fawfulfan:

Obamacare brings on some huge changes. But exactly what are these changes, and are they in the best interests of America? Time for a pros and cons discussion! But first, let’s dispel some right-wing lies.

First, it’s not socialism. A socialist health care plan would call for a government takeover and nationalization of health insurance and hospitals. Obamacare is first and foremost about keeping health care in private hands…but regulating unfair business practices so that everyone has access. This is in fact a conservative health care reform plan. The individual mandate was originally proposed by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank sponsored by the Koch Brothers…the very billionaire oil magnates who engineered the Tea Party movement and are leading the crusade against Obama and his health care reform!

And you can forget about “death panels”…in fact, aside from a (necessary) tax hike on Medicare and other reforms, seniors are barely mentioned in Obamacare at all! Nor is there any way that illegal immigrants could conceivably profit from this system, as I sometimes hear mentioned by conservative opponents, since this is still all in the hands of private business.

Also, this is not, as the persistent right-wing battle cry says, the “largest tax increase in American history”. Larger tax increases throughout American history include the Revenue Acts of 1950 and 1951, the Temporary Surcharge of 1968, the Excess Profits Tax of 1950, the Reagan Tax Increase of 1982, the Tax Increase of 1966, the Oil Windfall Tax of 1980, the Clinton Tax Increase of 1993, and the Bush Tax Increase of 1993…and that’s just in the past 65 years! Plus, it must be noted that many of these tax hikes happened under Republican presidents. So much for that lie, Mitch McConnell. Got anything else for us?

Furthermore, the Republicans’ denigration of Obamacare implies that the individual mandate accounts for most of the tax increase. It doesn’t. Not even close. The law includes Medicare payroll tax hikes, investment income taxes, premium insurance taxes, corporate taxes for insurance providers, etc. The mandate itself raises less money than any of these other tax hikes. This is perfectly logical, since the whole point behind the individual mandate is that you don’t HAVE to pay it unless you voluntarily refuse to buy health insurance.

In addition, there are many provisions to the mandate that exempt people under a variety of situations. Of course, the first provision is if you already have health insurance, or are on Medicaid or Medicare. But you also are exempt from the mandate if you are a member of a religion that opposes health insurance, are an undocumented immigrant, are in prison, are a member of an Indian tribe, have such a low income that you are not required to file an income tax return, or are unable to find insurance that costs less than 8% of your income. Nobody who meets any of these conditions will be taxed if they refuse to buy health insurance.

And just to make sure we cover all the lies, no, Obamacare does not call for the implanting of government tracking chips in people’s brains by 2013. Seriously, there are people who actually say that.

So, moving on, there are many reasons to be grateful for this new law. It ends price discrimination in the insurance industry and guarantees access to virtually every American, including those with pre-existing conditions. It requires large corporations to provide health insurance to all their employees (even Wal-Mart greeters will get corporate-sponsored insurance now). It puts an end to the “doughnut hole” in prescription drug coverage for Medicare. And it allows young adults to stay on their parents’ health plans until the age of 26.

And the mandate? Well, that’s just simple economics, folks. There’s no way the reform could possibly work without it. If people aren’t required to buy health insurance, they would just wait until they got sick to insure themselves. It would totally destroy the insurance industry’s business model, which depends on payout being a low probability. Imagine what our premiums would be if they needed to pay for expensive procedures for 100% of the people on their plans! Only folks like Mitt Romney would be able to afford insurance then.

And speaking of which…

Mitt Romney likes to argue against Obamacare on the grounds that unlike his health care reform, it undermines state sovereignty. Quite apart from the fact that this is a shameless flip-flop from 2008 when he proudly called Romneycare a “model for the nation”, his claim that Obamacare wrests power away from the states isn’t even true!

Here’s something that almost nobody knows about Obamacare, because the Republicans have so effectively hushed it up: starting in 2017, states have the right to opt out of Obamacare - PROVIDED that they have a more efficient means of guaranteeing affordable health care to all of their citizens. That means that Massachusetts has the right to opt out of the federal system, and it means that if any other state can come up with a promising alternative, they can opt out of Obamacare too.

In other words, the “waiver” that Mitt Romney claims he will give to states on the first day he’s elected president already exists. The difference is that Obama’s waiver encourages states to actually reform their own health care systems, and Romney’s waiver does not.

But let’s not get too excited. There are still some problems with Obamacare.

First of all, it should probably be called not the “Affordable Care Act”, but the “Accessible Care Act”. It’s unclear whether it will truly lower the cost of health care in practice. The Obama Administration makes a great case that it will—decreasing the number of uninsured people to practically zero will put an end to insured citizens footing the bill for those who default on hospital bills, and increased access to preventative care will reduce the demand for expensive lifesaving procedures which make up the bulk of this country’s health care costs. In theory, that sounds great. But what President Obama seems to be overlooking is that these trends never materialized under Romneycare in Massachusetts. People in the Bay State are certainly healthier, happier, and more secure…but they aren’t paying any less for their insurance.

If you talk to conservatives on the street, you’ll often hear legitimate points about health care that their representatives have completely ignored. With all the hysteria about “death panels” and “socialized medicine”, somehow the Republican leaders haven’t grasped the actual problem with Obamacare, which is that it doesn’t address the root causes of why health care is so expensive in this country.

There are two conservative health care positions I agree with. The first is tort reform. If we really want to make health care more affordable, we should stop holding doctors accountable for conditions they didn’t spot. Under the law right now, if you get sick because of a condition your doctor could have tested for but didn’t, you have the right to sue him. This means that doctors have an incentive to run as many unnecessary tests as possible so they don’t risk a lawsuit and skyrocketing malpractice insurance.

That’s ridiculous. Suing a doctor because he amputated the wrong leg is well within your rights. Suing a doctor because he didn’t test you for cancer that wasn’t causing symptoms and nobody suspected was there is frivolous. If doctors don’t fear being sued in those situations, they won’t run tons of unneeded tests, which means far lower health care costs for those who actually NEED testing.

That said, I will also caution that previous attempts at tort reform have not been successful. Many states have enacted legislation that sets a cap on the damages that can be awarded to malpractice victims, and this has done nothing to lower costs. But I believe these states have missed the point of tort reform. They may make lawsuits less profitable, but they don’t make it any more difficult for patients to sue, and they don’t make it any less painful for doctors when their malpractice insurance goes up. The real point of tort reform is to change the culture of medical lawsuits—we need a culture of patients who are less likely to prey on their doctors the instant they get cancer, and we need a culture of judges who are more likely to consider such lawsuits frivolous.

It’s not clear what sort of laws we could enact to serve those ends. But it’s also clear that the problems with our legal incentives can’t just be dismissed.

At the same time though, I’m very glad to hear that Obama has himself come out in favor of tort reform. Despite tort reform being a fundamentally conservative view, I believe it ought to be Democrats, not Republicans, who lead the charge, because Republicans have a vested interest in changing the system to suit their campaign finance. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that conservatives embrace a method of health care reform that profoundly impacts lawyers, when lawyers are among the largest donors to the Democratic Party.

One could argue Democrats aren’t exactly in a position to be impartial either. And maybe that’s true. But when it comes to a profession designed specifically to fight for justice, better to risk too little change than too much.

The other conservative health care position I support is the idea that we should break down the state barriers and create an unfettered national market for health care. Under the old system, many states had near monopolies on health insurance, enabling many providers to engage in absurd price-gouging.

Obamacare attempts to solve this problem by setting up “state exchanges”…virtual marketplaces in which providers from multiple states can come together and offer a wider range of goods and services to customers. And certainly that will be an improvement, but why create yet another layer of bureaucracy? Really, it would be so much simpler to just do away with state barriers entirely and create laws that defend every insurance provider’s right to sell in any part of the country they want.

With a real free market for health care, we’ll have competition, and competition drives down prices. Let companies in New York sell to people in Nevada. If their cost is lower than the cost of Nevada insurance providers, the local companies will either lower their prices or go out of business. That’s how capitalism works.

Finally, I’m not entirely comfortable with the idea of Obamacare preserving the longstanding American tradition of using the workplace as an intermediary to provide health insurance. Certainly corporations are more capable of bargaining for lower prices in the insurance industry, but shouldn’t the real dream be a gradual push towards a health care market that operates independently? Shouldn’t people still get to keep their health insurance even if they lose their jobs? And if corporations don’t need to pay for their employees’ health insurance, wouldn’t that make them more competitive on a global stage (assuming they use the savings for innovation and not executive bonuses)?

In my view, we should use the German health care system as a model for reform. In Germany, they essentially have multiple private firms and multiple public options, all in competition with one another. Germans without private health insurance automatically get their choice of public plans, but they also pay higher taxes. This is simply one of the best universal health care systems in the world—far better than the clunky single-payer systems of Britain and Canada, which take forever to provide the simplest things for their citizens. And it’s sustainable, too…much cheaper per person than the U.S. system.

But here’s the thing: this isn’t cause for condemnation of Obamacare, it’s cause for expansion. Obamacare still increases coverage and helps millions of people. And it does so by motivating the kind of self-reliance that Republicans claim to love. People need to understand the truth, warts and all. The Republicans owe it to their own ideals to debate openly and apply critical thinking to this issue. If only they would, they could actually improve the President’s reform.

This is veerryyy long for those with short attention spans (i.e. me) but very worth it. Very detailed, very clear, and full of very juicy facts. I love facts, don’t you?

I bolded the shit I’ve been saying and the new stuff I thought very interesting, but left the tail end alone because really you should just read the whole thing.

(Source: barackobama)

soupsoup:

Is Obamacare’s Individual Mandate Really The Largest Tax Hike In The History Of The World?

No, no it’s not. Republicans just want to fight everything Obama does, no matter why he’s doing it or how much good it will really do.

thingsmittromneysays:

Guys and gals — I wasn’t kidding when I said we should congratulate Mitt Romney for Obamacare.

inothernews:

Hey guys,

Let’s reblog this photo until the official Mitt Romney Tumblr sees it.

Because Obamacare.

(Photo of then-Governor Mitt Romney signing Obamacare Romneycare into law in Massachussetts not that long ago via The Huffington Post)

jayparkinsonmd:

So, let’s say it’s 2014 and you and your spouse have two children. You both make a combined salary of $93,000. You are both freelancers and don’t get health insurance through your employer.

In 2014, when the mandate goes into effect, the average health insurance premium for a family of four will be about $16,000 per year. You make too much money to qualify for federal subsidies to offset the cost of health insurance premiums. 

Therefore, 17% of your pre-tax income will be spent on health insurance that you are mandated to buy, or you can pay a fine of $2,085.

According to today’s SCOTUS decision, you and your family must pay a “tax” to a private, for-profit corporation called Aetna or Wellpoint of 17% of your pre-tax income. 

$16,000 or a fine of $2,085? But since the least expensive plan is more than 8% of your income, you do not have to pay the fine. And you are still uninsured.

I’m pretty sure the plan is that there will be more competition and costs will hopefully go down, kind of like what happened with car insurance. However, even if that is not the case, this family isn’t negatively affected by the bill. They may not be getting help out of it, which hopefully will be addressed, but they aren’t harmed, they would be uninsured either way, and they don’t have to pay the fine. Gee, sounds like life right now for many other families who aren’t in the situation and will be helped. 

Also. You said “the average health insurance premium for a family of four will be about $16,000 per year”. And then you said “$16,000 or a fine of $2,085? But since the least expensive plan is more than 8% of your income, you do not have to pay the fine.” So which is it? Average, or least expensive? Where/who are you getting these quotes from? If you meant $16000 a year is average, then what really is the least expensive?

(Source: iamnineonefour)