly given 90,000 dollars within a day out of a crowd sourcing campaign, what need do we have of wasteful, expansive welfare state? It doesn't follow. That's an industrial age answer, in an information age environment.

Yes. It's not the only answer, but it is part of it.

Because of price controls, recognizing their costs over a longer period of time, and paying the remainder with bonds.

What I'm quoting to you is a CBO estimate, no it won't.

No it isn't. Spending as a factor of of GDP is at 24%, the highest its been since WWII. The highest Revenue to GDP we've ever collected is 20.1%, on average we only bring in 18%.

Further, spending is still increasing faster than our GDP. Do you see the problem? Here's a budget chart showing what our debt is like under the sequester, in case you do not. In 2016, it will just shoot up, and never come down.

 

They were. You need only look at history: namely, the period I mentioned, the Great Depression. Social programs didn't come about arbitrarily, they came about as a response to the failure of the private sector.

Basically, you're claiming- without evidence or even reasonable explanation- that welfare does nothing to reduce poverty and that we're better off without it. It's actually quite well established that welfare has had an immeasurable impact on both relative and absolute poverty.

Erm, "yes"? As in: "Yes they're available to everyone and will be useful come what may"? Because the example you cited costs thousands a year and is only available to "devout Christians" (which, judging by the video of their headquarters, means "middle class white church goers from the Midwest"). Tell me, what happens if an economic downturn hits people so hard that they can no loner afford the $360 a month? Not being a government, they can't exactly take on massive debt so I don't see how you can say that it's objectively as useful- let alone better- than government welfare. It seems that if you couldn't make the payments you'd simply be excluded from the service, sounds like a lot like private healthcare to me.

No, it's because of smaller profit margins for pharmaceutical and insurance companies, less superfluous intensity of treatment, and greater consumer market power. I'd suggest doing some actual research into healthcare, rather than throwing around assertions blindly; how would price control affect overall healthcare costs as a percentage of GDP? Other countries genuinely devote half as much resources to health care as the United States. It's not just less money spent, it's less resources (drugs, machinery, doctor's time) used.

But it doesn't factor in other healthcare reform that has yet to be enacted or proposed. The Affordable Care Act is not the final step of healthcare reform in the United States. This is just the first step, extending coverage to those that were previously excluded and giving the government/consumers greater negotiating power.

It will "never come down"? Sounds like the kind of blind assertions partisans make when they know nothing of macroeconomics. It will come down when government revenue increases: either because of increased taxes, economic stimulation or an end to the current economic downturn. That's how government works: during a recession, government spending has to remain constant or the economy will suffer more, so spending remains the same or increases while tax revenue drops. This is sustained with government debt- most of the debt is bought by the Federal Reserve, essentially the government pulling money out of its arse and promising to put it back later. And it works just fine considering that governments are not people and have centuries to pay off their debt and that America's debt isn't even exceptional: it's actually a lower percentage of GDP compared with countries like Japan or Britain that have had no noticeable impact on their economic capability.

 

Remind me what your country has done that rivals ours in compassion for others? I will wait. Take your time.

Wel also give more to charity then your citizens. I can feel confident in that claim without even knowing where you are from. Why is that?

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Umm.... Google "Japan lost decade"

We are still spending 2009 crisis levels and we have less employment to show for it. Oh and stagnant wages and higher costs.

 

I know what the lost decade is. What does it have to do with my point? My assertion was that Japan's debt hasn't had any bearing on its economic capability, something you have failed to dispute.

What point are you even trying to make? Yes, you're still spending the same as in 2009, because you don't cut spending during a recession. Decreased employment is a separate issue entirely.

 

How has skyrocketing spending working out? For the people?

So, we spend a fortune, government takes up GDP, useful and productive industry becomes less competitive as we produce more government, and this is a good thing? How? Or are you arguing that stagnation is acceptable? Isn't that another word for the idea "hasn't lost economic capability"?

 

First of all, it wasn't a failure of the private sector, it was a failure of monetary policy. Even Ben Bernanke copped to the Federal Reserves lackluster response to the deflationary pressures, saying " Regarding the Great Depression. You're right, we did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again."

Second, Social Security has locked us into an unsustainable system that's a raw deal for all. On top of being a regressive tax that hurts the poor, each successive generation of recipients have received less and less on their "investment", culminating into 2010's announcement that everyone who started receiving payments that year will get back less out of social security than they put into it. I could use my money better buying treasury bonds on my own, although, that was always the case.

Nothing effective at any rate, because curing poverty isn't simply giving people money, that's just alleviating symptoms. A cure, instead, requires an ingrained sense of industriousness and earning an income on one's own merits that sustains them. We have in fact known this for quite a while, through observing over decades what happens with foreign aid given to impoverished nations. Most recieve the money, take it, and little to nothing changes, they're still poor. Rather, you only get a Botswana, or a Singapore, when the people in that nation take it upon themselves to spend tax revenues judiciously, and giving focus to productive practices, not simply take hand outs from the western world.

Bringing the focus back home, African-American poverty was decreasing by 1% each year, every year from the 1940s to the 1960s, before Lyndon Johnson started implementing his "Great Society" policies. Some narrow consequences of his policies are easy to see, out of his "Model Cities" program, $400 million a year was given to areas of Detroit and Chicago to alleviate "urban blight", that now instead lie in ruins. Back on the Macro level, the progressing downturn in African-American poverty ceased, and reversed into a slight uptick.

Your own source shares some of this (pg 3, middle paragraph), and while it seeks to discredit Murray's explanations for why it happened, it doesn't deny the observations. Post-Great Society, poverty became worse.

Well here's another, secular one then, and Samaritan only costs "1,000s of dollars" because they exist in a market where the vast majority of consumers don't discern what they're buying. Patients are gladly paying, say, $2400 for a PET scan when another clinic down the street offers much the same service for $1200, as they neither see, nor feel the effects of making that choice. At least, not until their co-pay becomes so overwrought that they're better off making cash payments.

Yeah, this is called Price Controls. The consequence, among others, is that the U.S. develops most pharmaceuticals, with Canadians having to cross the border to buy meds that their domestic NHS doesn't offer. It was quite a battle back home as to whether or not these "foreign" meds qualified for their standard subsidies.

You honestly could have fooled me. Japan is in a crisis as, among other things, people use up bed space when they aren't critically sick. In France, they've put birthing wards out in the middle no where, where usage rate is so low that they fear the attending physicians aren't getting enough "action" to keep their skills sharp. Across Europe, there's calls of Over-treatment and over diagnosis, redundant intuitions and clinics, at a time when they are trying to save money.

But perhaps the worst thing I can leverage against their systems, is that, like with their public expenditures in general, they aren't sustainable. And if they aren't sustainable, then you aren't calling for a "better" system. You're just calling for a system with a different list of problems.

And destroying plans of people who will be now forced onto medicaid. And forcing people who were just fine with mini-med plans or no insurance at all to purchase plans they don't need.

And, having not addressed the central cause of the rise in premiums, but instead resorting to rampant use of Subsidies, it will in fact cause premiums to rise, just as the Chief Actuary of Medicare foresaw, and just as the CBO itself reports.

Indeed, that Subsidies were used to any wide degree at all, is how I know this "solution" wasn't serious about lowering prices. Subidies do not do this, they always lead to a rise in prices, because they give more margin for how much a producer can charge, until the price is a composite of where it originally was, plus the subsidy.

If making premiums fall was truly the goal, then we should have torn down Government barriers that were keeping premiums high and competition low. We should have rescinded the AMA's monopoly on licensing and determining the Doctor's scope-of-practice. We should have removed the tax write-off for employer-provided care, or given one for those with individual plans, so that we could level the playing field, and hopefully get most Americans to abandon the ad hoc, wasteful practice that costs everyone $3-4,000 just for the companies to provide those plans.

As it stands, we got none of this. "Price", wasn't the focus.

... The chart I cited? That came out of the White House, made in tandem with the GAO. Look to the right side, and tell me if my words do or do not reflect what's happening.

Also: stop using Macroeconomics to refer to fiscal policy. Government budgets are not the economy. They are not unrelated, but they are also not the same thing.

Yes, standard Keynesian narrative, I'm aware. Sadly, none of this guarantees GDP growth will recover, we could quite easily be heading in the direction of Japan, which is headlong into it's third lost decade.

<1% interest rates? Banks buying more and more of their nations own debt? Under-performing employment numbers? The parallels are staggering. The litmus test for all this, is when interest rates start to recover, if the Monetary giants let it.

And remember this is why I said the U.S. Government is unsustainable: Absolute spending by the Federal Government, is growing faster than the Economy. If we keep our gaze on the two major entitlements (Medicare and SS), which will make up half of our Federal budget soon, the rate is faster still. If GDP growth doesn't surpass them, we are due for a debt trap, just like Japan.

 

The Affordable Care Act makes rates go up for young healthy people. Why do this?

 

America is not and never has been a generous or compassionate country, here are the facts, my countr (UK) gives more than double what yours does in foreign aid, despite yours being the richest country in the world, and most of yours goes to one country (Israel) that doesn't even need it


http://www.statisticbrain.com/countries-that-give-the-most-in-foreign-aid-statistics/


you will also note the top 13 are all in Europe so don't give me this crap about foreign aid and generoisty, the USA are scum when it comes to such things, take away what you give to Israel you give practically nothing to anyone

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Percent of GDP Commited to Foreign Aid
Country Percent of GDP to Aid
1 Sweden 0.99 %
2 Norway 0.88 %
3 Denmark 0.82 %
4 Netherlands 0.80 %
5 Belgium 0.50 %
6 United Kingdom 0.48 %
7 Ireland 0.43 %
8 Finland 0.43 %
9 Spain 0.43 %
10 Switzerland 0.42 %
11 Austria 0.42 %
12 Germany 0.38 %
13 France 0.38 %
14 Canada 0.32 %
15 Australia 0.29 %
16 New Zealand 0.27 %
17 Portugal 0.25 %
18 Italy 0.21 %
19 Greece 0.20 %
20 Japan 0.20 %
21 United States 0.19 %

 

Silly euro. Govenment aid isn't charity. Charity is charity. It has to be given voluntarily and we are number 1:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way...-u-s-takes-top-spot-as-most-charitable-nation

But even if you don't count our military shield of Europe as international aid, like most ungrateful euros, we still give out more at 1.65% of our GDP.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-m...-obama-says-foreign-aid-makes-1-percent-us-b/

We give aid to Israel and Egypt as part of Carter's camp David accord. They get equal amounts.

 

"Is anyone who would be helped by Obamacare "lazy" according to Repubs?"

According to the repubs, yes.

As for bringing the repubs "down," that would be difficult, at least morally. They're already about as low as you can go short of doing time. Don't forget, the combination of lies (from the repub leadership") and selfish stupidity (on the part of their followers) is the only thing they have.

 

My only problem with Obamacare is that is forces people to buy purchase private health insurance. Obama caved to corporatist scum who only care about making money for private companies. It would have been better if we had an optional tax, which people can opt out of, that goes to paying for a public insurance fund. If you opt out of the tax, you do not get to use any of the public money, and are forced to use private insurance and are at the mercy of their greed.

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My only problem with Obamacare is that is forces people to buy purchase private health insurance. Obama caved to corporatist scum who only care about making money for private companies. It would have been better if we had an optional tax, which people can opt out of, that goes to paying for a public insurance fund. If you opt out of the tax, you do not get to use any of the public money, and are forced to use private insurance and are at the mercy of their greed.

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My only problem with Obamacare is that is forces people to buy purchase private health insurance. Obama caved to corporatist scum who only care about making money for private companies. It would have been better if we had an optional tax, which people can opt out of, that goes to paying for a public insurance fund. If you opt out of the tax, you do not get to use any of the public money, and are forced to use private insurance and are at the mercy of their greed.

 

Mutual Aid Societies? What utter nonsense. Before government subsidized aid many people just starved to death.

 

you have no military shield of Europe, you protect America through an early warning system in Britain, if anything you should pay us for that

Israel received $2.4 billion in the 2008 fiscal year, while Egypt got $1.5 billion.

you do not give the same amount to Israel and Egypt, and that doesn't count the military hardware you literally give to Israel free

charity is internal within America, thats what you give in foreign aid. .0.19% of GDP, less than half the UK, and a fifth of Scandinavia. America is a very selfish country.

 

Look, you aren't arguing with me, you're agreeing with me.

FOOD STAMPS is how we should approach HEALTHCARE, because FOOD STAMPS are a VOUCHER system.

Voucher systems don't overwrite the market, they instead allow the poor to take advantage of what's in the market, without any disruption to other consumers.


Mutual Aid Societies on the other hand are just one way people choose to pay for their healthcare. If people want to do that, they should be able to, I hope you don't disagree.

 

That's the Government, you're not calculating private charities.

Charity abroad we give over 3% of our GDP, next is the U.K. at 1.7%. At the very bottom of the list is France.

 

How do you make that connection? How does saying someone doesn't deserve a benefit mean that they're at fault for their own condition? There's no basis in reality for such partisan close mindedness.