Hell no, I ain't paying another $300 a month (ACA)

[seemslikeadream]

Obamacare Is Such a Threat to Libertarian Ideology That Republicans Have Shut Down the Govt. to Delay It
We've been conned. The media has been conned. And libertarian billionaires who want America to be a "me" society and not a "we" society won.
October 1, 2013 |


What is the most effective way to destroy Obamacare?

It's not to defund it, as there's really no such thing as defunding it. Individuals are mostly funding it by buying insurance policies, and the rest of it as a whole bunch of other separate and individual pieces – things like rules against pre-existing conditions, which require no funding whatsoever.

The way to destroy Obamacare is to make sure that young, healthy people don't sign up for it.

That's because of something known in the insurance industry as the "death spiral."

A "death spiral" happens when an insurance company gets more and more older and sicker customers, which raises their costs, which in turn forces them to raise their rates. When they raise the rates, fewer and fewer young and healthy people sign up, and their proportion of older and sicker people gets even worse, and their expenses go up.

Eventually, the health insurance program dies.

The only way to prevent a death spiral is to have a large pool of young, healthy people making up most of the income to the health insurance company, so that it can pay out for what has to be a relatively small fraction of its customer base who are older, sicker or both.

So, if you want to kill Obamacare, prevent young people from signing up.

The Koch brothers tried to prevent young people from signing up with their creepy "Uncle Sam with a speculum" ad, but it was widely ridiculed.

Time for Plan B. Here's how they did it.

First, remember that midnight of September 30 was the moment when Obamacare exchanges across the nation opened for enrollment.

Every news organization in the country had prepared detailed packages and reports on what Obamacare is, how to sign up for it, how he exchanges are going public right now, and all the details.

Obamacare experts were being lined up as guests for September 30 and October 1 on radio and television networks and stations across the country. Local stations planned their local versions of this, talking about their state programs.

Those two days we're going to be a big deal, programming wise. I know. I'm in the industry. We were planning it, too.

These were going to be major programs – in some cases major features – on September 30, and October 1.

This massive news coverage, provided to Obamacare for free, would make up for the millions in advertising to promote Obamacare that Republicans had stripped out of the legislation.

All those programs on radio and television would have given the equivalent of millions of dollars worth of advertising to Obamacare, and caused tens of millions of young people to learn about the program, get excited about the program, and begin signing up right away.

Again, the way to destroy Obamacare is to make sure that young, healthy people don't sign up for it. Because if they don't, it will die. Just simple economics.

So what could the Koch brothers and other billionaire funders of the Tea Party do to make sure that every television network in America did not do a special feature the night of September 30 about how to sign up for the new Obamacare program?

And to make sure that on October 1 there weren't big news and feature stories on radio and television about how the health exchanges were offering cheaper insurance than anybody imagined?

How could they make sure that the starting date of Obamacare got buried in the news cycle so deeply that it was lost?

Under normal circumstances, that kind of story-killing would take a hurricane, or a massive earthquake, or a crazed mass-murderer gunman. But those things are pretty hard to control or predict.

So instead, the billionaires turned to the politicians they own, and told them to pull off such a radical stunt that it would seize the attention, continuously, of all the television networks and newspapers throughout the entire news cycle of September 30 and October 1.

They shut down the government.

It's just that simple.

Come up with the biggest story you possibly can – shut down the government – and run it through at the very moment Obamacare is going into effect. It seizes the new cycle, and hardly a mention is made that, "Starting tomorrow morning you, too, can sign up on a healthcare exchange for your Obamacare plan."

It was a brilliant strategy, and it worked.

The night of September 30, and all both wall-to-wall reporting, often had reporters asking the question, "Why this and why now?" It was right in front of their faces and they missed it.

But wait, there's more! This is also the week that the IPCC is rolling out the details of their new major report on climate change.

Again, networks and news organizations were preparing specials, packages, and wall-to-wall coverage of climate change and the IPCC. All of that is now buried in a closet someplace, along with the feature specials on how to find your local Obamacare exchange.

For the oil billionaires like the Koch brothers, people who make money dumping carbon dioxide waste into the atmosphere that we have to pay for, and hold to a political ideology that says the middle class should not have health insurance, this was an absolute twofer.

We've been conned. The media has been conned. And libertarian billionaires who want America to be a "me" society and not a "we" society won.

You can thank the Supreme Court for this, by the way. In their Citizens United decision, they gave corporations and billionaires the power to own politicians more than they ever have before, and that's just what they've done. Welcome to the brave new world of American politics.

[norton ash]

Single-payer payroll deduction, or included in welfare or pension. Jesus fucking christ. I can't believe these pricks.

Fuck the neocons and their pretense that 'socialism' hurts people. This is getting unbearable.

[Carol Newquist]

Fuck the neocons and their pretense that 'socialism' hurts people. This is getting unbearable.

I wholeheartedly agree....and fuck the Neoliberals and their pretense to represent the poor and oppressed when their policies send the aforementioned further into poverty.

Single Payer wasn't even considered in the debate, Norton. Why would that be? Because U.S. citizens would never have accepted it? That's what the Obama apologists will tell you, but that simply is not true.

http://www.pnhp.org/sites/default/files ... or-all.pdf

Two-thirds of Americans support Medicare for all

"Americans are scared to death of single payer."

These words were not uttered by some foaming-at-the mouth wingnut. They were written by Bernie Horn, a senior
fellow at the Campaign for America's Future, a member of Health Care for America Now, on June 8, 2009. Horn
explained that he was moved to write this tripe because single payer supporters were asking why Democrats had taken single payer off the table to make room for the "public option":

The question most frequently asked by progressive activists at last week's America's Future Now conference was this: We hear Obama and congressional Democrats talking about a public health insurance option, but why aren't they talking about a single-payer system like HR 676 sponsored by Rep. John Conyers? Why is single payer "off the table"?

Horn went on to assert that single payer had been taken off the table because Americans want it off the table. He
claimed polling data supported him, but he cited no particular poll. The truth is that the Campaign for America's
Future (CAF) and other groups in Health Care for America Now (HCAN) had decided years earlier they would push
Democratic candidates and officeholders to substitute the "option" for single payer, and they would tell both Democrats and progressive activists that Americans "like the insurance they have" and that Americans oppose single payer.

The argument that single payer is "politically infeasible" is not new. That argument is as old as the modern single payer movement (which emerged in the late 1980s). It is an argument made exclusively by Democrats who don't want to support single-payer legislation - a group Merton Bernstein and Ted Marmor have called "yes buts."

The traditional version of the "yes but" excuse has been that the insurance industry is too powerful to beat or, more
simply, that "there just aren't 60 votes in the Senate for single payer." But the leaders of the "option" movement felt they needed a more persuasive version of the traditional "yes but" excuse. The version they invented was much more insidious. They decided to say that American "values," not American insurance companies, are the major impediment to single payer.

How did the "option" movement's leaders know that Americans oppose single payer? According to Jacob Hacker,
the intellectual leader of the "option" movement, they knew it because existing polling data said so. According to people like Bernie Horn and Roger Hickey at CAF, they knew it because focus group "research" and a poll conducted by pollster Celinda Lake on behalf of the "option" movement said so.

More at link....and well worth the read to see how the deceit works.

A Democrat-controlled Executive and Legislative Branch and they not only can't get this passed, they didn't even try. That's seriously fucked up and if that's not enough to make you question this Kabuki Theater, I don't what will make you question it.

FYI, "you" is no one in particular....just the general audience if it applies to "you." If it doesn't, then there's no reason to take it personally. I'm part of the "you" and it doesn't apply to me, so I'm not taking it personally.

[8bitagent]

Whenever I see Beck, I see an SNL skit. He simply cannot be taken seriously. In fact, when push comes to shove and he's called on something where he may have crossed the line, he falls back on his being an entertainer as a disclaimer. I remember he did that a couple of years ago, and I thought "you spineless coward." I don't watch MSM. Hell, I hardly read alternative media any longer because, imo, it's pretty much become MSM-Lite, and if we believe the CIA controls the media message to a large extent, and I do, then it stands to reason they've now had plenty of time to co-opt any independent messaging.

That being said, I will occasionally tune into Limbaugh or Cain when I'm in the car running errands. I do it to gather a pulse on the propaganda. Their talking points come straight from the tried n true William Casey playbook. Case in point, Limbaugh yesterday, in his criticism of the originally Republican-crafted ACA legislation, was mentioning abortions at taxpayer expense to stoke the ire of the morons. They pull the same shit on the left side of this divide, although they're not as brazenly obvious as the right wing pundits which actually makes them more dangerous, imo. Slippery and more clandestine.....intellectually feeding you the message that if you want legal abortions and gay rights, you must accept and support the perpetual bombings with smiling faces.

And 8bitagent, yes, they used the Zimmerman/Martin tragedy as a platform to divide and fragment with their wicked propaganda.....and if you think about it, the case didn't even fit their fabricated conclusions. There are much better cases to choose if you want to make an argument for racial profiling. This one was always too ambiguous. This was a great case if we want to have a debate about stand-your-ground laws, but other than that, it doesn't fit the agenda both sides of the debate were propagating. They were squaring a circle. A disgusting display. Thankfully, most people didn't react as they intended. That was the one positive I took from all that. There is some light if you look close enough, albeit not much.

The data that came out on how the US government targeted inner city black youth, Vietnam era style, to go kill other minorities in post 9/11 wars taught me a great civics lesson of the modern era. Nothing really changes with these folks. You're right, the Martin case was shoehorned into a race baiting topic, but I think it did work in part. God, imagine if it was something more coherently engineered...

Also, I still can't help but laugh every time a right winger talks in scary tones of "communism" and "socialism" conspiracies

[justdrew]

I think Single Payer went off the table, In Part, due to the unwillingness to destroy a vast swath of the economy. Millions of people work jobs in the "health insurance" industry. Single Payer would have immediately shown it all for the pointless make-work it is. Actually going SP would have resulted in huge numbers of layoffs at a very bad time, not to mention rendering the stock prices of every Health Insurance provider into trash, which would have fucked up a lot of shit, pension funds for one.

Also, healthy people who don't really NEED any health care CAN still use a shitton of it, with SP, how would "excessive use" be guarded against? It would also even further have spiked demand. so those 15minutes you get with a doc now would have been rendered into what? 5? Some reasonable method would have to be implemented to limit expenditure, that's done now via co-pays, deductibles, etc (and people still sometimes make mildly excessive use in order to get their deductibles paid off as early in the year as possible).

Mainstream "health Insurance" was never all that great a thing. In the late 90s it was still common that a Insurance plan would cover a whopping 40% of a bill.

Most Health Insurance doesn't even DO what people think it does.

There's no easy answer

but the ACA does go a long way to making things better. No throwing people out of plans, no deny for pre-existing conditions are BIG deals for a LOT of people.

82_28, have you gone back and looked now that it's "live" ?

[Carol Newquist]

but the ACA does go a long way to making things better. No throwing people out of plans, no deny for pre-existing conditions are BIG deals for a LOT of people.

I wouldn't go so far as to say it goes "a long way to making things better." You've mentioned two positive features. I've mentioned one negative feature.....penalizing the poor unnecessarily. There are other negative features. Of course, it remains to be seen, but I'm not holding out any hope, and I don't buy the excuse that going to Single Payer would crash the economy because it would be a blow to the insurance companies. The economy is crashing for other much larger issues....this would be immaterial in comparison. And yes, of course, Medicare would have to overhauled if it was for everyone, otherwise there would be abuses. That can be done with the proper will and focus. And even going to Single Payer is not a panacea. None of this addresses the costs of healthcare and the delivery of healthcare. Modern healthcare is over-specialized and uncoordinated. There is no comprehensive and holistic approach with the focus on health rather than disease symptom management. We should look to Cuba for how it's done. For example, the elderly in Cuba are assigned a Health Professional who makes house calls. These wonderful, dedicated, caring individuals make the rounds and visit all the elderly to check on their health and keep them healthy. In a documentary I saw several years back on it, it was asserted that these people lived longer and healthier as a result. It meant something to them to know someone cared enough to be looking out for their welfare. We don't have anything resembling that in the U.S. and that's just one example of how U.S. healthcare delivery is misdirected.

[Carol Newquist]

I think Single Payer went off the table

justdrew, it's an incontrovertible fact it was never on the table. Not even considered.

[Pele'sDaughter]

If I remember correctly, no mention of single payer was even allowed. The subject couldn't even be broached.

[gnosticheresy_2]

Is "single payer" pay out of your taxes or just a better version of health insurance?

[Carol Newquist]

Is "single payer" pay out of your taxes or just a better version of health insurance?

It's essentially Medicare for all, rather than just the elderly. It's collected from taxes and administered in much the same way as Medicare. Of course, Medicare would have to be overhauled significantly, and most likely be called something else at that point. Staffing would expand and the costs of running it would increase, but with proper focus and will, it could be made to run as effectively, or more effectively, than private insurance with the added benefit of cutting out much of the corporate overhead to include exorbitant executive salaries and shareholder profit. In a sense, it's a collection of premiums in the form of taxes to pay claims and operating costs, so in that sense it is similar to insurance run by the government. But, like I said, it's not a panacea. There are so many other issues that need to be addressed. I'm not going to hold my breath, though. Fat chance any of that happening anytime soon, if ever, considering.

[The Consul]

I have heard several people use the $300/mo claim. One person, who's income I know, I looked up and he was not entirely correct, especially factoring in his family of four (and not factoring in his insurance under his employer {ICE}. Another person is uninsured and has mostly been uninsured his adult life, hates doctors, hates hospitals, hates government. His figure was also an overestimation. So, I don't know. Is it a scam in the right direction or the end of democracy as we know it (as if we ever did)?

Something has to be done. I recently experienced chest pains in my Dr's office. Before I could say "what the fuck are you doing" they had me strapped to a gurney shoving 5 baby aspirins down my gullet and spirited me off in an aid car to the hospital less than two blocks away. After the ride and the angiogram that showed no blockage the bill came to $24,000 (Instead, because I have decent insurance I only have to pay $2,400 and because I can afford to pay it up front, I get a 15% discount bringing it down to about $2,100). The 24I would have been expected to pay if I had not insurance or did not qualify for uncompensated care. Of course, if I had no insurance, they would have told me to take a couple of tums and get lost.
Point is, it is out of control. Will the ACA be a portal through which it can be managed? Will it be an introduction to changing govt priorities? Will people finally begin to ask themselves just WTF we are getting for spending more than $750,000,000,000 a year on defense/security?
Probably not. As much as I distrust and despise the increasingly pedestrian pols, the utterly prostituded press, the mind bogglingly arrogant billionaires - by a significantly greater degree I doubt the resolve and intelligence of the masses to elevate their daily concern above the wiley distracting bruise on Kim Kardashian's inner thigh.

[Carol Newquist]

the wiley distracting bruise on Kim Kardashian's inner thigh.

Shit, she has a bruise on her thigh? I didn't know. Do you have a link?

[Carol Newquist]

Most people, because of cost are going to choose the least amount of coverage, which is the bronze or silver plan. The bronze and silver plans receive the greater subsidy, but they have higher co-pays and deductibles. Those co-pays and higher deductibles can tear you up real quick if something happens. Here's a calculator that's fairly accurate. Let's use an example. Husband and wife with combined income of $80,000 and no children. Husband 47 and wife 45. Estimated premium for the silver plan with the high co-pays and deductible and the subsidy applied? $633. No joke. Play around with it and tell us what you think. Woo Hoo!!

http://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/healthpolicy/calculator/

[freemason9]

The purpose of this video is a form of social coercion and a tactic to dissuade otherwise intelligent people from engaging in independent critical thought. The message is that if you oppose or criticize The Affordable Care Act you are an idiot like these folks. The substance and verity of your criticism is of no importance. If you criticize, you'll be conflated with these morons and laughed at. To that, I'd say, who do you think gets the last laugh?

No, you managed to miss the point entirely. You read too much into it.

It points out something we all know, and it flings it in our face: American politics is disinformative and saturated with for-profit media that benefits from conflict. Republicans vs. Democrats is the same as Yankees vs. Sox. We need to resolve the political entertainment crisis before we can advance much further as a society. It will, by the way, be resolved.

And if you actually believe that "the purpose of this video is a form of social coercion and a tactic to dissuade otherwise intelligent people from engaging in independent critical thought," you need a night out.

(1) The ACA is not perfect. It's not even very good.
(2) I opposed the ACA because I wanted something akin to Canadian, Australian, or German models.
(3) Nevertheless, it is a step away from the status quo. A necessary step.

[Carol Newquist]

(3) Nevertheless, it is a step away from the status quo. A necessary step.

How so? The status quo is corporate domination of all things, and this legislation is no different. It is legislation crafted by insurance companies for insurance companies. It's a pile of shit doused with some floral scent and festooned with a decorative bow with some gaudy lipstick hastily applied in the heat of the night.