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ACA Running Thread

The endless argument over who voted for what and who owns ACA is so tired. Let it go.

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There isn't an argument. There are just a bunch of die hard Opologists who want to believe this will somehow reflect pooly on the other party - which is, of course, both wrong and dumb.
 
To those who say the 'pubs don't have a plan...google is your friend:

the Republican Study Committee (RSC) put forward a sensible, innovative, and compassionate alternative to Obamacare. Titled “The American Health Care Reform Act” and accompanied by the twitter hashtag #ABetterWay, this proposal would solve the problems Obamacare created and ignored.

The Problem

In May, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius wrote a blog on health care.gov, addressing the class of 2013. Sebelius writes that young people will be glad to know Obamacare ensures free birth control. Birth control is the least of millennials’ problems and to suggest otherwise is to belittle millennials. Birth control has been affordable and accessible long before Obamacare.

Sebelius giving free birth control to millennials is much like a salesman giving a customer’s child candy. Doing so simply appeases the child momentarily while the salesman sells the customer an overpriced, broken, doomed-to-fail car, or, in this case, skyrocketing health care costs.

Millennials don’t need free birth control and unaffordable care. They need jobs and a functional health care system. Obamacare is conducive to neither. In the past six years, millennial employment rates have dropped more drastically than those of any other age group. Obamacare is on track to worsen the situation.

Companies are lying off workers, cutting hours, and firing employees, because Obamacare crushes businesses by implementing oppressive mandates. If they did not have health care before Obamacare, millennials can thank the law for their newfound unemployment. Millennials need to remember that when unemployment rises, it hits them hardest.

Worse yet, health insurance companies are benefiting, their executives are receiving high government positions, and they are coordinating with the White House and nonprofits to spend your money to make you believe Obamacare is flawless. Without pricing mechanisms like a free market, and with government on their side, health insurance companies can and will charge you as much as they like.

Obamacare exempts the elite — congressmen, Capitol Hill staffers, and big business — from having to opt into the law. This raises a logical question: If Obamacare is so great, why are Democrats exempting their elite friends? Numerous Democrats who passed the bill have backtracked and admitted that Obamacare is a disaster. Others, like labor unions, are also outraged at how terribly the law has come to function.

The Solution

The Republican Study Committee (RSC) recently released an Obamacare alternative. The American Health Care Reform Act would repeal Obamacare, thereby cutting billions in taxes and thousands of pages of impossible regulations. In stark contrast to Obamacare, this proposal is funded by tax deductions, not increases.

It embraces free markets as a way to lower costs. Americans could purchase insurance across state lines. Smaller groups could “pool together” to achieve the same “buying power as large corporations.” Other pools would ensure people with preexisting conditions receive good coverage.

The act would treat patients compassionately by expanding the definition of preventative medicine, preventing harms caused to patients by bureaucracy, and incentivizing healthy behavior. It would also make health care transparent by creating portals to provide information on various plans and providers.

The act would help stop “defensive medicine,” a widely condemned but commonplace practice used by doctors in which they perform extra and unnecessary tests on patients solely to avoid lawsuits. Its effects boil down to exponentially higher health care costs and distorted medical standards.

Finally, it would stop government from getting between you and your doctor by removing any possibility of health care rationing. It goes so far as to expressly state, “Nothing in this act shall be construed to interfere with the doctor-patient relationship or the practice of medicine.”

Obamacare is hurting jobs and health care, increasing cronyism, and millennials are suffering most. Conversely, RSC’s American Health Care Reform Act puts no unsustainable burdens on employers, meaning it won’t increase unemployment and hurt millennials. Lower costs means millennials can buy their own health care. The RSC’s plan is the opposite of a piece of candy and an overpriced, doomed-to-fail car.


http://rsc.scalise.house.gov/solutions/rsc-betterway.htm

I really am fucking stunned that intelligent people on this planet can digest this much bullshit and smile about it.
 
Actually, nevermind, this is obviously pointless.
 
Again, why anyone argues with RJK about this is beyond me. He has no idea what he is talking about (see HSA part of this thread as an example).

To add one thing that CH was talking about how the feds are dumping a lot of additional work on the INs companies, the ACA dictates that they only have 15% (arbitrarily arrived at BTW) to deal with paperwork, for profit, marketing etc, and 85% must go to paying claims, this additional work dumped by the feds cuts into that % because it costs money to clean up the mess they have made of the law.

This is an interesting post. At some point, I expect to see insurers to begin vocally pushing back. Some of the things the feds are asking insurers to do are very costly and nearly impossible to implement.

Granted Im biased, but insurers have been pretty good actors here (from what I see in the trenches) and really want to make this work yet continue to get blasted by the left and the right (as seen in this thread).

I expect to see some for profits going on offense at some point.
 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...think-obamacare-will-make-health-care-better/

"Fully 65 percent indicated that by 2020, they believe the healthcare system as a whole will be somewhat or significantly better than it is today. And when they were asked about their own institutions, the optimism was even more dramatic. Fully 93 percent predicted that the quality of care provided by their own health system would improve. This is probably related to efforts to diminish hospital acquired conditions, medication errors, and unnecessary re-admissions, as encouraged by financial penalties in the ACA.

On cost control there was similar optimism: 91 percent forecasted improvements on metrics of cost within their own health system by 2020. The vast majority, 85 percent, expected their organization to have reduced its per patient operating costs by the end of the decade. Overall, the average operating cost reduction expected was 11.7 percent, with a range from 0 percent to 30 percent (Figure 2). Most executives believed they could save an even higher percentage if Congress enacted legislation to accelerate the shift away from fee-for-service payment toward models like bundled payments. In such a case, the executives projected average annual savings of 16.0 percent, which, if applied across the healthcare system, would amount to savings of nearly $100 billion per year (Figure 2)."

Pretty much every system I talk too thinks they are cost efficient and its the other guys who stink at controlling costs. I myself and looking forward to seeing rates come down as a result of this optimism. Given the MLR rules, lower costs = lower premiums. Im not holding my breath.
 
How many times has the House voted on this bill?

Ph, I don't know...however, since it doesn't seem to have an HR # (it is listed as HR __________) I'm guessing it has not been voted on.

However, it should put to rest the canard that there are not other options to this horrible law that keeps being parroted by the Prez and the Press (and other sycophants).
 
So the House has voted 40+ times to end Obamacare and hasn't voted once on an alternative.
 
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So the House has voted 40+ times to end Obamacare and hasn't voted once on an alternative.

Well, I mean we have to repeal it to know what's in the alternative plan.
 
Well, I mean we have to repeal it to know what's in the alternative plan.

Isn't that kind if the reasoning given to pass ACA. We had to pass it to know what it did?
 
Thus the joke.
 
The supporters of ACA at this point remind me of the Black Knight in Monty Python's Holy Grail movie.

It's just a flesh wound!
 
It's about the same as being buzz-in

Its kind of hilarious that they can't see the similarity.

1. Disaster from the start? Check
2. Campaign of misinformation based on very loose data that doesn't really apply? Check
3. Continued failures stacked on top of the previous? Check
4. Move the goalposts until the achievement of mediocrity at any point is glorified as success? Check
5. Dissenters labeled as hating WFU/America because they saw the failure from before it started? Check

Anything I am missing?
 
Its kind of hilarious that they can't see the similarity.

1. Disaster from the start? Check
2. Campaign of misinformation based on very loose data that doesn't really apply? Check
3. Continued failures stacked on top of the previous? Check
4. Move the goalposts until the achievement of mediocrity at any point is glorified as success? Check
5. Dissenters labeled as hating WFU/America because they saw the failure from before it started? Check

Anything I am missing?

You mean like the supply-side/trickle down defenders? Oh I see
 
The exact same checklist could have been used for Medicare and the RX benefit. OOPS using the reality of massive programs is not OK.
 
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