WaPo: "Suddenly, Obamacare Is More Unpopular Than Ever"

[memphis]

You have to give credit where credit's due to the Republican Lie Machine. The Democrats could never pull a con like this off.

It would be nice if the Democrats would make the effort to defend it. The Dems never want to play the silly political games. Sometimes, it's needed.

[memphis]

It's a bad bill. It's primary focus is shifting money around between the demographics, not providing world-class affordable care. People are starting to take notice.

The only people who support ACA are those who believe it's something other than what it actually is.

Whatever your opinions, the ACA is a law, not a bill. The right has so much trouble adapting to reality.

[memphis]

The premiums on my parents' insurance went up this year, like they do ever year. They blame it squarely on ObamaCare. My father's getting a procedure done in a week, and has no idea what it will cost him yet. But, of course, he is already complaining about how ObamaCare has made it "too expensive."

U.S. insurance plans are too complex for the average American to understand.

That's why I think one of the biggest blunders in implementation was to ignore successful online insurance models. Imagine if they set up the federal site like Geico designed to get you through the questionnaire in 15 minutes. How about running a state exchange like Progressive that gets you to enter your insurance needs then shows you a list of competing providers without a lot of extraneous noise? My experience was that the federal contractors wanted to reinvent the wheel when private insurers in other sectors had a good handle on how to make a clear online presentation to the public.

That's exactly what the website did. The federal one at least. I can't speak to any of the state websites, but the federal one asked a few simple questions and then gave a list of competing products, each with a bronze, silver, or gold rating and a premium price. Not sure what your quibble is.

[memphis]

I don't know why anybody would expect to buy health insurance a la carte like that. Has anybody heard of purchasing a plan like that? My pre-exchange individual plan certainly didn't work like that. It was actually a much bigger pain because I had to document a couple of pre-existing conditions and sign privacy waivers at doc's offices to get them to fax info. And then follow up on it because medical people are always drowning in paperwork, and that sort of non-urgent stuff always gets lost in the shuffle. And, with the exchange, I also got to compare plans from multiple insurers in one spot. Before, I would have had to play the fax game with every insurer I wanted a quote from, which would have been ridiculous. Except for waiting for the website to get fixed, which it was, with plenty of time to spare, buying from the exchange was a piece of cake in comparison to the old style.

[memphis]

Oh goody. Now we get to play semantics games.

[memphis]

So, the new disingenuous Republican talking point is that they're opposed to health insurance because they're not smart enough to understand it? I'm sure all of them prefer to go uninsured personally. And what exactly is the alternative? A comprehensive single payer government plan? I'm sure they'd line up for that one.