Do you support the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare)

I've provided the link many times on this bbs. This may be some different links. But the info is the same.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/u...ise-from-lower-rungs.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/chart-of-the-day-paul-ryan-wrong-about-upwardly-mobile-america

Look at the chart and studies. Canada, France, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, etc. all have greater upward mobility than the U.S. Notice those nations have less wealth inequality than the U.S. as well.

 

I'm sure TeXXX will be swayed.

 

facts never have the effect on the persona that texx is playing on this bbs.

 

If med school didn't cost anything and was free then yes, you'd have a lot of people trying to become doctors even if it mean it would be a public service job.

 

I believe free health care should be available to every American citizen. Cost would be contained through several initiatives:

1. Junk food is taxed like cigarettes.

2. All patients must undergo yearly checkups. This would be done to catch problems before they become more serious/costly. Skipping a checkup results in being booted off the program.

3. Fat patients would have three choices.

A. Lose the extra weight and keep their healthcare.
B. Keep the extra weight and lose their healthcare.
C. Keep the extra weight, keep their healthcare, and pay a monthly fine.

4. Cigarettes would be banned.

5. Junk food advertising would be banned.

 

If we have too few doctors we need to import more, but the AMA won't allow that.

 

This is the old variation of the "if people can't be millionaires, they'd rather deliver pizza for a living", and it has zero nuance, which is why right wingers love it.

 

No it isn't why would you study for a decade to make $75k a year when you can just get a degree and go make that money in some other field. People work hard to be a doctor for that big payday. $400k+ is what they're after not mediocrity.

 

Veterinary schools swamped with applicants despite high debts, low salaries

 

You think most doctors make $400k+ ? Haha, man are you out there.

Most doctors struggle to pull in $100k today. If they could get free training and a guaranteed $80k/year salary working for the gov't many would take that. It's not studying for a decade either. It's 4 years of med school (which many people can't afford so free education would be great), and 3 years of residency. There's additional years if you want to specialize obviously.

But you can make it so that the gov't provides free education, room and board. Many many people would jump on that. Talented people. If you think not than you just don't know.

 

You seem to have a lot of (really horribly wrong) opinions about people and cultures you clearly have no real experience with.

 

I don't know what doctors you know but my mom has an office in the med center, a practice in cleveland, and a practice in lake jackson and she brings in close to $900k/yr she says, her pay isn't salary. My mom's brother works at MD Anderson and is on salary north of $500k. If you're talking doctors such as family clinics or pediatrics sure. Any surgeon or specialist tops $300k easy

 

Are most top 1% like Eddie?

 

Most doctors aren't surgeons, anesthesiologists, neurologists, radiologists etc.

 

This takes about .00000067 seconds

http://www.healthcare-salaries.com/physicians/general-practitioner-salary-gp
The general practitioner in the United States receives an average yearly salary ranging from between $168,550 to $173,175 per year. General practitioner salary is also known as GP salary. On an average, general practitioners earn an hourly wage of around $81.03 per hour, which is equivalent to a monthly income of $14,046 per month. All these figures have been reported by the US bureau of labor statistics. Based on the type of work setting, the average yearly salary for a general practitioner working at the physicians’ office and at the outpatient care centers is around $174,280 and$174,590, respectively. General practitioners employed in general medical and surgical hospitals earned around $157,470 per year, while those employed in medical and diagnostic laboratories earned around $189,840 per year. Moreover, the employment and salary prospect for general practitioners has been estimated to increase by up to 22 percent until 2018.



http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-...000-means-even-bernanke-son-carries-debt.html
The median four-year cost to attend medical school -- which includes outlays like living expenses and books -- for the class of 2013 is $278,455 at private schools and $207,868 at public ones, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges, a nonprofit group of U.S. schools.
Record numbers of students still want to become doctors. First-time applicants to U.S. medical schools rose to 33,772 in 2012 from 24,884 a decade earlier, according to AAMC. New enrollment at U.S. medical schools grew 1.5 percent to 19,517 students, the highest ever.

The median education debt for 2012 medical-school graduates was $170,000, including loans taken out for undergraduate studies and excluding interest. That compares with an average $13,469 in 1978, (I.E. Your Mom)

So there wold certainly be a case to be made for setting up programs or even a national medical college on the order of the service academies to train doctors for the exchange of a dedicated period of public service work at a government workers pay schedule. It could also work for nurse practioners that can do most of what a GP does on a daily basis.

 

regardless $170,000/year salary is still significant to the point where it's a factor in why people choose medicine....job security as well

 

believe it or not a lot of people become doctors to help people!

 

DeanBaker raises the important point that when you lose your job for whatevr reason you can still continue with good healthcare. I sometimes feel like we are dealing on the bbs with mostly inexperienced folks who have never experienced this or even know someone who this happened to.
BTW as noted a lot of older workers struggle to work just for insurance. Now they can quit and open up the jobs to younger folks.


Of course in Texas Perry cruelly has kept hundreds of thousands of Texans from being covered by the new Medicaid eligibility rules due to his hatred of Obama and his heartless ideology.

Obamacare: It’s Better Than You Think


Dean Baker
Truthout, September 23, 2013
The Huffington Post, September 23, 2013


In just one week the main part of Obamacare will begin to kick in. This is the state level exchanges that will allow the uninsured to be covered. Beginning on October 1, people will be able to sign up to get insurance in their state regardless of their health.

Most people signing up on the exchanges will qualify for subsidies based on their income and family size. This means that the cost of insurance will be less than the advertised price.

This is good news. It means that tens of millions of people who are uninsured now will likely be insured in the next year or two as a result of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). However this is actually the less important aspect of the program. The more important part is that those of us who now have insurance will have real health care insurance for the first time.

Most of the insured get covered through their job. This creates an obvious problem. If they develop a chronic illness, they may be unable to keep their job. Once they are no longer employed, workers will be left trying to buy insurance in the individual market.

Insurers don’t want to insure people who are sick. If a person with a chronic health condition applies for insurance in the individual market, they would be facing premiums of tens of thousands of dollars a year, making it unaffordable for all but the very wealthy.

This situation will end with the start of the exchanges. Workers who lose their job because of an illness will still be able to find affordable insurance. This will provide a huge element of security that is currently lacking. In effect, most workers will have true health insurance for the first time.

Workers of all ages will benefit from this transformation of the insurance market, but it will be especially important for older workers in poor health. There are a large number of older workers who struggle to stay employed despite bad health, because this is the only way that they will be able to afford insurance until they are old enough to qualify for Medicare.

Many of these people will now find insurance to be affordable with the subsidies on the exchanges even if they do not work. Some critics of Obamacare have argued that it will undermine incentives to work. In the case of older workers in poor health they are right, and this will be good.

There is much real basis for criticism of the ACA. Private insurers are the sole providers of insurance. Not only are we not getting universal Medicare, we did not even get a public option, the right to purchase a Medicare-type plan that would compete with private insurers.

The drug companies and medical equipment suppliers both end up as winners under Obamacare. They will be able to secure even greater profits from their government-provided patent monopolies since the ACA does little to rein in costs.

As a result, we will still be paying close to twice as much for drugs and medical devices as people in other wealthy countries.This is a guaranteed recipe for bad health care since the enormous profits provided by these patent monopolies give drug companies an incentive to push their drugs even when they may be harmful.

And we will still be paying twice as much for our doctors as people in other wealthy countries. These failures on cost controls will add hundreds of billions of dollars to the cost of health care each year.

The fact that so many states refused to go along with the expansion of Medicaid will leave millions of working poor uncovered. Undocumented workers were explicitly prohibited from being covered through the exchanges. And the plan will effectively penalize many workers who get insurance through union-sponsored plans, since they will not be eligible for subsidies through the exchanges.

These are serious complaints about the inadequacy of Obamacare that will have to be addressed in the years ahead. But none of these problems changes the fact that the ACA is an enormous step forward. Most of the country will now have real security in their access to health care. The agenda now has to be to extend this security to the rest of the country and to squeeze the parasites out of the health care system.

http://www.cepr.net/index.php/op-eds-&-columns/op-eds-&-columns/obamacare-its-better-than-you-think

 

Yes. It's better than the status quo and will eventually lead to a much more efficient system. Not to even mention that it's the right direction morally and treat human more compassionately. Would have fit nicely under real compassionate conservatism, as it was a conservative idea after all until Obama happen

 

Exactly the AMA (American Medical Association) is practically one of the if not the most powerful union in the country.