Voter: I Am Leaving The Democratic Party Over Obamacare, "Everything They Said Was Not True"

Here it is plainand simple. Not a TV talking head or pundant. Just an average guy expressing what he and lots if not most of us experienced. Biden will campaign tuting Obamacre and the canards about moving low income from Medicaid to having an "insurance policy" but ignoring the truth and lies that were told. So give a listen and if you voted Democrat previously just consider...

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/v...mpaign=mailchimp-newsletter&utm_content=Front Page Module&mc_cid=2450d8f972&mc_eid=3773b6ec2a

A two-time cancer survivor delivered a video monologue on how he was duped by Obamacare and the Democratic party on healthcare reform.


"VOTER: I thought I would share why I am no longer a Democrat... I was a two-time bone cancer survivor, still am. That's how I lost my arm. Having healthcare was extremely important to me. I heard all the talking points of "if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor," "if you like your plan, you can keep your plan, "the average family is going to save $1,500 a year," "it's not a tax." All of this stuff makes sense to me, how this was being pushed. And then the Democrats were saying Republicans don't want you to have health insurance if you have pre-existing conditions. Well I was a walking pre-existing condition having cancer twice.

My insurance was $185/month with a $1,000 deductible. That was for a family of 5. So I voted for Obama-Biden in 2008 based on Obamacare. Now fast forward to 2010 when Obamacare was implemented. Everything that they said was not true. The Supreme Court ruled that it was a tax if you didn't have insurance, that penalty. So that was a lie. Insurance premiums went up instead of down. That was a lie. The insurance policy that I had specifically that I had going through 2 bouts of cancer -- chemotherapy, amputation, all of this stuff. It was great insurance. The insurance company canceled it because under the new Obamacare guidelines that policy wasn't good enough so they no longer offered it. They came up with a new offer and said this is what your new plan will be or you can go through the marketplace. And when I looked at it, the cheapest insurance I could find to replace that one was $1,200 a month with a $6,000 deductible.

Remember, $185/month with a $1,000 deductible is now $1,200/month with a $6,000 deductible. No additional income. So I had to make a choice. Do I keep a roof over my children's head or do I get health insurance and struggle? And I choose to just keep a roof over my children's head. And then I was penalized every year. I didn't have insurance for 10 years after that. I couldn't afford it.

For ten years I was penalized every single year because I could no longer afford the insurance that I was required to get through law through Obamacare. I voted for that ****. And it did nothing but hurt me and my family."

Continues in video..

https://twitter.com/ImMeme0/status/1772279457711034482?ref_src=twsrc^tfw|twcamp^tweetembed|twterm^1772279457711034482|twgr^0ab73be74ebb234ef0d755419b9fa111d0f98819|twcon^s1_&ref_url=https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/03/25/voter_i_am_leaving_the_democratic_party_over_healthcare_everything_they_said_was_not_true.html

 

lol, and this person thinks republicans will help him more in healthcare. Republicans cater to the corporate profits, to which such persons are a detriment. Obamacare without the public option is basically the republican alternative to the old Clinton Plan. In short, it's not very liberal and is basically a compromise moderate solution that can't deliver the things that sufficiently funded public health insurance could deliver (see the rest of the developed world for examples).

 

the republicans would have gone with the status quo (remember: $185 a month/ $1000 deductible). instead, obama and his crew introduced the poison pill. they shook up the insurance companies and the response was overwhelmingly against low cost patient care. it was predictable, but the democrats were just so sure they were the smartest ones in the room and that they could make the inevitable simply go away.

 

Technically he only said he voted D for Obamacare. Maybe he was a conservative or moderate that also happened to highly value healthcare, and that got him to go D. Then he found out Obamacare was crap and lost any faith that D was the healthcare vote.

Its a good reason. D's virtue signal about healthcare, but the ideas on how to fix it are all terrible.

I vote R because gun rights. If R's start trying to restrict guns (or D's stop trying to restrict guns) I could switch very easily. That just to demonstrate: single-issue voters exist.

Hell I still prefer RFK to Trump. If RFK hadn't lost his Party for the sin of not worshipping the pharmaceutical corporations, I would be voting D this time around.

 

The status quo wouldn't have caused him to keep his lower cost plan over time, unless he's just an unusual case and grandfathered in to a plan that couldn't drop him but sure wishes they could as he's hemorrhaging their profits. Health costs would have gone up with or without obamacare. The real issue with obamacare to function as intended was that for a young, healthy person, a little fine wasn't going to make it worth it for them to get health insurance. But the companies need such healthy persons to offset being required to keep people with pre-existing conditions, who are seeking insurance because they are about to use a lot of it.

Bottom line though, is that there was no way to make for-profit healthcare insurance work well. It's always a siphon of resources, where the profit motive doesn't lead to a better product or more innovation but just a company working to cherrypick healthy people wherever they can, adding little utility for all the overhead it adds.

 

I wish your folks hadn't installed it then.

 

and i can't buy a chicken for two dollars any more. yes, prices do go up, but a 600% increase doesn't sound like it's working either. this isn't even about one single problem (in this case, obamacare). it is a series of bad decisions by government that have culminated in an untenable situation. the price of insurance is influenced by the price of healthcare, regulation and the cost of living. the price of healthcare is influenced by pharmaceutical prices, regulation and judicial malfeasance. the price of pharmaceuticals is influenced by technological necessities, regulation and political intrigue. the expectation of profit is mixed up in all of it, but it is that same expectation that spurs progress in medicine and innovation in its practice. the greatest negative constant in this equation is governmental interference. from over-regulation to outrageous compensation for even the most innocent malpractice incidents, government has done more to increase the cost of medicine than anything else. they do the same thing to everything they try to control and they are trying to control everything.

 

Can understand disliking the ACA and the Democratic approach, as long as this person doesn't think the GOP is going to help them on the health care front.

 

This is an example of the true cost of a corrupt media. People are too busy to try to figure out a 30 page booklet of exceptions. So they go with what you read.
They could never have sold it without the media.
AND the even did it for free.

 

Obamacare is what Obama and the Dems gave us, I note you could refute nothing the man said and simply like the Dems and Biden and Obama don't care the program wa an utter failure and millions have suffered ever since.

 

I never liked Obamacare. I think my main reaction at the time was it's "a big nothing." The good thing to say about it is that it reduced people with no coverage at all, but it was always a desperate attempt at a moderate approach when a more liberal approach was needed. I really don't think it caused a lot of suffering, but it failed to really address the main problems caused by for-profit health insurance. Because it failed to solve the main issues, suffering continued.

 

We all know how insurance of ALL forms is designed to spread the risk which our private markets did and gave the most people the best insurance. I note nothing in your post says that "NO Obamacare did work and is great and we should all be glad Obama/Biden and Dems did what they did".

Do you not grasp how a competitive market offers the most bang to most people while government run programs do the least with the most cost is a historical fact?

 

That's not true at all, and you would know that if you knew anything about the healthcare systems of other developed nations. Government run programs have lower overhead because the system is much simpler and does not need to cater to profit. Profit in other areas of the economy can be the proverbial carrot that gets things efficient, excellent, and innovative. But in health insurance it's mostly about minimizing costs, and you do that by finding ways to avoid covering sick people, avoid covering expensive things regardless of efficacy, etc.

Spreading risk isn't what happens because young and healthy people tend not to buy in at all, taking their chances. And so the market is left mostly with sick people who feel they need insurance - or have insurance by default due to their employer. Obamacare did not fix this problem because the penalties were smaller than the cost of having insurance.

A competitive market in health insurance basically gives relatively healthy and/or wealthy people what they want and harms relatively poor and unhealthy persons. If the purpose of health insurance is to promote health and prevent financial ruin when a healthcare crisis arises, the for-profit free market system is a very suboptimal approach.

Obamacare not being amazing should properly be understood as the failure of moderate policy when more liberal policy was correct all along.

 

It took some people who got care through medicaid and other charity and gave them a card with "insurance" printed on it. Less the 5% of the people out there. And gave the rest of us what the guy in the video got. Was it worth it to give those few a card with "insurance" on it so they could have "DIGNITY"?

 

Other countrie have hidden cost and hidden revenue and less service for fewer people with no incentive to make it better and why many of them are privatizing more and more of their failing systems. The same with our government here and why so many complaints about how badly it does provide services and the lack of their ability to actually produce results with all the money.

Why do you believe profits are some kind of evil disease on an economy and a draining factor. It is competition that makes companies including insurance companies to make themselves BETTER and to provide BETTER coverage than their competitors and to work harder to make sure their CUSTOMERS ARE HAPPY. Want to see what happens when you get rid of competition, go to any or read about since they ultimately fail socialist countries. Go down to your Social Security or welfare of DMV office and see the lackluster service you can get at many of them if not most.

 

Healthcare costs continued to rise. For the most part, that would have happened anyway. The US has long covered fewer people at higher cost than other developed nations which use socialized health insurance. Naturally adding more sick people by tying insurance companies hands on pre-existing conditions will cause us to cover more people but at higher cost. The dignity of these people being able to get actual care instead of being stabilized a few times in the ER before dying - that's a win - but it doesn't negate the fact that it was a suboptimal approach based upon the republican alternative to the clinton plan.

 

Profit is a very good thing, but only in the right context. Developing a better product that people can choose to buy if it's good enough? That's a good place for profit to motivate improvement. Providing funding for a thing the government can do just as well, that people absolutely need when they need it but are tempted to gamble and go without, with the added cost of profit, increasing profits by denying coverage and cherrypicking healthier people. Profit there is actually aligning incentives against the goals of health insurance. Health insurance might be one of the worst places to have a profit motive. It's like expecting doctors to give people enough care when you subject them to capitation (a system by which doctors are paid less the more they do).

Other countries with more socialized health insurance definitely fund healthcare more efficiently. It is fair to point out, though, that conservatives may try to cut funding to make it inadequate and this has occurred but is not inevitable.

Here's a few graphs:





The last graph might be a bit of cherrypicking by them. I think some of our cancer care stats are good. But heart attack mortality is troubling, as that should be a good one for us and we're just average. Overall point is we do not get substantially better quality overall for the extra money we put in.

 

That right there says it all. Someone signed up to have this goofy **** sent to their email inbox.

 

Interesting.

So in this glorified public system, it is your belief that people who exercise, don't smoke, don't drink, and take care of themselves should subsidize the insurance pool of those who don't maintain their health?

 

Healthcare needs cannot be reliably predicted by lifestyle choices. On average, smokers cost more, but even people who make all the right choices can end up with extremely expensive healthcare needs that requires coverage due to their genetics or random chance or both. So one cannot predict whether one will contribute more or less than one will end up getting back. The best predictor of that would really be age. The young subsidize the old, continuously.

Given a free market, people at lower risk will tend to gamble that they are not the small percentage of people who will need substantial coverage soon - leading to hospitals not getting paid for those who do, higher costs for everybody else, and bankruptcy for many. This also highlights the fact that we cannot really get around the costs of unhealthy people - they will be an issue because we as a society have determined that we are unwilling to simply let them die in the streets (EMTALA).

In terms of lifestyle, all choices occur in a context. Free will is only one of many components that feed into a choice. The public health landscape in America is severely eroded by the power of corporations. Primary care, the next level of intervention for issues like this, is also underutilized because of issues with how providers are paid and people who are not covered. Much needs to be done. Much that is far more useful than blaming people for being unhealthy.

The burden for everybody falls to their tax burden. Actual costs would be lower, but instead of being paid to an insurance company it would be a part of taxes.

 

Oh, thats not true in the slightest. Is it only unhealthy choices that lead to health problems, of course not, but the statistics (and common sense) show that people who make poor lifestyle chocies lead to higher healthcare costs.

Age is a factor as well.

Nah. This is passing the buck.

I could lose some weight, i smoke, i drink. Thats all on me.

the higher premiums i pay as a result are my own doing.

we need people to own up, accountability is lacking.

I disagree.

This is nothing more than an attempt to make people victims of their own choices and then impose a collectivist solution that really solves nothing.

And now insurance companies, and corporations are the problem?

Not peoples health choices, not people's prioritization of healthcare..

At what point are individuals responsible?

 

Well, there are certainly ways to hold them accountable without letting them die in the streets after they fail to buy health insurance. One could have dedicated excise taxes on specific foods and products that lead to health problems. Includes cigarettes, alcohol, soda. Use those taxes to help fund medicare for all.

The opposite is true. Good policy assumes people will make bad choices sometimes. One goal of policy is to make it easier, or otherwise more likely, for them to make the right choice. This includes making it easier to get exercise, a primary care doctor who nags them about their weight and gives them tips to improve it, cheaper healthy food and more expensive unhealthy food (via taxes/subsidies), etc.

Insurance companies for profit are especially bad because they add nothing of value. Corporations have utility in making excellent products motivated by profit, but at the same time that doesn't mean they will self-regulate their externalities. We have to assume they will act out of greed. Encourage it where it helps, discourage it where it doesn't. For example, McDonalds will sell you twice as much food as a normal person would eat when you pay a dollar more than the small size. You feel like you're wasting money buying a small, even though it's all you need. So you buy more and eat more. This action by McDonalds, and companies like them, contribute to our obesity epidemic. But unlike for-profit health insurance companies, at least they are providing some service for society by making cheap and tasty food easily available. I'm not going to get into exactly what the ideal policy to regulate that would be - just pointing it out as a way they contribute to the problem.

All choices occur in a context. If you tell somebody they need to kill a baby or die themselves, it's different than if they kill a baby on their own for fun. Even the law recognizes this (mitigating, aggravating factors), and the law is all about holding people accountable. The goal of policy needs to be not to force people to make the best decisions, but to make it easier for them to make the right decision, and hold them responsible when needed. Letting a fat alcoholic smoker who refuses to buy health insurance because they can't afford it die on the street is not the best way to hold them responsible. We've already chosen not to do it that way, and we'd be pretty barbaric to approach it that way. So the solution is to provide a better social context for healthy choices. Part of that would be universal tax-funded health insurance. Easier to go to the doctor for regular preventive care when it's covered automatically, and you're not choosing between it and buying more pizza or keeping the lights on or whatever it is.

 

Why do you feel it's everybody else's responsibility either directly (insurance participation) or indirectly (government taxes) to solve these people's problem?

Honest question. I am trying to understand the collectivist mindset.

What I am gaining from this discussion is that there is little desire to actually hold individuals accountable, and rather the desire is to transfer that responsibility to others.

I simply can't wrap my head around this perspective that seems to transcend multiple issues.

You think government SOLVES problems? Government generally creates them.

Further, I am asking again, why you feel inclined or responsible to solve these issues, and why is government mandated control the first solution?

Profit does not inherently remove value. There is competition in the market, and providing value while making a profit is the drive of each company.

On the converse side, government is a monopoly. A monopoly that can force people to buy the product they are selling, even if it's a terrible product. Take Social Security as an example. It pales in comparison to retirement programs offered in the private market, even WITH profits considered.

Government profit is bloat and inefficiency. The difference is, their "profit" is mandated and forced on the consumer with no alternative.

Nobody is forced to eat at McDonalds, and nobody has a gun to their head to get the large size.

What if government controlled all the restaurants, and they force you to eat there or starve. That is what you are arguing in favor of with insurance.

At what point do you admit that the policy you desire CREATES the problem?

 

We have close to 100% of Americans saying that our healthcare system sucks while we have almost 100% of Democrats telling us how great Obamacare is.

 

It's not about responsibility, it's about outcomes. If holding people responsible leads to better outcomes, you do it. But the "principle of the matter" is definitely not put before outcomes. I think that's the main difference between a conservative and a liberal mindset here.

Now if we try to make each person fully responsible for their own healthcare, a few issues arise. Some people will figure, correctly, that their odds of needing healthcare soon are low, but some proportion of them will be unlucky and require it anyway. Those people, without coverage, can be bankrupted by the bills. Bankruptcy will reduce their productivity, and their unpaid bills lead to higher bills for the rest of us. With the overutilization of emergency services for regular care, they interfere with our ability to handle critical cases, and greatly increase overall costs.

Also, the asymmetry of information between doctors and patients means that a few bad doctors can do a lot of damage, and patients will not really know it because they don't know if they really have a clogged artery - they only know what the doctors told them. We can't expect people to "shop around" effectively in healthcare because the need is absolute, and often urgent, so they go to the nearest ER and are at the mercy of the system they find themselves in.

These points highlight why healthcare in general, but especially health insurance, does not operate like most of the economy.

To reiterate, holding people accountable is one of many tools. Aligning incentives is certainly a part of good policy. If you want to ensure people take their meds, you fully cover them and make it easy to mail them to the patient. If you want to discourage overuse of the ER, you make a copay for the ER but not primary care visits.

The way in which you do it should be the way that leads to better outcomes. Better outcomes being defined as a productive and healthy population.

This is kind of the right-wing religion, I know. Yes, the government can solve problems. We went to the moon, after all. WW2 was won. The government can accomplish things, it's just a question of which tool is better for the task in question: Government or private enterprise. It's true that much of the time, the optimal approach is for-profit but regulated private enterprise. That's not the case in health insurance. And we can see that by the fact that socialized (or at least more socialized) medicine in the rest of the developed world leads to similar or better outcomes in health, at a much lower cost than our system.

I dislike suboptimal policy that leads to inefficiency and suffering. In this case, government becomes a better tool because profit is aligned against the goals of policy. In most parts of the economy, profit is actually good, although often regulation is required to tame it and prevent harm to others.

No not at all. It could even be said profit is its own value due to helping shareholders and employees. It's not that profit removes values, it's that the pursuit of profit is counterproductive to the goals of health insurance because profit is maximized by finding ways NOT to cover services. Ideally for them this means excluding people who have high medical needs, but they can do it in more nefarious ways at times too.

Well of course. The private market is to make profits, and retirement programs benefit from profits. That's the point - to use money to make money.

And actually, in this case it's more like monopsony if we're talking about government health insurance. This tends to drive down prices with their negotiating power, provided congress doesn't do something corrupt like forbid them from negotiating for drug prices.

Governments aren't for profit, they are task oriented. The challenges are different. As you allude to it's finding the motivation to work hard - the opposite challenge that profit creates. These things should be accounted for, but it certainly seems to work out better for the rest of the world. Is our government unusually corrupt and incompetent? Maybe.

Everybody already needs healthcare when they need it, or they die. Profit doesn't help with making this part of the economy more efficient. It's not just theory when you consider all of the other developed countries and how they do it for less than we do.

What policy creates what problem?