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

[AggregateDemand]

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.

[AggregateDemand]

You could just as accurately argue "The only people who oppose ACA are those who believe it's something other than what it actually is."

It's not a government takeover of health care, it's not death panels, it's not causing millions of people to lose their insurance, it's not responsible for the all of the rate increases people are seeing, it's not remotely Socialist or Communist, it's not "literally killing people," it's not forcing Catholics to take buy control, etc., etc., etc.

It doesn't have "death panels"......anymore. It did cause millions to lose their health insurance when private insurers dumped people into the government system. Covering people with pre-existing conditions, expanding coverage to non-insurable services, and forcing various demographics to subsidize care for other demographics is the cause of rate increases. ACA is obviously socialistic in nature, though it doesn't impose single-payer or nationalized healthcare. ACA is forcing employers to buy birth control services, regardless of the owner's religious convictions; however, the Hobby Lobby ruling allows religious exemptions for certain kinds of birth control procedures and medication.

You like ACA because you don't know what it is.

[AggregateDemand]

Oh right...

I don't pretend to know everything about the law, but your understanding of ACA and the economics of insurance is not substantial enough for us to have meaningful conversation. ACA does nothing except use an extraordinarily convoluted system to stiff certain healthy individuals to cover benefit expansion (much of which is not insurable expense) and health services for the uninsured. Included in the original proposals were mechanisms like Medicare oversight committees (death panels), which were designed to achieve part of a $500B reduction in Medicare spending to free up funds for subsidies and Medicaid expansion.

The original bill, though more socialistic than the current iteration, showed signs of intelligent life. The bill that became law shows how desperate Democrats were to push something through--a bill so bad Obama won't even execute the law.

[AggregateDemand]

I don't really see the problem with death panels.  I mean, as long as they're being held accountable and managed properly -- nothing angers me more than when some flunky can't figure out whether they're pulling my grandmother's plug on 7/8 or 8/7.  It made the funeral so much harder to plan.

I don't have a problem with "death panels". My grandfather was a victim of our Medicare system. Doctors knew he had about 2-3 years left in the tank. They convinced him to spend it in the hospital at extraordinary expense to the taxpayers, including a hip replacement, much like President Obama claims about his own grandmother. Medicare is the maximization of public bad in many instances.

However, panels were definitely part of the original bill in Section 1233. Republicans could make many strong arguments against death panels, but most of the people who are afraid of "death panels" are probably those who've yet to have a loved-one drawn and quartered by Medicare actuaries in the name of social justice.

[AggregateDemand]

I don't pretend to know everything about the law, but your understanding of ACA and the economics of insurance is not substantial enough for us to have meaningful conversation.

Whatever man. Anyone who doesn't have the same opinion as you just doesn't know what he's talking about. Even if said person is a health actuary.

It's the construction worker vs architect problem.

The insurance industry does not teach you about insurance per se. A policy with flat-rate copay is not insurance. Policies that cover regular, foreseeable expenses (birth control, annual checkup) are not insurance. All kinds of perverse economic programs have fallen under the banner of insurance because health insurance is exempt from federal taxation. Rather than fixing the exemption problem, and returning to proper health insurance systems, ACA makes the income exemption problem much worse.

You cannot insure yourself against birth control. The expense is regular, known, and predictable. Therefore, insurance policies that cover benefits like birth control are nothing more than thinly veiled entitlements, in which some demographic of people is forced to pay for the services of other demographics via ACA "insurance" policies.

[AggregateDemand]

Oh goody. Now we get to play semantics games.

The semantics games have been going on since the tax exemptions were introduced. If you're just now noticing the level of intellectual debauchery in the insurance system, you haven't been paying attention. All sorts of perverse economic programs have been classified as insurance to achieve tax exempt status.

ACA is not a health insurance bill. It's a series of new entitlements. At first, Dems thought these programs would be administered through government agencies, but, in the end, they decided to grease the palms of private insurers to get them to administrate the system. Instead of fixing the problem, Obamacare expands the problem, an absurd political stance that Democrats justify by the new entitlements they've buried in ACA.

[AggregateDemand]

This raises a real cost hidden in health coverage; a legacy from the beginnings of the HMO movement of the 70's. It's the equivalent of putting maintenance expenses like oil changes and new tires on an auto insurance policy. These are normal budgetary expenses and don't require an insurer to assume risk on behalf of the policy holder. Instead one is charging the consumer for the convenience of having the insurance company manage that part of the budget for the consumer.

Exactly. Drivers would pay extraordinary agency costs to a private company that essentially bills them and then returns their money, less the insurance company fee. People with expensive cars and high maintenance bills make out like bandits, while frugal spenders are gouged. Normally, private insurance would used discriminatory pricing to avoid gouging the smart-spenders, but ACA tends to view all healthcare services as exogenous consumption, forcing the healthy to pay for the routine, predictable services demanded by other citizens.

[AggregateDemand]

So, the new disingenuous Republican talking point is that they're opposed to health insurance because they're not smart enough to understand it?

Why bother bluffing, if everyone knows you're holding no cards?

If you believe the choices are limited to shoddy wealth redistribution disguised as insurance or comprehensive federal single-payer (Medicare), you've already resigned your electoral privileges.