Neither set of points (approval or numbers Red listed) provide a clear picture of the effect Obamacare is having on the health care system or on the health of the people of the U.S. and the cost therein. Whether more people are insured or not is meaningless. The real issue is whether the cost per treatment is going down, the bureaucratic cost is going down and if general health is improving. The primary rational justifying universal insurance was managing costs. There is not close to being enough data there and the full cost impact hasn't been implemented. However the very items Red boasts such as no cap on treatment, no previous condition, will be big drivers of cost increases over time. Also the agreements he made with big pharma, hospitals and insurance will end up costing us very much. I agree that mindlessly attempting to repeal it is doing no good and probably much harm. Republicans should have provided a realistic alternative that is based on a truly open and free market with tax breaks for treating indigent and limited subsidies long ago. It is better to fight with good ideas than to mindlessly say "NO".
So . . . statistics with sources are not "partisan". It is math. And they have opinions based on that as well as other things, including their politics. Your poll was of doctor's opinions. It is NOT "more than an opinion" if it did not also include documented statistics. American Hospital Association, June 2010. http://whitepapers.mchc.com/october-2010/providing-care-in-a-recession/ No, you cherrypicked a time period to suggest that operating room visits were up only because of ACA. I presented you a graph showing that that emergency care visits have been steadily increasing for 25 years. This suggests that the increased emergency room visits had nothing to do with Obamacare at all, but with declining numbers of emergency rooms. Injury-related visits to the emergency room are not the issue that increased insurance availability is supposed to reduce. It is non-emergency visits to the ER by indigents. I never disparaged their opinions, only noted that its was a poll soliciting their opinions, not an analysis of their statistics. Other reports using actual data suggest that such visits are down. http://commonhealth.wbur.org/2012/0...isits-down-for-first-time-since-health-reform http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/article...elped-cut-emergency-room-visits-by-10-percent http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/34m-saved-in-effort-to-cut-needless-emergency-room-visits/ Sure, but that is normal where any projections are concerned. The bigger point is that there many areas where ACA projections were exceeded as well where they fell short.
It's like this....if someone solicited YOUR opinion about university research et al, I would accept it as expert opinion whether it came with hard facts or not. An ER physician knows what goes on in their ER every day and trending. They also know what slows down their ability to take care of patient. Those stats and the article were specific to a recession. I'm pretty certain you have discussed the miraculous economic recovery that the President has created so ER visits should be down....by that particular aspect. Again, due to recession-era issues. Two of those are from Q1 in 2014 and one from 2012. They do not address what has happened in the amost 18 months since ACA went into effect and that is what the ER physicians were addressing. "too many primary care doctors refuse to accept Obamacare patients because of low reimbursement rates. Many of those patients wind up using the ER for primary care, which portends higher – rather than lower – overall health care costs. Nowhere is that scenario more observable than here in the Golden State, where Covered California, the state’s Obamacare health insurance exchange, is held out as a national model. A study published in the May issue of Health Affairs found that health plans available through Covered California have narrower hospital networks than do commercial plans. Blue Shield of California, which boasts some 3.4 million enrollees, provides a case in point. In 2014, its Covered California health plans included only 75 percent of the hospitals in its network and 60 percent of the doctors. It’s hard to imagine a higher participation rate inasmuch as hospitals and doctors that accept Covered California patients are reimbursed in some cases 30 percent less than those that do not. That’s why many Covered California patients are turning to the state’s already overtaxed emergency rooms for such nonemergencies as coughs and colds, and cuts and burns that could be addressed at the local CVS or Walgreens." And what of the promises about being able to keep your provider if you wanted or that premiums would be lowered? Over 1M people had their plans cancelled. What's funny about the premium decrease is that they were promised, it didn't happen and the actual government website for ACA claims they had been going up anyway.
An expert opinion is still an opinion and they sometime fly in the face of evidence. Which is why I pointed out that opinions differ and evidence exists that suggests otherwise. The point was that ER usage has been increasing for decades for reasons unrelated to ACA and those reasons have not gone away. Cancelled or simply changed to a better plan. It was a comment that assumed that people wanted good insurance policies that met ACA standards and covered what most people want covered. It did not consider that many people had been paying for cheap policies with high deductibles and limited coverage and preferred to keep low-quality insurance. Not many did. For every person that was required to obtain a policy that conformed to the law, there were 17 persons newly insured that had no insurance availability at all before. Again, insurance premiums have been rising at an unsustainable rate for two decades for reasons unrelated to ACA. Those reasons have not gone away. You can't just take all the things we hate about insurance and blame it all on ACA when the problems have been happening for years and years.
Red these two points are more proof of the ridiculous attempt to claim the ACA has done anything but stuff guaranteed money in the pockets of big insurance and big hospitals as well as big pharma. The ACA has done nothing to change the slope of health care cost. It was a political deal nothing else.
Depends on who you are. 17 million people have affordable insurance, many of whom were uninsurable at any price. Many others have much better insurance now, with better coverage, kids are covered longer, pre-existing conditions covered. These things have increased the value of heath care provided. Political for sure, but a lot more than nothing. Trying to cater to Republicans was why Big Insurance got so much of the pie.
Bullshit. The deal was made by the president and the democrats for the president and the democrats. Essentially his words to the republican negotiators "I won the election and we'll do it my way. Go along with me or go to hell".
That's a made up quote. Stop trying to rewrite history, we can all remember it. Obama gave concession after concession to gain republicans votes and ended up not getting them. First to go was a single-payer healthcare system favored by democrats, in which the government, not private insurance companies, covers healthcare costs for all Americans, like Medicare. Then there was the "public option" which would have preserved the current employer-based system of private health insurance coverage while providing a government-run healthcare insurance alternative as well as a safety net for the uninsured. Importantly, it would have also injected much-needed competition into an environment where private insurance plans are increasingly consolidated. Still, this compromise of abandoning a single-payer system for a public option was not enough for Republicans. Finally they settled on the compromise of adopting RomneyCare, the old Republican plan signed into law by Mitt Romney when he was governor of Massachusetts.This plan builds on the existing system of insurers and insurance plans and was explicitly designed to mimic previous Republican plans in order to assure passage in Congress. Notably, it includes the "individual mandate," which 19 Republicans first proposed in 1993 as a legislative alternative to President Clinton's healthcare reform bill. Today, Republicans attack the individual mandate as unconstitutional, while the insurance companies rake in huge profits. Despite all these compromises and concessions, House Republicans still forced a government shutdown. Having coerced the Democrats into adopting a Republican health insurance reform plan, they then accused the administration of refusing to compromise. And just you wait and see. The Republican Congress will not overturn Obamacare despite their rhetoric. Too many features of it are too popular with the public. The party of NO does not want to become the party of "take-away our insurance". They may make lot of noise about it and may change pieces and parts, but the main components of it are here to stay.
Sorry @red55 ive been busy and haven't had time to reply. You are so funny. That the president told the Republicans when they first met that he had won and things were going to be done his way is attested to by both Democrat and Republican congress people in attendance. To say he offered compromise or concessions is also false. There were as many democrats against single payer as republicans. He gave the formulation of the ACA to Nancy Peloci and the democrat leadership who shut the republicans out. To call Romneycare a monolithic republican plan is also false. Yes it was first proposed by the Heritage foundation but it languished as most republicans weren't for it. Romneycare was passed in Massachusetts as democratic state as there is. It could be said Romney took the best of poor options. BTW just because a plan is proposed by an entity doesn't make it a policy of a party. Are you obligated to support every idea proposed by some liberal think tank? And guess what sport neither am I. I will agree that the ACA won't be overturned anytime soon. As you noted it was poisoned by too many give always that will never be paid for. Some one will have to clean out the Augean stables of failure and debt this will produce however.
Cite the quote. What did he actually say? Something like George W. Bush famously said after the 2004 election? That he had a mandate that gave him “political capital” and that “now I intend to spend it” on a bold second-term agenda. It was “my style” the Republican president said, adding that he had “the will of the people” behind him after defeating John Kerry for president. Nonsense. You were not paying attention if you imagine that. You can't rewrite history. I already listed the concessions. IS Romney Republican? Was it his plan? Is it remarkably like the ACA? True, true, and true.
