Forbes: Wal-Mart shoots self in foot, decides health care is good

[Dinner]

Just got my renewal notice from Blue Cross Blue Shield.

Roughly a 15% increase.

If that trend continues, I'm only a few years away from my health insurance costing as much as my (fixed) mortgage.

It was going up 18%-20% per year before the ACA so the rate of increase has actually gone down slightly.

[Aeson]

Riiight, if your life is not as bad as someone living in some third world ****hole you clearly have no right to complain...

You seem lost and confused.

[The Mad Monk]

[kentonio]

Man Who Understands 8% Of Obamacare Vigorously Defends It From Man Who Understands 5%



SEATTLE—As debate continues in Washington over the funding of President Obama’s health care initiative, sources confirmed Thursday that 39-year-old Daniel Seaver, a man who understands a total of 8 percent of the Affordable Care Act, offered a vehement defense of the legislation to 41-year-old Alex Crawford, who understands 5 percent of it.

“First of all, Obamacare will reduce insurance premiums for most people, and no one can be denied coverage if they have preexisting conditions and stuff like that,” said Seaver, displaying over half of his 8 percent grasp on the sweeping health care reform policy. “Which means a whole bunch of uninsured Americans—I’m talking millions of people here—will finally have access to health care. How can you not get behind that?”

“And Medicare has nothing to do with this, by the way—that’s a separate thing,” continued Seaver, adding one of the few remaining facts he knows about Obamacare. “This just deals with the private insurance companies and makes sure they can’t, you know, drive up costs through the roof.”

According to reports, Seaver mounted an impressive case given his severely limited knowledge of the actual law itself, bolstering his 8 percent understanding of the Affordable Care Act with his 6 percent awareness of the nation’s current economic landscape. Crawford, meanwhile, demonstrated just about the full extent of his understanding of Obamacare by claiming that its provisions could potentially kill jobs.

Sources confirmed that, if asked, neither man would actually be able to correctly define the term “HMO” or coherently explain what a health care exchange actually is and how such a thing would actually work on a regional basis.

“If you get insurance through your job, you can keep it, so this won’t affect a lot of people,” said Seaver, failing to incorporate roughly 90 percent of the bill’s actual groundwork into his semi-accurate assertion. “It’ll really only change things for really poor people who live below the poverty line. That’s it.”

“Saying this is somehow a government takeover of the healthcare industry is, quite frankly, a flat-out lie,” added Seaver, forcefully and passionately summarizing what he remembers from an informed person’s opinion he read on a website recently. “All this does is offer a public option.”

Over the course of the next half hour, the two men used their full comprehension of what reportedly amounts to several sentences at best of the Affordable Care Act to debate many facets of the 906-page piece of legislation. On separate occasions, sources said Seaver and Crawford both claimed to have done “a lot of research” on the subject.

“Okay, I hear your points, but I think there are a lot of other factors to consider,” said Crawford, boldly countering Seaver’s 8 percent knowledge of the subject with his own 5 percent familiarity with it. “It’s actually going to raise insurance costs for most people. The way it actually works is, see, there are different tiers. And these different tiers, or levels or whatever, have different co-payments. And then there’s the individual mandate, which means you’re required by law to get insurance, otherwise you pay higher taxes. So, you see, there are all these other things to think about.”

“Are you starting to get it?” Crawford added, after almost completely emptying his accumulated knowledge on the subject in one fell swoop. “It’s complicated, for sure.”

The two men, whose collective net understanding reportedly makes up, in a generous estimate, little more than one one-tenth of the entire Affordable Care Act, then repeatedly volleyed back and forth over the constitutionality of the law—a matter that sources confirmed they have a roughly 0.000001 percent knowledge of.

Sources also confirmed that the two men independently opted not to introduce at all the subjects of prescription drugs, the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, the law’s effect on small business owners, exemptions, state costs, specific penalties for opting out, effects on the marketplace, the nation’s existing overall quality of health care, any specific statistic whatsoever, and the federal budget.

“Hold on, Alex, let’s go back to the premiums for a second, because I feel like I need to drive this point home for you: they’ll get lower for most people,” said Seaver, straining the very limits of his 8 percent comprehension of the bill to the point of utter collapse. “Lower premiums, lower deductibles, and no denial of coverage to people with preexisting conditions.”

“Way lower premiums,” Seaver added.

At press time, both men’s understanding of Obamacare had dropped to 3 percent as a result of the debate.

[kentonio]

DP

[regexcellent]

Hey look, it's a "conservative" defending price and wage controls.

The onion isn't actually funny anymore, especially the blatantly political articles.

Also, if you understood obamacare at all you would realize that it was a hacked-together piece of **** that was never intended to actually become law, and only became law after voters clearly demonstrated at the polls in MA that nobody wants health care reform.

[DinoDoc]

Also, if you understood obamacare at all you would realize that it was a hacked-together piece of **** that was never intended to actually become law,

It actually started life off as the most Obama thing ever. A throwaway applause line in a speech:

Soon-to-be-candidate Obama, then an Illinois senator, was thinking about turning down an invitation to speak at a big health care conference sponsored by the progressive group Families USA [in January 2007], when two aides, Robert Gibbs and Jon Favreau, hit on an idea that would make him appear more prepared and committed than he actually was at the moment.

Why not just announce his intention to pass universal health care by the end of his first term?…

“We needed something to say,” recalled one of the advisers involved in the discussion. “I can’t tell you how little thought was given to that thought other than it sounded good. So they just kind of hatched it on their own. It just happened. It wasn’t like a deep strategic conversation.”…

The candidate jumped at it. He probably wasn’t going to get elected anyway, the team concluded. Why not go big?

[DinoDoc]

Also Ken since we're now conflating threads, can you help me tack down the source of this quote?:

The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies. … Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that “the buck stops here.” Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.

I'm honestly having trouble finding out who might have said this and in what context.

[kentonio]

Hey look, it's a "conservative" defending price and wage controls.

The onion isn't actually funny anymore, especially the blatantly political articles.

Actually it's very funny, you're just on the wrong side of the political aisle to appreciate it.

Also, if you understood obamacare at all you would realize that it was a hacked-together piece of **** that was never intended to actually become law, and only became law after voters clearly demonstrated at the polls in MA that nobody wants health care reform.

Actually a majority want healthcare reform, a 2007 poll by Yahoo/AP showed a majority in favour of a single payer system. That has now dropped because of the relentless campaign by the right to convince people that something that is an improvement in every sense over the existing system is actually an evil gummint plot. Americans it seems are genuinely ****ing stupid enough to vote against their own best interests.

As for Obamacare, of course its a piece of ****. It is however a huge improvement on what was there before, and brings millions of people into healthcare coverage. It's a small step, but it was the biggest step that the administration could manage in the face of vociferous opposition from the right (including right leaning Democrats) and massive lobbying efforts by the insurance industry.

Personally I hate it. Profit making and healthcare should be kept as far apart as humanly possible. I'd still rather have an unwieldy, profit led system that provides people with coverage though, than just leaving people without coverage at all like the tens of millions of Americans before Obamacare.

[kentonio]

Also Ken since we're now conflating threads, can you help me tack down the source of this quote?:
I'm honestly having trouble finding out who might have said this and in what context.

Ahh bless, you so funny.

What is funnier however is that despite Obama proposing huge cuts aimed at bringing down the deficit in a manageable way (without collapsing the economy or leaving millions in poverty in the process), you right wingers have become utterly blinded to reality.

It's endlessly entertaining watching the two camps on the right consuming each other in a blaze of utterly self destructive idiocy. On one hand you have the tea party side who want to slash everything until America goes back to some idealized version of the age of the Railroad Barons (ironic, considering how many TP supporters are utterly reliant on Medicare/Medicaid and SS and often don't even seem to understand that these are government programs), and on the other you have the neo-conservatives who are terrified of losing elections to TP insurgency, yet cannot support any attack on their sacred items of military spending and oil and farm subsidies. So you get people like Boehner trying to walk the increasingly thin tightrope of having to pretend to want to totally slash budgets while knowing full well that going too far would condemn the GOP to complete national implosion. All the while both sides look on and sharpen their knives as they see everything the leadership do as betrayal.

It's a beautiful thing. [/Popcorn]

[MrFun]

Nothing says awesome like raising prices when everyone wages as a whole are decreasing. Sounds like a winning strategy.

I thought since you're conservative, you like decreasing wages.

[DinoDoc]

What is funnier however is that despite Obama proposing huge cuts aimed at bringing down the deficit in a manageable way (without collapsing the economy or leaving millions in poverty in the process), you right wingers have become utterly blinded to reality.

What was the national debt when he came into office and what is it now? Cut spending indeed.

On a more serious note, was Obama engaging in terrorism or attempted hostage taking by making that statement and vote?

[kentonio]

What was the national debt when he came into office and what is it now? Cut spending indeed

How typically Republican of you. Run up huge debts, pass them onto the next guy and then blame him for the interest payments.