3rd Attempt: GOP/Trump Repeal & Replace ACA and Trump lie about pre-exist coverage

Yes, your cheap insurance with low premiums won't cover you in the case of serious or chronic illness needing long term care. So yes, since you're not rich and can't pay out-of-pocket either, you will be a deadbeat mooch on society.

 

Maybe Theresthedagger is a principled man, and will just off himself when it comes to that.

LOL who am I kidding.

 

that's how i read it, but i'm not sure if that's what was meant... GOP broke their promise of the last 7 years and should own up to it completely. I'm sure many will forgive if they work with the other side to improve Obamacare. Pig can fly.

 

Have you tried filing for an exemption due to unaffordable coverage? If the premiums really are that high and you're not getting subsidies, there are ways to get around the mandate penalty. I know you probably don't want to share personal details, but what % of income are the premiums you're seeing for coverage?

The loaded gun / health concern is, of course, what the Dems have been trying to address in all of this - making coverage more affordable and accessible. The GOP bill did nothing to help you there. All the skinny repeal does is make MORE people have to live with that hell. I'm not sure why you think that's better.

 

Yes - he's pissed at the GOP for failing to repeal.

 

The GOP's legislative impotence is more annoying to me than their legislative ideals.

 

I think their impotence should be considered a pre-existing condition. Ironically, that's still covered.

 

I'm actually kinda glad of their impotence. It means less of their ideals actually becomes enacted into law.

 

He's also 100% right. The GOP has been lying to Americans about what is wrong with the ACA and how they could fix it. They were given a chance and 3 Senators had too much integrity/courage/etc. to actually vote for the lie they've been peddling. They all know in their hearts this was total BS, but most of them closed their eyes and hoped for the best.

I honestly can't believe how many of my GOP friends think this would have lowered their costs/fixed ACA when the insurance companies themselves flat out said essentially "Pass this and we will drop our plans. All of them."

 

So no one gave the video I posted a look. So I ask the question that it raises one more time. Why not instead of attacking Obamacare/ACA, why don't we look to lower costs as a whole? Why don't we look to do what republican's supposedly love most and let capitalism thrive? Why don't we create a marketplace where the consumer has choice and power? This is done by having more publicized medical costs, making them as uniform as possible, and being able to compare them more systematically. It won't be easy to do, but did anyone ever think that part of the problem with healthcare in this country is the fact that everything is overpriced on the hospital side of things? I mean, does $37 for a tylenol pill make sense to any republican here (well, ones not in pharma I guess).

 

I believe that most people who have a grasp of the problem fully agree that prices are seriously inflated.

 

Therein lies the issue. I mean, for myself, I knew things weren't completely efficient, but it wasn't until my dad started having health problems I realized to what extent. I just don't get why more people aren't clued into this, and then we use this as a primary point of attack. Admittedly, part of the issue is that lobbyists for Healthcare are incredibly powerful.

 

Yes.

 

Because everyone gets on board when you price control insurance companies and call them the devil but nobody wants to price control doctors and hospitals

 

The illusion of having health insurance.

 

This is the fundamental conversation that needs to be had. Insurers are middle-men and they take some profit and processing costs out of the system, but they aren't the drivers here. We have to decide, as a country, who loses out of if we pay less for health care: doctors, nurses, hospitals, pharma, equipment manufacturers, etc. If we cut health care costs by $100B per year, who doesn't get that money? And that's where it gets ugly.

 

Right.

And where I will depart with my liberal friends here is that I believe we have built a huge chunk of the economy on the system we have. Jumping to single payer would kill so many jobs...

We regulated insurance companies and limited their profits and costs still rose (though some studies argued the rise slowed.) Unless steps are taken to lower the crazy rise in costs of prescriptions and emergency room costs and tests/labs this will continue to grow out of control.

 

Agree - I'm not opposed to single payer in theory, but I think it's logistically a total nightmare given our established system. You're probably the biggest health care expert here, but I've never understood the congressional opposition to importing of drugs. It seems like that would immediately crush drug prices and force pharma to raise prices elsewhere in the world - basically, it would probably align their expenses to all their customers instead of the US subsidizing everyone else's drugs.

I also wish we could find a way to push more people away from employer sponsored health care. Seems like having more people with individual plans better aligns insurers with their customers, though I do think plans need to be made even simpler to make that work. People shouldn't have to spend endless amounts of time comparing plans, calling all their doctors to who's on what plan, etc. I do love the marketplace aspect of the ACA that made plans more standard and made it much easier to compare them side-by-side, but it still seems like it could be taken further.

None of this, of course, still addresses doctors/hospitals/etc. I do wonder how much administrative waste is in the system (doctor billing, for example), and how much streamlining that nonsense would save. Obviously it would cost jobs/etc, but I think people are less sympathetic to admins than doctors/nurses/etc.

 

Speaking of controlling costs, this is a great article about how Maryland is trying to address it.


SINGLE PAYER, MEET ALL PAYER: THE SURPRISING STATE THAT IS QUIETLY REVOLUTIONIZING HEALTH CARE