Are you angry now? Why not? Are the millions who will lose their employer-sponsored health insurance considered just a speed bump on the road to single-payer health care? I volunteer those who still support Obamacare today, to offer themselves up as a speed bump and show us how it’s done.
Let me first congratulate Prez. Obama and David Axlegrease for running a deceptive campaign in 2012, promising everyone will be able to keep their health insurance and doctors….period! Some call it misleading, some would say Obama just over-promised, I call it BS and out right lying to the American people. Now with Obama having no credibility on anything, I am sure even today, there are the “true believers” who still trust what Obama has to say. For those that still do, I have good news for you, mental illness is now covered under Obamacare.
CBS News (not Fox) reported today that “the government estimated all along that millions of workers will be dropped from their employee insurance under the Affordable Care Act”. “In 2010, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services estimated ObamaCare would ‘collectively reduce the number of people with employer-sponsored health coverage by about 14 million’. The reason is some big companies will opt to save by paying the relatively-small penalty for dropping employee insurance. Small businesses don’t have to supply insurance, and may find new policies too costly”. Seriously folks, if they say 14 million, best multiply that by four.
The segment then talks to a few small business owners. Nancy Clark of NH received a 39% increase over last year (I guess she gave her employees crap plans, right?). So she told her eight employees to go on the Obamacare Exchanges.
“Virginia Beach business owner Betsy Atkinson is also canceling company insurance, because her plan doesn’t meet new ObamaCare requirements, and she can’t afford to offer employees one that does”. Betsy said “They’re going to have to go find their own insurance. I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry”…gee, didn’t Obama say that not too long ago regarding the five million who already lost their health insurance? I suppose Obama will say he “profusely apologizes” to the millions who end losing their employee-sponsored health insurance.
To those politicians (Jeanne Shaheen) who repeated the lies of Obamacare and now want to apologize, you know where you can stuff your apology, and it ain’t in the Thanksgiving Day turkey.
Happy Thanksgiving BMG (especially to those that I have chatted with this year) and to Dave, Charlie, and Bob.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/some-small-businesses-cancelling-health-insurance-plans-for-employees/
This poster frequently gets facts wrong. It is quite likely that the assertions in the above are not substantiated by its thin sourcing. Those who wish to take any of the above at face value do so at their own risk.
Any danfromwaltham thread: ctl+f+kbusch. This one simple trick has saved me an immeasurable amount of time on BMG.
kbusch: commenting so the rest of us don’t have to!
Big companies, long purported to be on the right, turn out to be on the left, and are opting for single payer in the most passive aggressive way possible. Wow.
Not necessarily the way I want to get there… but I’ll take it if the end result is good.
Speed bumps galore?
I value honesty and sincerity. And you should too, you should too, Petr. And show some outrage by what is happening to millions of Americans, who have seen their health and well-being turned upside down by this law.
Not the end justifying the means.
Instead, the GOP is reaping what it sows. The reason we have the ACA instead of single-payer is a similarly passionate and similarly relentless campaign against single-payer by the GOP during the Clinton administration. The reason health care costs are skyrocketing is that the GOP has been driving us towards “deregulation” and “privatization” for decades.
The GOP wants to keep the focus on the ACA at the moment in hopes of keeping us distracted from the next GOP-driven shutdown coming in mid-January.
This is all smoke, mirrors, and lies.
The reality is that tens of millions of Americans are in the process of getting real health insurance at affordable prices. The reality is that most Americans pay far too much for health care that provides substandard outcomes. America pays far more of our GDP for health care (especially for health care administration) and our population is less healthy (by virtually every objective measure) than our first-world counterparts. Some Americans may love their over-priced and substandard health insurance — that doesn’t change the facts of health care cost and effectiveness.
By the time the next shutdown hits, there will be ten or one hundred Americans happy with their new health coverage for every disgruntled complainer.
Let’s get some facts straight here. The ACA grandfathered all the crap plans already in existence. If the insurance companies chose to drop those plans anyway, that’s on them. Likewise, if employers choose to discontinue insurance, that’s on them. Most of their employees will, in fact, do better on the exchanges.
And, yes, if the cost is so much higher now, it’s most likely because those employers were offering crap insurance before. I know several people who were getting that insurance. They paid hundreds out of their paycheck only to face a huge deductible. They are, in fact, doing better under the ACA.
Why tell half the story, Tom? Perhaps “quality” has two different meanings.
Is it quality b/c Obamacare requires contraception coverage? Is it quality b/c Obamacare requires a 55 year old woman to pay for pre-natal care, in-case she gets pregnant. It’s quality b/c Obamacare requires mental health coverage?
You see, unfortunately, I have someone very close to me in a huge battle against an evil, viscious disease that kills hundreds of thousands of people in the US every single year. And b/c of my insurance, we have access to the very best hospital, and even an expert brought in to consult and assist. That’s quality Tom, and why I am a little apprehensive about Obamacare, to say the least.
How does Obamacare contain cost? It limits access to the very best hospitals, as articles have suggested the best treatment facilities in NYC are not in the Obamacare network. Half the hospitals in NH are not on the Obamacare exchange. Do you call that “quality”?
In the end, you want to bring a large segment of the population down, in order to help the uninsured?
If people are receiving subsidies, I would hope you realize it’s b/c these folks have low paying jobs, for one reason or another. I call them Obamajobs, and it’s an indictment as to the seriousness of the jobs market. And the people who get screwed are those who earn more than $45K, b/c they are considered “well-to-do” and get no subsidy. You may find this fair, I find it unconscionable.
n/m
If the co-pays changed by $5.00, it’s no longer grandfathered, don’t blame the insurance companies. Obama LIED, admit it. He either LIED or was grossly uninformed.
#tcot
… do not
And Obama, knowing full well his plan would eliminate and/or incentivize insurance carriers and employers to drop coverages for tens of millions of people, and continued the lie in order to get re-elected. It’s like saying a squirt gun is the same as a water cannon.
from a man surreptitiously imposing sharia law on God-fearing Americans?
Show me the real birth certificate!
Of course, we all know you won’t because that would violate your troll code.
… sorry, the GOP has drawn blood on this one. I can’t say with certainty that the Obama administration did not deliberately lie about this.
Can someone clarify? Because if they did lie, that’s serious, and the law has enough problems without adding that to it.
Please don’t say “The insurance companies are cancelling policies because they’re inadequate.” That does NOT equal “You can keep your health plan.”
There was nothing in the law that required the cancellation of plans, but I guess they didn’t think to include provisions prohibiting the cancellations by the insurance companies themselves.
How hard is it to say, “You can keep your health plan, UNLESS it falls below minimum standards?”
An unforced error, that they now use against us. We are nearly four years away from passage of ACA.
My understanding is that by law all the plans were grandfathered, warts and all. It is the companies deciding to cancel the plans without any reference to minimum standards.
Obamacare was designed to eliminate the individual insurance market. If the grandfathered plans changed their co-pays by $5, it’s eliminated. And to put the blame on the insurance companies is outrageous and disingenuous, to say the least.
The honest answer to Jim’s question is if Obama told the truth about his Obamacare, it never would have passed.
It would have passed regardless, we had both chambers. I continue to believe that a strong bill rammed through quickly, what I presume to be the President’s original bill, would have sailed through on a party line and been a better law.
If nothing else you can guarantee that I genuinely believe what I write at the time I write it. The grandfathering may well have been for absolute status quo only (but I’d like someone else to confirm since frankly I don’t take your word for it), but the companies played games then told their policy holders sob stories about how they just “had to” cancel the plans and the President made them do it. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if the companies deliberately sabotaged their own policies in an effort to drum up opposition to the ACA.
Yet, people still don’t care. So sad.
You would blame the river for the horse refusing to drink. Then you would shoot the horse and beat it for the next three days… sheesh.
The employers who are shedding insurance benefits have greatly desired to do this for some time, and are only now doing this because there is NOW a safety net to catch their employees. They wished they could do this YEARS ago. They are the good guys here. The bad guys are the ones *cough*walmart*cough* who hire predominantly part timers, work them to the bone and refuse let them either unionize or get health benefits thus being largely motivators of the problem to begin with.
Employers want out of the insurance game. They will continue to shed these benefits because now there is infrastructure in place to catch their employees and thus they can sleep better at night. What’s “sad’ about that?
The whole entire and complete medical insurance system in America is a rickety amalgam of bad economics, raw greed and plain cruelty. THAT IS WHAT IS SAD. That it lasted so long and has to be ushered off the scene in the most lingering, unkempt and disastrously feeble and inefficient method possible is even sadder… It’s like you’re still trying to get the dead horse to take you another mile down the road.
Saddest of all is your insistence that there is something wrong with the people who want you to stop beating the dead horse…
This thread now has roughly double the comments made on an actual, substantive thread about health care from Don Berwick, candidate for governor of Massachusetts, which was posted here just a couple of days ago. You should all be ashamed of yourselves.
Please, in the future, DFTT.
Regardless of who raised it, and why, the “You can keep your health plan” bit is hurting Obama politically. it’s fair game to comment on it.
as a separate diary.
It’s not as if you’re asking illegitimate questions but debating DFW on them is a waste of time.
I posed it as a general question.
But this is hairsplitting, and goes to my point about opportunity cost.
There are a few people on BMG who want to be your filter of information, control who and what is said to the BMG audience. They want to isolate you and everyone else from reading my diaries, and if you dare to offer an opinion on a topic that I raised or have an exchange of ideas with me, then you get taken to the woodshed and scolded like a little child. Be like johnk, tell them to get lost, as he basically did.
When you ask a question on a DFW diary, you instigate DFW dialog — even if you don’t participate.
I’m pretty sure they don’t pay him.
I get your general point, and I agree with it, but when it comes to us having to shut up, then the cost/benefit ratio flips.
No one is saying shut up.
Not even that wild, hairy radical johnt001.
He and I are merely hoping that you place your interesting comments that are fully deserving of discussion and gratefully received by many of us in a location that does not convey to “Wally” a continuing interest to engage with him.
I see. đŸ™‚