Originally Posted by Wallace 88

Obamacare won't be killed. It will be allowed to pass away under the Complete Lives System.

I also doubt Obamacare will die. I expect it to morph over time into something more single payer like. I expect the first step will be a mandatory public option in every market. When this happens is still an open issue, but not more than ten years from now. If the political landscape is right, it could happen quickly.

Originally Posted by stilltim

Yeah, the Obamacare catastrophe will work. Sure. Keep hoping.

http://themattwalshblog.com/2013/10/...merican-lives/

Rats. I thought I had you on ignore.

Fixed, now.

Push the deadline for the individual mandate back to June 30th, with the penalties for not signing up for insurance being cut in half for 2014.

Why does this have to be so difficult?

Originally Posted by '58 Flat

Push the deadline for the individual mandate back to June 30th, with the penalties for not signing up for insurance being cut in half for 2014.

Why does this have to be so difficult?

Because all the premium pricing is based on having the indivdual mandate in place. Drop it, and premiums will soar ... more or less the Republican wet dream of an Obamacrash.

Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon

Because all the premium pricing is based on having the indivdual mandate in place. Drop it, and premiums will soar ... more or less the Republican wet dream of an Obamacrash.

Premiums are already starting to soar for many. Maybe we need to get off the bandwagon of ACA and fight for a health care reform that benefits mainly the citizens and not the corporate insurance industry. When corporations write the rules, we citizens eventually lose more than we gain.

Originally Posted by Deb C

Premiums are already starting to soar for many. Maybe we need to get off the bandwagon of ACA and fight for a health care reform that benefits mainly the citizens and not the corporate insurance industry. When corporations write the rules, we citizens eventually lose more than we gain.

So you're buying the GOP hype too, I guess. Look, the premiums that are going up are the ones for catastrophic coverage, primarily of the young. Those policies are no longer offered, and shouldn't be. Most had deductables the "covered" couldn't meet, and they magically disappeared as low coverage caps kicked-in. They provided nothing for normal circumstances and damn little when the minimums were exceeded. In short, many were more correctly called scam policies (common in California, where insurance regulations are poor).

I assume you aren't promoting those. I say that as someone not overly enamored of Obamacare. It has a long way to go to be really good, but it's better than what it replaced.

Originally Posted by stilltim

Yeah, the Obamacare catastrophe will work. Sure. Keep hoping.

http://themattwalshblog.com/2013/10/...merican-lives/

http://theweek.com/article/index/251...nment-programs

The Obama administration's struggle with debugging the HealthCare.gov website is causing critics to ask whether ObamaCare is "Obama's Iraq War," and to dismiss Obama's signature policy achievement a "quagmire."
Media coverage is becoming increasingly hysterical, meaning some historical perspective is in order. Many large-scale government programs that are now embedded in American society also began with rough rollouts that are now mostly forgotten.
Here are five programs that are humming along today, despite their rocky beginnings:
1. Social Security
In the program's early days, many employers failed to include worker names and their new Social Security numbers in their earnings report, leaving the government without the basic information needed to calculate benefits and cut checks. Syndicated columnist Drew Pearson turned the "John Doe" problem into a crusade, writing about the snafu once a week for two months and stoking panic that the government would be unable to pay out the promised benefits to millions. But new procedures were established to follow up with delinquent employers, and within a year the number of John Does was slashed. Today, the crisis is dismissed as a blip, while Social Security historians view the effort to build a nationwide social insurance system from scratch before the age of computers as "Herculean" and "amazing."
2. Medicare
Last week, historian and Bloomberg columnist Stephen Mihm chronicled the myriad problems that beset the 1966 Medicare rollout. More than 700,000 eligible seniors initially refused to sign up because they mistakenly believed it meant giving up Social Security. Some Southern cities were left without any participating hospitals because the Medicare law required hospitals to comply with the new Civil Rights Act, yet many in the South remained segregated. It was more commonplace at the time for doctors to bill patients directly, and excessively long waits for Medicare reimbursement checks frustrated seniors. But as Mihm notes, "The government and the private insurers worked out most of the kinks, and by the late 1960s the system was working reasonably well."
3. Medicare's Prescription Drug Benefit
It wasn't all that long ago that another presidential health-care initiative ran into an online buzzsaw. In 2005, the Bush administration rolled out its new Medicare Part D program, providing seniors coverage for prescription drugs. But the debut was bedeviled by website problems. The Washington Post noted at the time that the launch was delayed twice over the course of a month. Then on the day it actually launched, "visitors to the site could not access it for most of the first two hours. When it finally did come up around 5 p.m., it operated awfully slowly." The glitches continued throughout the open enrollment period, but as Jack Hoadley of the Georgetown Health Policy Institute reminded us in a blog post this month, "The program added both phone lines and customer service representatives and implemented other upgrades over the weeks. The website — both its functionality and the accuracy of its information — was the source of ongoing frustration for its users, but it did get better over time. By the end of open enrollment in May 2006, over 16 million successfully enrolled for drug benefits in Part D.... And today, Part D enjoys widespread popularity."
4. The Peace Corps
President John F. Kennedy established the Peace Corps by executive order shortly after taking office in 1961. Skeptics worried that the program would be overrun with immature draft-dodgers. And that concern was seemingly confirmed when one of the first volunteers mistakenly dropped a postcard before it could be mailed, telling her stateside boyfriend that her host country of Nigeria suffered from widespread "squalor and absolutely primitive living conditions." A horrified Nigerian student discovered the postcard, made copies, and distributed it widely. It sparked an international incident. Riots ensued, and the volunteer had to be sent home "cloak and dagger" for her safety. Still Kennedy forged ahead, shrugging off the setback by joking to a new batch of volunteers, "Keep in touch, but not by postcard!" And two years later, the Christian Science Monitor reported that foreign governments were "so pleased with [the Peace Corps'] work they have called again and again for more.... Although the 'postcard incident' in Nigeria seemed to confirm some fears that the program might do more harm than good, that has been far from the case."
5. The income tax
It was 100 years ago this month that President Woodrow Wilson first enacted the progressive income tax that finances much of our government today. Now, few Americans would claim to be fans of our current tax system — but many of them are fans of what the income tax system helps pay for. In the early days of the rollout, however, plenty of people were sent over the edge because of the forms' perceived complexity. As tax historian Joseph Thorndike noted, one lawyer made headlines in 1915 by saying of the paperwork, "It is so complicated that it is utterly impossible to understand its meaning save by consulting a palmist." A 1915 New York Times headline characterized the forms as "Income Tax Riddles."
Now, some may say the tax forms have only gotten worse over the last 100 years. But by and large, the public has accepted the nature of tax forms as a governing necessity, and no politician has gotten very far in the past century campaigning against the progressive income tax. As Thorndike noted in Barron's, "The income tax has survived because it does two things reasonably well: It raises money, and it satisfies popular notions of economic fairness."
The lesson? History suggests that glitches get fixed and forgotten, people get acclimated to new programs, and policies rise and fall on their merits. If past is prologue, ObamaCare will be judged on the quality of the coverage, not on the first incarnation of the website.

Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon

So you're buying the GOP hype too, I guess.

No sir, you are the one trying to protect the very bill Republicans have been lobbying for since the 90s.

Originally Posted by JohnMc82

No sir, you are the one trying to protect the very bill Republicans have been lobbying for since the 90s.

No, ACA's the bill the Republicans were lobbying for in the 1990s. Show me a Republican who supports Obamacare today, and I'll show you a Republican who is either not in office or is about to be "primaried".

Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon

So you're buying the GOP hype too, I guess. Look, the premiums that are going up are the ones for catastrophic coverage, primarily of the young. Those policies are no longer offered, and shouldn't be. Most had deductables the "covered" couldn't meet, and they magically disappeared as low coverage caps kicked-in. They provided nothing for normal circumstances and damn little when the minimums were exceeded. In short, many were more correctly called scam policies (common in California, where insurance regulations are poor).

I assume you aren't promoting those. I say that as someone not overly enamored of Obamacare. It has a long way to go to be really good, but it's better than what it replaced.

I would hope that my giving facts of how the ACA is making the insurance industry even wealthier, which then that wealth is used to buy even more politicians, would be proof that I don't buy into GOP hype. What I do buy into is the importance of seeing the the huge flaws of this Heritage Foundation model of insurance.

Originally Posted by The Wonkette

No, ACA's the bill the Republicans were lobbying for in the 1990s. Show me a Republican who supports Obamacare today, and I'll show you a Republican who is either not in office or is about to be "primaried".

Mitt Romney?

Originally Posted by Deb C

Mitt Romney?

IIRC, when Romney was running for President last year, he felt that Romneycare was appropriate for Massachusetts but not on a Federal level. Has he changed his tune since then?

"But for all of the emphasis on affordable care, the new law reinforces the notion that access depends on how much you can afford, not how much you need. In the health insurance exchanges, the price of premiums will depend on your age, health, income, and on whether you opt for a bronze, silver, gold or platinum coverage. In Canada, access to necessary health care services is not a competitive sport." .... By Antonia Maioni The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

Originally Posted by The Wonkette

IIRC, when Romney was running for President last year, he felt that Romneycare was appropriate for Massachusetts but not on a Federal level. Has he changed his tune since then?

Not sure he accepts it by the Obamacare title. I'm just going by what the president said.

"President Barack Obama took a swipe at his former rival Mitt Romney on Friday, saying Obamacare was actually the former Massachusetts governor's idea.

"It used to be Republican idea. There was a Republican governor in Massachusetts who set it up. It's working real well," Obama said during a speech in Scranton, Pa.

On April 12, 2006 at a ceremony in Boston, Romney signed a law mandating that nearly every Massachusetts resident carry health insurance. Obama later cited that law as a model for his own health care reform plan, causing the move became a point of attack for his rivals as he ran for the presidency in 2012."

Originally Posted by Deb C

Deb, Deb, Deb... If you are going to be using an internet quickmeme, at least make sure it corresponds to the correct format.

Originally Posted by Copperfield

Deb, Deb, Deb... If you are going to be using an internet quickmeme, at least make sure it corresponds to the correct format.

Yeah, poor Willy Wonka has been used by just about every group wanting to get their point across.

Originally Posted by Bad Dog

Rats. I thought I had you on ignore.

Fixed, now.

Damn. You had to see an opinion you disagreed with.

Originally Posted by The Wonkette

No, ACA's the bill the Republicans were lobbying for in the 1990s. Show me a Republican who supports Obamacare today, and I'll show you a Republican who is either not in office or is about to be "primaried".

Your thinking of a few people at the Heritage foundation, and only as an alternative to what the Clinton's were cooking up.

Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon

I also doubt Obamacare will die. I expect it to morph over time into something more single payer like. I expect the first step will be a mandatory public option in every market. When this happens is still an open issue, but not more than ten years from now. If the political landscape is right, it could happen quickly.

I guess the comment about the Complete lives System went over your head.

Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon

I assume you aren't promoting those. I say that as someone not overly enamored of Obamacare. It has a long way to go to be really good, but it's better than what it replaced.

I willingly support even the smallest gains of the ACA. However, if we think that the insurance industry will loosen it's now super glued corporate grip on our need for health care, we will be grossly disappointed. The ACA has strengthened them with tax payer dollars. We are now feeding the insatiable Goliath.

" Medicare was rolled out in 1965 with typewriters and telephones, not websites. Enrolling everyone over age 65 in one program offered simplicity."

Glitches

The “glitches” in purchasing private health insurance arise from the complexity and bureaucracy of our private insurance system -- with hundreds of insurers, thousands of plans, state-by-state as well as federal regulation and the need to mine new databases in order for the federal government to subsidize premium payments for Americans who have incomes below 400 percent of poverty.

By Andrew D. Coates, M.D., F.A.C.P.

Every day in the hospital I meet patients who can’t afford prescription drugs. Every day in the hospital I work with patients who can’t get timely specialty care, who are on waiting lists. Every day in the hospital we learn about new bottlenecks that deny or delay necessary care, problems caused by private insurance.


It is true that it is better to be insured than uninsured and we know this intimately, for every day at the hospital we help uninsured patients find out how to enroll in insurance and apply for charity care. Yet in the big picture private insurance has already failed us, individually and as a nation. It is beyond repair.

http://www.pnhp.org/news/2013/october/glitches

Originally Posted by Wallace 88

I guess the comment about the Complete lives System went over your head.

It's only germane in cases where resources are scarce and cannot be expanded. This has nothing to do with 99.99% of medicine, so your point is valid, but vapid. My example is valid almost all of the time.

Originally Posted by Deb C

I willingly support even the smallest gains of the ACA. However, if we think that the insurance industry will loosen it's now super glued corporate grip on our need for health care, we will be grossly disappointed. The ACA has strengthened them with tax payer dollars. We are now feeding the insatiable Goliath.

They'll never quit. They'll be pried away kicking and screaming. It will help to take away their profits first, though. Motivation to resist will be lower if the stakes are also lower.

A reality check

"UnitedHealth Group has lobbied extensively on the implementation of the Affordable Care Act in 2013. The company has spent more than $2.5 million on lobbying overall so far this year."

Key Figure at UnitedHealth Group Was Major Obama Donor


Late last week, the Obama administration named Quality Software Services Inc. (QSSI) to be the new general contractor in charge of the emergency operation to fix the glitches plaguing the government's healthcare website. QSSI is a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group Inc, the health insurance giant that has lobbied extensively on issues relating to the federal healthcare overhaul -- and also happens to employ a key donor to President Obama.


http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2013...ama-donor.html

And if that's not bad enough

"Anthony Welters, executive vice president of UnitedHealth Group, and his family has gone all out for Obama. During the 2008 election cycle, his wife Beatrice bundled donations totaling between $200,000 and $500,000 for Obama's campaign. In 2009, the two were among the president's top inaugural donors, contributing a total of $100,000, as well as bundling an additional $300,000 for the festivities."

"Soon thereafter, the Obama administration nominated Beatrice Welters to serve as the ambassador to Trinidad and Tobago. "