<p>Is Obama a socialist? Answer: Not even close.</p>
<p>What’s your stance on health care reform? Answer: Like many Americans, I was satisfied with my coverage before reform was passed, but I am fortunate to have access to an excellent group plan through my employer. That being said, I found it absolutely unacceptable to have 30+ million people uninsured in the wealthiest country on Earth, without the same access that I have to health care, and subject to the whims of the insurance industry and its practices. I have a serious preexisting condition, and I’ve always wondered what would happen to me if I lost my insurance as a result of losing my job. The reform legislation is far from perfect, but I credit Obama for having the backbone and the foresight to push it through. I have no patience for the GOP, which in my view did its best to preserve the status quo.</p>
<p>Look, I don’t agree with every aspect of the bill, but it’s an important intermediate step, given that the Republicans were unwilling to compromise on aspects that you clearly find preferable.</p>
<p>Requiring all companies to provide insurance to employee’s CREATES unemployment and makes it harder for all of us to get a job- basic economics. Tax credits simply do not incentivize employers.</p>
<p>No one in their right mind uses short term solutions (tax credits) for long term spending (health care for employees).</p>
<p>No, the Republicans made no attempts to compromise.</p>
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<p>The Republicans made no attempt to get (1) added to the bill. If some had agreed to vote for a bill that included, say, (2), then it could have been added. Instead, (2) was removed so that they could get enough votes. You should think before assigning blame.</p>
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<p>But then the people that receive health insurance have more of their own money to spend –> businesses increase profit –> can hire more people –> lower unemployment. It’s not like businesses invest in a vacuum.</p>
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<p>:rolleyes:</p>
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<p>OMGZ WES BROKE!!!1!!!11!!1one!11!! Well, except that we’re not.</p>
<p>But if you really care so much, I’d be happy to go spit on Reagan’s grave for you, assuming you hate him.</p>
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<p>Things like insuring millions more people, covering preexisting conditions, longer lasting coverage for children and a bunch of other things that you didn’t mention are all positive steps.</p>
<p>I never said I was a fan of the Republicans. I would have opposed this act almost as much if it had been bipartisan. “Almost” because a bipartisan vote would have shown that more Americans agreed with it. I did forget the longer lasting coverage for children… that’s not bad. I thought quite carefully before assigning blame, and assigned to every person who voted for the bill.</p>
<p>Do you really think that it is sustainable for our country to spend more money than it takes in forever? I like Reagan for a lot of things, but his spending isn’t one of them.</p>
<p>If this act really was just a nice hand up to all those poor uninsured people with preexisting conditions, I’d have much less of a problem with it. Unfortunatly, it isn’t.</p>
<p>If you have anything better than :rolleyes: to say, then by all means say it.</p>
<p>In other words, you would have opposed the bill even if you had received most of the things you wanted. And if the people with your viewpoint had supported the bill, they could have received most of the things they wanted. But since they didn’t, they don’t get what they want. So whose fault is it?</p>
<p>This bill was only ever going to get passed with some kind of compromise. If there are several possible compromises and you get first crack, you can’t complain after you turn your nose up and a different compromise is made.</p>
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<p>That depends on how you do it. As long as the growth of the National Debt is smaller than the inflation rate, you can have deficits in perpetuity while the real valued debt tends to zero. Allowing for 2% inflation, an annual $200B deficit would be sustainable. Another consideration is the possibility of paying off the debt - and it’s nonexistent in the short run. Plus, with the size of the debt as it is now, even large expenditures have relatively small marginal effect on its size. So the key is to run generally manageable deficits but not necessarily excluding any particular bill on grounds of cost.</p>
<p>If I recieved most of the things I had wanted, there would have been no bill to oppose.</p>
<p>What you are saying is like Spain taking over South America and then telling the natives “you should have compromised and given us half your country, then we wouldn’t have had to conquer it all.”</p>
<p>I don’t expect my senators to compromise when my rights are on the line. Had they done so what parts of the bill do you think would have been more to my liking? Not (1), it would never fly, since so many politicians are lawyers and so few are doctors. Maybe (2), but far more likely they’d never cut spending and higher taxes are bad PR unless you only tax the “rich”.</p>
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<p>That’s a bit beyond my level of economics, so I’ll take your word for it. Anyway, last time I checked we were running well over a trillion dollar deficit.</p>
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<p>True, but that doesn’t mean we should make it bigger.</p>
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<p>If you don’t exclude any particular bill on grounds of cost, you will not run a generally managable deficit. That’s just simple logic.</p>
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<p>A “hand up” might be good. A license to steal is BAD. If we had extra resources, we might could give a tax credit or even a subsidy to those people to help them afford insurance. But insurance companies shouldn’t be required to cover high-risk people for the same price as low-risk people.</p>
<p>Basically, this bill does several things that I think trample on personal rights, and several things I think are unwise:</p>
<p>Violation of rights:</p>
<p>1: Allows insurance companies to steal from some of us by forcing us to buy insurance even if we do not get our money’s worth.</p>
<p>2: Allows us some of us to steal from insurance companies by forcing them to insure us even if that is not a good investment for them.</p>
<p>3: Requires employers to provide coverage for their employees, even though they didn’t agree to do so. (This one isn’t so bad since the companies can just pay lower wages to compensate. But now it’s hurting the employees, who might be able to do better if they were paid more and could shop for their own coverage.)</p>
<p>Unwise:</p>
<p>1: Makes the government even bigger, adding more things that are “too big to fail” to our economy, meaning that if they don’t work they will just suck resources forever like social security does.</p>
<p>2: Allows the government even more ability to decide what is right for our lives, moving us one step farther towards Facism.</p>
<p>3: Adds one more entitlement to the list of things we can demand from others if we can’t get them for ourselves.</p>
<p>Yeah, because democratically passing a bill is completely analogous to conquest and destruction. :rolleyes:</p>
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<p>Except that tort reform is something that a lot of Republicans have claimed to push for and something that many Democrats are not wholly opposed to, especially if it would promise the passing of a landmark health care reform bill.</p>
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<p>The trillion dollar deficit is largely due to uncommon circumstances. Recessions like this one are rare. This particular bill is also very rare. It’s not like there’s going to be healthcare reform every year or something equivalent. Manageable deficits come from proper structuring of the budget, not randomly rejecting bills based on cost.</p>
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<p>The problem here is the belief that the usual rules of free markets should work when applied to health insurance. You don’t think the insurance industry should be forced to do anything that doesn’t result in maximal profit, and you think that’s a problem. I think it’s a problem that maximal profit is in the best interest (heck, it’s the only interest) of the industry. Maximizing profits means minimizing payouts and treatments. Maximizing profits means not accepting people that really need treatment. The point of the health care industry should simply be to provide health care (while fully compensating doctors).</p>
<p>The analogy is that, from the Inca point of view, the Spaniards do not have the right to take ANY of the land without paying for it.</p>
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<p>Are they really so uncommon as to justify this kind of spending? Considering that we haven’t even paid down the debt from the last several “uncommon circumstances”…</p>
<p>I don’t really know a whole lot about economics, but it seems to me that by simple logic you would spend more when you were taking in more and spend less when you were taking in less.</p>
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<p>This makes no sense, unless we have money budgeted for “random bills”.</p>
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<p>I do belive this, as it is fitting with my previously stated views on basic human rights:</p>
<p>1: Leave everybody else alone, unless you make an agreement with them.</p>
<p>2: If you make an agreement, keep it.</p>
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<p>The insurance companies make an agreement to take on their customers risks for a fee. They should be held to that agreement.</p>
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<p>Then you believe we should make a new non-profit system, like the public option. (Or like the coops that, except for a couple religious ones, have now been made illegal). But the insurance industry is like any other industry: It exists to make a profit. You shouldn’t expect it to pretend it is a non-profit humanitarian organization.</p>
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<p>IDK what business you’re family is in, but how would you like it if somebody said “grocery stores should only exist to provide food for people, while justly compensating farmers” or “the computer industry should only exist to provide people with iPods and Laptops, while justly compensating inventors”?</p>
<p>In other words, how would you like Communism?</p>
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<p>Yes.</p>
<p>By Facism here I do not mean swastikas and death troops, but the philosophy that the government can do “whatever it deems neccesary” without any restraints.</p>
<p>Sorry, but I’m missing something here. “grocery stores should only exist to provide food for people, while justly compensating farmers” What else are grocery stores supposed to do?</p>
<p>Yeah, because democratically passing a bill is completely analogous to conquest and destruction.</p>
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<p>Once every few decades seems uncommon enough to me.</p>
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<p>That is simple logic, yes, but when dealing fiscal policy a more complex analysis is needed.</p>
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<p>“Leave everyone alone” doesn’t sound like a very precise doctrine.</p>
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<p>Again, simple logic applied to a complex situation. Any agreements with insurance companies must be complex to protect the insurance companies. At the same time, this gives them the ability to contest coverage. There is no good way to avoid this. People also must have insurance coverage to have access to adequate healthcare. Having a system set up where the people that guard the gate can deny access even post-purchase (and have full incentive to do so) is not good for society.</p>
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<p>And that’s why this analogy is flawed. When one buys food, they get food, they don’t get waivers that may or may not allow them to buy certain food. Computers are not essential to life, so that analogy wasn’t even close to any sort of point.</p>
<p>It doesn’t to me, considering that it takes more than several decades to pay off the costs.</p>
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<p>It seems pretty self-explanatory to me. We all are born with certain resources, and are given more by our parents. Nobody should take those resources from us without our consent. When we do give our consent, that’s called trade.</p>
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<p>That’s true. If the agreements weren’t complex the insurance company would have to charge far more to stay ahead.</p>
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<p>I disagree with that statement. I think there is a good way to avoid it, called contract and transparency laws.</p>
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<p>True enough, so let’s fix it by making everybody buy insurance from said companies, and by making all the plans the same to avoid those confusing choices.</p>
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<p>So let’s hold the insurance companies to their word, rather than take away the people’s choices.</p>
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<p>Niether is healthcare, strictly speaking. But both healthcare and computers can help a person have a longer and more pleasant life.</p>
<p>That’s even more opaque. What resources? Breast milk?</p>
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<p>What do you want those laws to say - tell people that they may or be eligible for X surgery given Y conditions? Or would you prefer that every possible scenario be laid out?</p>
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<p>And what if they’re right? I thought you were opposed to stealing from insurance companies.</p>
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<p>I’m not eating now; I’m not dead. Food isn’t essential to life. QED</p>
<p>You don’t think so? We’ve been in debt ever since the “uncommon circumstance” of the Great Depression. After that came World War II, and then the Cold War, and then Reaganomics, and then the Gulf War, and then 9/11, and then the bailouts, and now healthcare!</p>
<p>Every one of those cases was an “uncommon circumstance” that kept us from paying down the debt… When do you think we will have several decades free to pay it off?</p>
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<p>That, but more importantly strength, intelligence, ingenuity, and the ability to work.</p>
<p>Your parents (either directly or through a society they are a part of) help you develop these traits and add skills. So by the time you’re an adult you have something, namely the ability to work, that other people are willing to pay you for.</p>
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<p>Something that would seem good to me would be a system of labeling… So people know what they’re getting. That’d be a good thing to use the “Essential Care Package” rules from the bill. Instead of saying “if it doesn’t cover all this stuff, it can’t be sold” just allow insurance companies to advertise a “PPAC approved plan.”</p>
<p>It’s like milk: You’re free to buy Skim or 1% or 2% or Whole, all in Organic and Regular flavors, and thanks to government regulation you know that a jug labeled skim milk isn’t going to have whole milk in it. Or if you wanted, you could buy directly from a dairy farmer, and take your chances.</p>
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<p>Whatever the insurance companies SAID they would cover, they should have to cover. Nothing more, nothing less. I’m sorry if the plans are complicated, so are a lot of business agreements.</p>
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<p>I will guarantee you that, if you live in America, you’ve never even been close to the food that is “essential to life”. Anyone can get well over that just by begging here.</p>
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