[ SECRET POST #2476 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2476 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 048 secrets from Secret Submission Post #354.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

Re: Obamacare

[(Anonymous)]

I'm sort of in the middle, but I'll try to sum up the two sides as best I can (hopefully others who are more strongly for or against will correct any misapprehansions I may have.)

For: A lot of people in the country do not have any sort of health coverage, either because they can't afford to pay for it or are young and healthy and don't feel they need it. These people tend to wind up in emergency rooms when hurt or sick, where the law requires that they be stabilized at taxpayer expense if they can't pay, but they don't get any more treatment than that. More than a few people die unnecessarily as a result.

Obamacare requires that everyone in the country have health insurance, either through a private insurance company or a government program; helps to pay for it if they can't afford it; and requires them to pay a fine if they can afford to buy it but refuse to. The theory is that it's better to impose some financial burden on everyone so that nobody has to go untreated and maybe die for lack of health coverage, and that ultimately some money will be saved for taxpayers because they won't have to pay for all the emergency room vists, lost productivity due to untreated illnesses, etc. Furthermore, the new health care exchanges will mean more profit for private insurance companies.

Against: It's unfair to ask people who are working to provide for themselves and their families to foot the bill to get poor, unemployed people health care they haven't earned and therefore don't deserve. The government also does not have the authority to require by law that the citizens buy anything they don't want to. Government assistance programs tend to be wasteful and frequently abused, and encourage people to be lazy because they don't have to provide for their own needs.

Some people who were happy with the insurance they already had will wind up losing it because the companies who provided it will change their policies to comply with the new laws, and they may not find coverage that works as well for them. Also, allowing the government to exert any control over the insurance market is tantamount to full-blown socialism (and here anon cannot explain further, because she isn't too clear on why any amount of socialism is inherently evil and will destroy the free market and doom the country, but apparently it is.)

There is definitely a political element to the whole thing. Irrespective of the pros and cons of the law itself, the Tea Party Republicans don't even want to take the chance that it *might* be successful. If it was, that would reflect well on President Obama and the Democrats, and currently the entire Republican strategy depends on making sure that doesn't happen by any means necessary. (Ironically, it's their own approval ratings that have been spiralling downward since the shutdown began, while approval for Obamacare has risen slightly.)

Re: Obamacare

[(Anonymous)]

Your last paragraph is something that people have been saying pretty much since the last time we tried to overhaul health care during the Clinton administration - that the Republicans are against improvements to the system not because they're afraid they won't work, but because they're afraid they will. Once Americans get used to the idea of easily accessible heath care they will not give it up again easily, and the Republicans will ultimately be cemented as the party that fought to keep it as difficult as possible for people to go to the damn doctor.

Re: Obamacare

[(Anonymous)]

This is a good summary of the situation, but I'd like to add to the "Against" side the penalties. The first year it's $95 per person per year or 1% of taxable income, whichever is *highest*. The second year it's $325 per person per year, the third $625, and after that it will increase by inflation or 2.5% of taxable income.

If you qualify to pay the $95 the first year, you obviously can't afford health insurance and certainly not those exponentially increasing fines. So those people will sort of be between a rock and a hard place financially.

Re: Obamacare

[(Anonymous)]

DA--except that, as originally conceived, people poor enough to qualify for that 95 bucks would have fallen under that 'expanded medicare' umbrella. It's just a bunch of states opted not to expand medicare and so there are lots of people that are too well-off to qualify for medicare at 100% or less of federal poverty-level wages per year, but poor enough that they would have qualified under the expanded, 139% of poverty level cutoff. But since they can't get medicare, they have to go insurance-hunting on the health-care exchanges. I'm still not clear on whether they can get government subsidy money to buy a health plan like people in states that are implementing the whole deal.

Re: Obamacare

[(Anonymous)]

And as an anon below pointed out, people who would have qualified for the expanded Medicaid but live in states that opted out of it are exempt from having to pay the fee for not having coverage.

Re: Obamacare

[(Anonymous)]

Adding to your "for" column: some people don't have insurance currently because no one will give them insurance due to pre-existing conditions (and pre-existing conditions, in this case, includes everything from bum knees to being fat.) The ACA makes that illegal.

Oh, and the ACA also makes it illegal for women to be charged higher premiums than men for the same coverage. So, there's that too.

Re: Obamacare

[(Anonymous)]

Another for is that preventive services are completely covered in the marketplace plans (and probably some of the private plans as well), making it easier to catch problems and treat them before they become catastrophic and ultimately driving down costs for everyone.