This page has been archived and commenting is disabled.
"$19,000 Premiums, Up 4x Since Passage": The 'Crippling Effect' Of Obamacare On The Middle Class
The past month has seen a veritable litany of reports that have slammed Obamacare, from sources on both the left and the right. Some examples:
- In Latest Obamacare Fiasco, Most Low-Income Workers Can't Afford "Affordable Care Act"
- The Stunning "Explanation" An Insurance Company Just Used To Boost Health Premiums By 60%
- Your Health Insurance Premiums Are About To Go Through The Roof -The Stunning Reason Why
- Obama Promised Healthcare Premiums Would Fall $2,500 Per Family; They Have Climbed $4,865
- Largest Health Insurer On Colorado Exchange Abruptly Collapses
- Co-Op Insurers Across America Are Collapsing, And Now There Is Fraud
As we have warned over the years, all of this was expected, and is precisely what happens when the government tries to take over a critical industry. It may have had "good intentions" but the result has been a total failure.
And nowhere is it seen better than from the laments of those whom it was supposed to benefit, such as Ed Elliott, who has laid out precisely what the "Affordable Care Act" means for the US: "This is crippling effect of ACA on small biz owners & middle class. $19000/yr premiums up 4x since passage."
This is crippling effect of ACA on small biz owners & middle class. $19000/yr premiums up 4x since passage. #tyranny pic.twitter.com/irHW4Oms2m
— Ed Elliott (@gunsntoolz) October 30, 2015
Still curious why the US middle class is expiring (even as the 1% are thriving), and has no discretionary income left at all? Simple: all of said "discretionary income" was spent to cover a soaring tax which was supposed to make life better for everyone.
h/t @noalpha_allbeta
- 613 reads
- Printer-friendly version
- Send to friend
- advertisements -


"He is S corporation that pays no taxes"
You don't know anything about S corps.
I think I'm going to get nailed for 2% of my income this year, freakin livid! I go to an alternative practitioner so wouldn't be likely be covered anyway because people avoiding the system in anyway cannot be tolerated. People were either too poor or figuring out that the system as a whole was a joke so they had to put the slam down on people like me who leave the country or go alternative.
Hoping for Americans to get their tax bill this year and collectively shitting their pants and going into revolt.
I AM an alternative practitioner, but I'm legally mandated to pay for insurance to cover getting treatment by a system I dislike, avoid, and generally refuse to have anything to do with. This is why I have a government job -- if I had to PAY for this crap, I would have moved to Transylvania.
Nice place, Transylvania. Language is slightly more difficult than Spanish (think Italian spoken with a bad Russian accent), cost of food and housing is dirt cheap. Market for computer-electronics techs is good, likewise the possibility of making a side income teaching English. Medical system is completely adequate if you don't intend to live forever. Monks and monasteries so you can easily get an orientation for what to do when it's time to stop living. I hear that Portugal is also nice; medical insurance there runs about 25% of the price for the same victim in the States.
CHM is $90/month for catastrophic plan & there's no fine.
We will without a doubt we will soon see government intervetion to control healthcare costs. While this sickens me, there is little choice, thanks to the flat out greed of a few players.
What sickens me is the way people run to the doctor for every little thing...get a brain out there.
True, but some of that is a function of our heavy-handed employers. Most private employers are now requiring a doctor's note for employees taking any time off for illness. This means that you either go to work sick, or you go to a doctor's office, spread your germs around, get told they can't or won't do anything, and get your frickin' note to give to the manager. A complete waste of time and money EXCEPT it discourages people from calling in sick and therefore shifts the costs of illness from the company to the employees.
Were I a worker today, I'd be saving every spare nickel and planning to quit from my first day on the job, exactly like I was doing thirty years ago
i guarantee they won't when they realize commie care doesn't pay until they've met their 7-10K deductible, add to that your premiums and the avg head of household (that pays) will pay close to 20-25K/year before receiving a $1 in benefit. democrats are idiots
Only an idiot would believe the people who spend a billion dollars per airplane are going to control costs on anything.
There is "hope" (false or otherwise), and then there is just plain naivety
who spends a billion dollars per airplane? you talking about development or just exaggerating?
@S Spade -- you must be an Obama supporter to think development costs are done "for free".
Last I checked, the people developing new planes expect to be paid. Those costs are real. Stop committing financial fraud and claiming that real costs somehow don't count in your f#cked up "math" system.
Just FYI, the new "Air Force One" just went to contract. Its based on a 777 super widebody (an existing airframe), and then obviously customized. Total cost: $3.1 billion for two airplanes. That's $1.5 billion per plane, before cost overruns that are standard operating procedure in Washington DC. By comparison, Saudi oil shieks are forced to slum it in planes that "only" cost $450 million.
Read the story in the Washington Post from a couple weeks ago.
all you need to do is eliminate all the government rules and regulations, competition will get rid of the bad apples, and prices will get reasonable fast.
lawyers also account for a significant portion of price increases and red tape, an often overlooked contributor to non-value added wealth re-distribution / looting.
Your kids, your home, your livelihood, and now your organs. STAT!
In all seriousness Folks / ZH
How long do you think this can continue before something snaps???
2-3 years before we find out the industry is completely broke. New puppet in WH will bailout the insurers and we'll have government healthcare with 90% of the market. It was the plan all along.
I think it's quite likely insurers will see a negative renewal rate in 2016-2017 time frame, once that starts happening the freakout will really begin, right in like with your 2-3 year timeframe.
Everything is shaping up for 2018 to be a real shitshow year.
"government" healthcare might have been the First Con-man's plan all along, but its naive for anyone (con-man or not) to think a government with trillion dollar deficits and $100 trillion in existing debt is going to be able to afford to keep this con-game going for very long.
Health care **COSTS** matter more than insurance premiums, and costs continue to climb 3-4x faster than GDP.
Fact is: Uncle Sam can't afford to keep Obama's fraud going either. (remember a basic truism here: taxpayers are Uncle Sam, and taxpayers are the one's having a problem. Add a layer of bureaucracy, it doesn't make the system work).
Obama is the dumbest president the USA has ever had, and considering the recent "competition" for that title, its saying a lot.
A monopoly on payment brings the necessary leverage to force costs down. And yes, it's costs that are ultimately the problem. But they can't come down until Americans realize that they can't have a Porsche for the price of a Volkswagen. We are NOT all going to live forever. Until we can get it out of our heads that we must always do EVERYTHING physically possible to preserve life, even when it's nothing but a shadow of existence on a ventilator at $10,000 per day, the costs of insisting that every single American have every single visit, test, surgery and procedure that they believe they are entitled to is going to be more than even the largest economy in the world can afford.
We will not get a handle on costs until we ration "care". That can be done gently, in a reasonable way, to eliminate the truly frivolous and futile treatments. It doesn't have to be a heavy-handed, "nobody can get treatment for genuine sickness" system. But SOME limits have to be set. Transplants of major organs, for instance, are a profound waste of resources, as the recipients(victims) can never lead a normal life again, but may live -- with constant, expensive medical care and supervision -- for decades. Especially transplants should be reserved for young people with the possibility of making a contribution to society -- not evil old men like a certain former Vice President. Children with chronic, universally fatal genetic defects like cystic fibrosis should not be kept alive for a couple of decades on the public bill. Most people with chronic renal failure should not be kept alive indefinitely on dialysis. These are procedures which WASTE vast amounts of money for very little social return. Likewise, the practice of requiring constant monitoring of relatively harmless meds like simvastatin for high cholesterol and many blood-pressure medications is simply a way for doctors to pad their receipts -- totally unnecessary and a waste of the patient's time as well as money. Most prescription medications should be available over the counter to reduce the need for "scarce" medical resources (scarce only because of occupational birth control practice by the profession via medical school admissions) for trivial problems. America's population is probably more medically sophisticated than any in the world, and yet we are more limited in our options for self-care than the residents of most 3rd-world nations.
Fixes cannot be made while the market is wildly fragmented and chaotic. A single-payer with the power to drive our dysfunctional market is needed. The government is the only single-payer with that power. It's the only way to fix what's ailing us.
The US population won't get, or accept, a true single payer system. Ultimately, the bottom 90%, or 99%, or 80%, or whatever, will have to make do with direct government-funded healthcare.
One of the perqs of a high-status job will be access to private insurance and/or fee-for-service care. We all know that Cheney, Hillary and Buffet will not be waiting in line down at the local clinic.
European countries don't have single payer systems. They have private doctors for the rich, and public sector style long wait lines for everyone else.
Now that most EU member states are officially bankrupt, we'll have to see how much longer the wait lines get before they start impacting quality of care.
single payer system is best -if the rich want to pay for additional care, let them. These rich fucks have plenty to blow to prostitute millions of young women who can't pay outrageous college tutition for incompetent sub par college ducations.
http://www.thedailysheeple.com/sugar-babies-a-rising-number-of-college-s...
Or we could work to increase supply by training doctors and lowering barriers for new treatments to come to market. That is a real solution to cost, not your artificial bullshit.
@Fairedust -- medicare already exercises price controls, which is just a fancy way of saying they don't pay their bills. Doctors already overcharge other patients to compensate for medicare losses.
Price controls have been tried so many times you should feel stupid to bring them up yet again. Remember the last time Uncle Sam tried price controls? Remember the gasoline lines in the 1970s? High prices, long lines all the way down the block?
How could you be so galacticly stupid to suggest this as a solution? Are you ignorant of history? Unable to do simple math? Both?
If you want other readers to take you seriously, don't make stupid suggestions that have already been tried, and already failed.
PS -- There is no free lunch. If you can't grasp that, go back and repeat kindergarten you dumb f#ck.
We allready pay 30% more for 30% less results than nearly all other developed countries which have a single payer system. What we're doing now is not working - except for insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies , etc. whose profits are expanding dramatically. Single payer system with rationing is a hell of a lot better than we have. We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for 90 year old vegetables in the last month or two of their lives so medical and insrance compamies can squeeze out that last bit of profit -the rest of us pay the bill -in so many different ways.
Look @savy -- before you go mouthing off about how other countries do this and that, fix Amtrak. If you sputter another stupid five year plan, you will be labeled an idiot. No one cares if that hurts your feelings.
Some European countries have demonstrated abilities to operate a railway system. Others (England being a glaring example) simply cannot.
England's health care system (NHS) is having massive funding problems, and without north sea oil royalties, it looks like the UK might need yet another IMF bailout (go look up their bankruptcy in the 1970s before you say something to prove you are stupid).
Other countries might be able to operate a railway system. The US has been "working on it" to fix Amtrak since 1972. We also have a war on drugs, which is going so well some states are legalizing illegal drugs. The USA under banana Obama cannot even defend its own borders from illegal immigrants -- which is a basic requirement of any functioning state.
I don't think you have your facts straight on other countries single payer systems (liberals are not good at math) -- but even if other countries can run health systems efficiently, you are an idiot to suggest the US government can do so.
Just stop talking. Stop writing dumb comments. Go fix all the empty promises of magic nirvana that you already promised before you go biting off even more projects.
UK health having problems because Oligarchs raped the system. Not hat they would not eventually had problems anyway.
NHS lost money every single year, without exception. North Sea oil royalties subsidized the losses for a while, but are no longer enough.
Whatever your tin-foil hat wearing friends are telling you about oligarchs misses the basic point that normal people learned back in kindergarten.
THERE IS NO FREE LUNCH YOU STUPID OBAMA SUPPORTER!!!!
Absolutely right on the costs being at the core of the problem, but it seems nobody actually focuses on the real problem -- the blatant violations of the price-fixing protections that exist in every other industry that are somehow built into the medical industry. How long have MRIs been around? Why are they still often billed out in excess of $3000? Only because of an artificially limited market and collusion and price fixing which is allowed, and never investigated or prosecuted. Why can't you get an upfront quote for a given procedure from a variety of local hospitals/surgery centers in advance? It's always spin the wheel and see what you get. What other industry is this legal in? Would you tolerate this from you car mechanic? Plumber? Tutor for your kid? Prescription medication is even worse -- in many instances marked up over 100X the cost if purchased in another country.
It's the same medication, just with Big Pharma controlling distribution and profits. Why have we been deemed to pay the ridiculously overinflated amounts for our meds, while they are drastically reduced for foreign markets? Because the costs for us are hidden under cover of insurance or Medicare and the media can flog the popular whipping boy of the evil insurance companies making all those profits.
Check the profit margins of some large pharmaceuticals and then some large health insurers and tell me who's getting fat. There's no coincidence that the Pharma lobby is second only to Big Finance and Defense in DC. If you want a dragon to slay, that's where you start!
Stop parroting the talking points from Washington DC criminals. The health care cost problem doesn't fit in a 15 second "news" sound-bite.
(1) MRI machines are manufactured by "industrial" companies like Siemens and GE, not by big pharma. I couldn't tell you why they charge millions per machine, but your "evidence" has nothing to do with your accusation.
(2) A lot of medications cost more than they should, but you don't bother to look at the "why". How many of us "regular folk" almost lose it standing in line at the DMV trying to renew a driver's license? Because that is a picnic compared to the Alice in Wonderland screw-up that is the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Drugs that are safe get rejected. Drugs that aren't safe get approved. Approval (or rejection) can easily take 10-15 years. Would you spend $50-100 million today on a new business, then spend 10-15 years in bureaucratic limbo before you can even begin marketing your product? And FDA testing / approval doesn't mean the product is safe/not safe, it just means a series of arbitrary tests have been performed at great expense. And even the FDA admits, the results of the 'safety' tests can not be reproduced, which is a fancy way of saying they are random outcomes.
(3) Like it or not (and its not fair), US citizens pay 100% of these drug development costs and FDA costs. Other countries free load. Even in the case of "European" drug companies, their R&D labs are in the USA.
(4) Lawyers make a lot of money off malpractice. Some doctors are incompetent -- and should lose their license to practice medicine. Most doctors are human and make mistakes like the rest of us. No amount of litigation will stop bad doctors who continue to practice. No amount of litigation will prevent humans from making honest mistakes. But most Americans think winning a court case is like winning a lottery -- courts shouldn't be casinos.
I dare you to waste your time trying to battle the lobbyists who make their living protecting FDA bureaucrats and tort lawyers. Govt Electric spends billions lobbying Congress.
Yup, there are also serious problems with pharmaceutical companies -- starting with the research that they get from universities who charge obscene tuition while not paying a penny in property taxes or income taxes on their endowments.
If a pharma company does R&D in house, its taxed. Do the exact same research, same researchers, in a university lab -- its tax exempt. It might make sense in Alice in Wonderland.
US health costs didn't get out of control overnight, and one has to be corrupt as a Congress member to think there is one silver bullet fix to the problem.
Financial engineering (like insurance / ObamaFraud) doesn't even address the cost problems.
A pure government single-payer system is the only way we can realistically afford to go at this point. And don't knock it. "Medicare for All" would have some problems, as they started to ration excessive care. But that's the problem that the system has as a whole. Some people are hypochondriacs, and they run up the costs for everyone in the system. Doctors enable them by demanding excessive visits, the same as anybody with something to sell attempts to do. A firm single-payer cost-control bureaucracy is needed to deal with a corrupt, self-dealing system with legendarily inflated prices.
I'd like to point out that fifty years ago, the U.S. had a model single-payer health insurance system called Blue Cross/Blue Shield. 90% of the public was covered; everyone and every provider was under the same rules, and the insurer was a non-profit corporation with low administrative salaries. Local hospitals were community-financed. Doctors were truly independent, not part of corporate practices employing hundreds of doctors for the profit of investors and partners. Hospitals were prohibited from organizing for profit, because that was seen as immoral by the public. Prescription drugs couldn't be advertised to the public. Referrals between doctors and other medical providers could not involve special discounts or kickbacks. ALL OF THIS WAS THE LAW WHEN I WAS A CHILD. And we DID HAVE the best health system in the world.
Then a bunch of insurance companies touted the concept of the Health Maintenance Organization as a form of insurance that would arrange total life care to maintain health rather than just take care of sickness. Now we still have a medical system designed around sickness and emergency/extreme care rather than simple preventive and lifestyle maintenance. But we pay about 20 times as much, our entire medical profession is rolling in money from advertisement, excess medication, self-dealing, bribes, and kickbacks, and we're mostly a lot sicker than we used to be.
Blue Cross/Blue Shield has become Anthem, one of the insurers whose business model is to charge high and pay little or nothing (except to their CEO's). It's terminally broke. So we need a new single-payer, one with enough power to bring overpriced medical providers to heel. The government's our best bet.
Go for the two=fer with health insurance. Get a Cigna policy and guess what, you get to help finance the stock buybacks of not one but two S & P health insurers. You see United bought the company that Cigna, a couple years ago signed a 10 year contract with to be their exclusive pharmacy benefit manager, you can't make this up. United is very strategic this way and wants to own everything. If you go back to Healthcare.Gov contracts and QSSI, well, there you go again, HHS/CMS awards a contract and two weeks later United goes and buys up QSSI. They do this kind of thing all the time, beware.
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2015/10/if-you-are-insured-by-cigna-guess-what.html
Don't forget the $70 billion dollar case of Medicare fraud. Medicare Advantage policy insurers found a way to tweak risk assessments to make them higher with a few algorithms so they could get paid more. Wall Street does not have the exclusive on evil algorithms at all. By the way, United Healthcare is the biggest one here who used their Optum algorithms to automate most of their takings. Of course we now have the former United/Optum head Algo Man, Andy Slavitt still in there as pending CMS chief, and I think at the end of November if Obama doesn't renominate him, he has to go away. Also, make note that Slavitt is a one time Goldman banker as well, where he got his algo training of course before going into the insurance business as CEO of Ingenix, now called Optum, a fully owned entity of United Healthcare.
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2015/03/cms-to-rerun-medicare-advantage-risk.html
mine tripled. fuck you owebomba.
btw - good luck getting a claim paid if you don't have a large human resources department behind you. legalized rape.
and the gods of the Copt Book headings stepped up to explain it once more.....https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsL6mKxtOlQ
I just received my notice that my premiums are going up by $750/yr on a catastrophic policy. Funny thing is, a deductible of $3650 is not seen as catastrophic any longer. I was told that I could go up to a policy with a $6850 deductible and I'd only have to pay $4800/year for the priviledge of having nothing covered until I meet my deductible. I think that I'll take "2016 tax penalties" for a thousand, Alex' unless Obama allows my pugs to use the free dental and vision coverage which is included for tots but not for their caregivers.
It would be interesting to know what the percetage of people just balking and taking the penalty is.
Sick.
About the "deductable" racket, if you get sick they break it up into several incidents and apply the deductable to each incident. When they are done with you you get nothing for your fat premiums. Read the fine print very carefully and protect yourself from these crooks and their crooked lawyers.
President Obama would never do anything to financially harm regular working Americans.
He provided us with ObamaCare, the best thing that ever happened to Americans.
We should all be thankful for the keen wisdom of our beloved leader.
We MUST move away from the private-insurance model for medical costs. You cannot expect the Holy Free Market to work in a government-mandated monopoly (and I'm not talking about insurance; I'm talking about the licensing of providers and the heavy-handed control of pharmaceuticals). If end-users cannot independently choose providers, access prices, or make their own decisions regarding treatments, then they can hardly act as "rational agents" in purchasing services. If all treatment must BY LAW be purchased on an all-or-nothing basis via insurance coverage, and all charges are assessed on the basis of a 40-80% knockdown varying by insurance carrier with a 100% charge going only to those who pay their own way, then patients and doctors are virtually forced to elect trivial, futile, and overpriced "care" in ignorance of genuine costs or value. Not to mention that refusal of a doctor's (often self-serving) Order, can get you committed for mental evaluation (at your own expense, of course) in many jurisdictions, while refusal to accept Officially Sanctioned treatments for your children will get them whisked away into foster care.
Obamacare isn't the cause; it's a final-stage symptom of a fundamentally flawed model. Prices won't go down until 1) we end the practice of private, profit-motivated insurance absolutely and permanently, 2) we end the practice of medicine-for-profit absolutely and permanently, and 3) we learn to take a realistic attitude towards death -- in other words, to recognize that no, we can't all live forever, and nobody who is permanently hooked to mechanical life-support is either living much of a life or doing much of anything useful for society as a whole.
Much of the problem with our health financing system comes from the rapid rise of extreme life-support and terminal care technology. We have gotten to the point where we can technically maintain many patients for far longer than we can afford to, either individually or collectively. And our outdated, two-thousand-year-old system of morals and ethics just can't handle the need to make genuine choices about who should live and who should die. We're afraid to make decisions. We attack and discredit people who actually do. We're unwilling to GROW UP and recognize that the real world aint' all bunnies and unicorns. And a one in a million chance of remission or survival? It's just that -- one in a million. This isn't Star Trek. Dr. McCoy isn't going to come up with The Cure thirty seconds before you bite the dust. So it isn't worth 25% of the Gross National Product to pay for fifteen designer drugs and a dozen surgeries, organ transplants, and computerized life support devices (as well as the three dozen imaging studies required to use them) for every octagenarian. Or ANY octagenarian. Life is short. Live with it.
For a while Oregon had a list of operations they would fund. It was very basic. YOu want more? You pay all. Also they would not pay for heart transplants for old farts to live 6 more months, all in the hospital.
Some sort of rational governer on procedures is required.
No SHIT people; the plan is to cripple the American Middle-class, that is why we have a Kenyan to do the job and he is the most effective President we have had in that regard.
The American Middle-class is and must be dismantled in order for the One World Economic System to come to fruition.
Everything is happening at break-neck speed and just for psychopathic humor; we (not me) elected/selected a man named Barrack Hussein Obama; the humor being our propagandized worst enemies at the time were Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden.
We are directly on course as the old and stupid ancient document called the Bible said we would with that fictitious God, named Jesus, warned us about, but what would he know.
The founder were a bunch of morons, for in the Declaration Of Independence they make the following claim that Darwinism/real science has proven beyond any doubt to be false: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness"
They claimed it was obvious (self evident) and given by a Creator (endowed by their Creator). These dummies stated that which we know is not true; all this is by random chance and that is a scientific fact. (major sarcasm)
I guess you stopped taking your medications when your obamacare expired.
This is why I don't like or talk to many of my stoner friends from High School. I grew up, went to college, and now make 6 figures. They toured with the Gratefull Dead and now have cancer and are so thankful that Obamacare saved them. To be honest I would rather they die for their choices than my family get TAXED to save their sorry ASS.
liberals are excrement
you should know, after seeing you hanging around public bathrooms for sex......ugh!
LMAO
If Obamacare were any good, Congress would be on it (instead of exempting themselves). Congressional staff would be on it. Supreme Court "Justices" would be on it.
Heck, if Obamacare was any good, Obama would be on it.
So, stop all spending that is possible and sink this ahole administration before Obummer destroys the country. But ohh no, the bread and circus must continue for the sheeple and they keep on buying shit from china - wake up idiots.
As I don't understand the American Health system could somebody explain to me why you have Insurance in the US other than what I would call Emergancy treatment when it would be a tiny fraction of the cost to fly to one of the first rate Asian Hospitals that have sprung up around the world and have any Operations etc done there, a nice Holiday can be had at the same time, surely it would be better value to put the premium you would be paying directly in a savings account.
I bet you could load up on any drugs you needed and make arrangements to have them sent to you in the US as well at a fraction of the US cost as well.
I understand there are some penalties to pay under the ACA if you dont have cover but you would stil be ahead if you needed treatment and if you stay healthy you have saved a fortune.
many thanks
This says it more succinctly than I could
"During World War II, the number of persons with employment-based health insurance coverage started to increase for several reasons. When wages were frozen by the National War Labor Board and a shortage of workers occurred, employers sought ways to get around the wage controls in order to attract scarce workers, and offering health insurance was one option. Health insurance was an attractive means to recruit and retain workers during a labor shortage for two reasons: Unions supported employment-based health insurance, and workers' health benefits were not subject to income tax or Social Security payroll taxes, as were cash wages.
Under the current tax code, health insurance premiums paid by employers are deductible for employers as a business expense, and are excluded, without limit, from workers' taxable income."
we had a code blue [repritory arrest] in the hospital at patient services today
I think they saw their bill
stay healthy my friend
don't look at your bill.
Recently someone I know needed Azithromax (some antibiotic), the Insurance wouldn't cover the medicine because the month before they needed the same tablets.
Long story short . . . .350$ for Antibiotics + the insurance premium which essentially does nothing but cost money.
Thousands of dollars and you cant even get 12$ worth pills to fight an infection.
The same antibiotics for animals (same pills, made at the same factory, packaged in the same warehouse) cost about 12$.
The health-care system and modern medicine are completely broken.
If you cant even get affordable antibiotics (which quite literally cost nothing to produce) in todays day and age , your country is pretty much a Third World Kleptocracy.
Health Insurance is a SCAM INDUSTRY.
"may have had "good intentions""
gullible and naive
Would you people stop calling compensation for services income to the provider of the services? Go study the definition the Supreme Court has laid down for the word income.
America needs a socialized medical system. It would lower costs overall and bring healthcare to poor, elderly and unemployed. Call it "communism" if you like but it's better than building billion dollar planes that will never fly or invading some third world shit-hole to satisfy the ego of a marginally retarded president (W).
If Obamacare sucks in its present form, it is because it was designed that way. NOT by the left, but by the right and by the Big Med, Big Pharma industries. Obamacare is as large a handout to them as TARP, etc. was to Wall Street.
Repeat after me. "ObamaCare is not socialism. Obamacare is fascism". Basically it works exactly as designed by those who benefit.
Who passed the bill?
So we have fascist system now and your solution is even more socialism, pound that square peg in the round hole harder... No pricing mechanism and not voluntary, it always fails.
“Hence the familiar fact that the more the state “plans,” the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.” - from The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek
"Bob Murphy: Government Medicine is Killing Us" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZHwimuPjLE
1- Let's see, as an expat, you've left the country, yet you want to tell us how to do our way of life??
2- The right had zero say in the wording of the Affraudable Care Act and were told they had to vote first to see what was in it.. No Republican voted for it. It's was nick named after its chief supporter, the communist in chief.
3- All the votes for the ACA came from the left. IOW, it was all socialists who voted for it. BTW, Fascism is a form of socialism where the citizens are literally bound up and their individuality is lost.
4- You need to have your thinking staightened out from the curly-q mess it is demonstrating. The Dems are left. The Republicans are center LEFT. There are a few exceptions on the Republican side but not enough to make any policy differences.
5- Neither big med nor big pharma are right wing. They are FOR stringent regulations that give them monopoly powers. Those are not right wing positions.
6- For you to conclude that the ACA was put together by the right indicates one of two things. Either you have a level of denial that is pathological or you are mentally ill. There is not ONE right wing person who supports the ACA. Not one.
America !! You are FUCKED !
I think the saving grace of Obamacareless is that the parasites have overstepped their bounds and are going to quickly kill their weakened hosts. This scheme probably won't float for the duration but the poor goyim will just die, they don't seem able to mount a defence.
This is what tyranny looks like! TYRANNYCARE!
America needs a free-market healthcare system. Destroy illegal and rights-violating license requirements for doctors because I do have a right to get any type of advice from anyone I want, period. Fire everyone in the FDA, because I do have the right to put *any* substance I deem fitting into my body, period. I do have a right under the freedom of expression to combine any substances I want on my own property and put them in any order I want, period.
Problem solved virtually overnight. Best of all, when we decide what is good for our own bodies, rather than someone who couldn't care less about us and think we are just a spec of overpopulation, I'll have someone who I know cares about me making my medical decisions.
I think Europe, and Germany in specific, has very well proven why socialized medicine is an epic fail. But perhaps we shouldn't let abject failure get in the way of the collectivism religion by which committing crimes against minorities in a large enough group, like stealing their money for the greater good, is fine and dandy, so long as you voted to do it.
Once again, Obama divides the nation.
How will housing prices stay up in the stratosphere.with Obamacare?
the net effect (excluding tax implications):
19000 / 4 = 4750 old premium
loss on new premium: 14250$ or 1187.50 / month
loss of house purchasing power: 175,000$ / year