Obamacare

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Top Four Reasons why we should have “Medicare for all”

1.  It will cut bureaucracy.  Right now we have a gigantic book full of regulations concerning Obamacare, and the Republicans want to destroy most of them and insert their own, and you know what? We already have all the regulations and bureaucracy in place for Medicare that has been tested for over fifty years. It’s not perfect (nothing in government or business or education or anything is perfect) but it sure is easier to deal with.

2.  It will get rid of mandatory insurance. Right now, insurance companies provide no health care. They’re a middle man standing between you and health care. Oh sure, if you want to buy extra health care to cover elective surgery or other things, you can do that now with medicare. But if we get rid of the need for health insurance companies, we can cut our health care costs tremendously, like every other industrialized country has done.

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3. It will lower costs. That’s how health care works, after all. If we spread the costs out among 350 million people or so (as opposed to the way we spread them out among much smaller insurance groups today), then we’ll reduce the average expenditure per person.

4. It will save everyone money. Right now, you’re either paying for insurance on your own (which is expensive) or your employer is paying for it. If it is government-provided, those costs will go away. Your employer should increase your salary accordingly (and you should demand as such — after all, they think that’s what you’re worth). Even if your taxes increase (and they don’t have to — we have the money, we’re just wasting it on things we don’t need like tax breaks for billionaires), they won’t increase as much as your insurance premiums are.

The fact is that this is the easiest, cheapest, and best way to provide health insurance to Americans.

(Note: Unlike Donald Trump, I know that health care is a complicated issue. This article is a very stripped down simple summary and does not cover every nuance, nor is it trying to.)

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Shock! Obamacare isn’t perfect!

They just won’t let it go, will they? Conservatives are still bitching about Obamacare, pointing out statistics about rising health care costs and other problems with the program.

Yes. We know. It’s not perfect. We didn’t like it much, either. But it’s the best we could get out of you bastards, who would have preferred no health care policy at all.doctor-obama

You remember what it was like back then, right? When prices were increasing by huge amounts and people could be denied coverage or kicked off for whatever stupid reason the insurance companies wanted?

Obamacare didn’t fix everything, but instead of comparing it to a perfect world, how about comparing it to what it was like before?

It also doesn’t help that you have been wrong about every single prediction you made about the plan. More people signed up for Obamacare than even Obama predicted (and certainly more than the “close to zero” the Republicans had predicted). More people are insured than ever before. The vast majority of those previously insured (80%) did not have to change their insurance companies or doctors. It hasn’t killed jobs and in fact has created many new jobs. 85% of all employers stated that it hadn’t affected their hiring practices in the slightest. And studies show that people are satisfied with it, including 74% of all Republicans. Even the Rand Corporation, a respected independent research group not known for its liberal political views, released its study on Obamacare and determined that it has indeed accomplished what it set out to do.

Maybe if you conservatives had actually proposed a plan — any plan — you’d have the right to complain about it, but otherwise, please just shut the hell up.

Let’s face it, you guys liked Obamacare just fine when it was called “Romneycare” and when it had been proposed by your own Presidential candidates years earlier. You just have this knee-jerk reaction to oppose anything Obama does, don’t you?

We can fix all of this with a single-payer plan like every other industrialized country, but no, you’d rather have no plan whatsoever. And, of course, even with no plan whatsoever, you’d still bitch about how the President isn’t doing anything, would you?

No one with intelligence takes you guys seriously — you know that, right?

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Every single Republican prediction about Obamacare proven wrong

The Rand Corporation, a respected independent research group not known for its political views, has released its study on Obamacare and determined that it has indeed accomplished what it set out to do.doctor-obama

This flies in the face of every single Republican prediction about it, including ones they are still making to this day.

Has it been perfect? Oh, of course not — no one ever said it would be. But to deny it’s an improvement is to just ignore all the facts.

More people signed up for Obamacare than even Obama predicted (and certainly more than the “close to zero” the Republicans had predicted). More people are insured than ever before. The vast majority of those previously insured (80% according to Rand) did not have to change their insurance companies or doctors. It hasn’t killed jobs and in fact has created many new jobs. 85% of all employers stated that it hadn’t affected their hiring practices in the slightest. And studies show that people are satisfied with it, including 74% of all Republicans.

So to all the Republicans out there, let me say this: I understand that you plan on running against Obamacare again in 2016. Oh please don’t. I beg you. Don’t keep health care as a prominent issue in the campaign to remind everyone of what the Democrats did. I will be so unhappy. Please don’t throw us into that briar patch.

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Grunt! Oog! Obamacare bad because written by women and minorities!

Me just caveman lawyer. Your modern world confuses and frightens me. But me know one thing:  Obamacare bad because written by white women and minorities.

At least three of these people will probably disagree with the idea that women don't understand the Constitution.

At least three of these people will probably disagree with the idea that women don’t understand the Constitution.

This, almost literally, is what the chief lawyer who argued recently before the Supreme Court about Obamacare said.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, he said that this law was different because it was written by “white women and minorities.”  If you can understand why that makes it different from any other law, please enlighten me, but apparently, to Attorney Michael Carvin, that makes it suspect and clearly unconstitutional.  As we all know, we need white men making these decisions about our laws.

Hey, if nothing else, the fact that the people who hired him see nothing wrong with this statement tells you what kind of people are behind this latest attempt to overturn the will of the majority.

Editorial cartoon: Thar she blows

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Obamacare not an issue in the election

The last few elections saw Republicans attacking Obamacare, saying how awful it was and how it would ruin the economy and make people die and cause the earth to leave its orbit and careen into the sun.  “It’s the worst thing to happen to America since slavery,” they actually said.  doctor-obama

Here’s the funny thing:  None of the bad stuff they predicted would happen actually happened.  I know, right?  Who would have thought that the Republicans had lied and exaggerated?  Shocking.

The uninsured rate keeps dropping.  Approval of Obamacare is at its highest.    Insurance cost increases have even gone down.  (Yeah, they’re still rising — they were doing that before Obamacare, you know, by huge numbers — but percentage-wise, they are not rising as fast as they were, and in some places they’ve even gone down.)

And the GOP knows this.  That’s why they’ve finally stopped scheduling “repeal Obamacare” votes and why you don’t hear them talking about it any more.

I mean, it’s not like they had a real reason to be against it.  Obamacare was, after all, originally a Republican plan.  They liked the idea of keeping the insurance companies happy.  It was called “Romneycare” at first, you know.  They only opposed it because Obama supported it, because all that party knows how to do these days is to oppose anything the Democrats favor.

But that’s all in the past.  Conservatives have always been against social progress, and they’ll scream and yell as they’re being dragged into the present but eventually they’ll shut up.  They did the same thing with worker’s safety, minimum wage, child labor laws, racial integration, medicare, medicaid, environmental protection, voting rights, women’s rights, gay rights … (need I go on?)

 

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Insurance companies, under oath, tell the truth

It must be terribly frustrating to be an anti-Obamacare congressman these days.  doctor-obama

Why, just take the Republicans who held a hearing this week about how terrible Obamacare is and how much it is failing.   They subpoenaed insurance company executives who would testify about how less than half of those who had signed up had actually paid, how the bureaucracy was restricting care, how rates were going up, and how the entire program was terrible (because that was what Fox News kept reporting, and they’re never wrong).

Sadly, none of that came to be.  The executives, evil as they are, realized they were under oath and reported that in actuality, things were going quite well.   More people had signed up than predicted.  The vast majority (80% – 90%) were up to date on their payments.  Insurance company stock had increased and business was doing great, and because of all that, rates would not be going up.

Republicans at the hearing just couldn’t accept this, and complained that the executives weren’t being forthcoming.  Clearly, Obama’s goons had gotten to them!  Why, the goons were even able to somehow change all the statistical data in every single one of the insurance companies to make it seem that Obamacare was working.  The fiends!

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Obamacare kills again

And yet another place shuts down because of Obamacare.doctor-obama

A free clinic administering to the poor, with volunteer doctors. Yep, you guessed it — Obamacre is making them shut down.

Because they are no longer needed.

“Because people are qualifying for insurance coverage through the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, our free medical clinic will not be needed anymore,” Stacey Bowser RN, 9th Street Ministries Clinic Director, stated. “We’ve gone from seeing around 300 people a month on a regular basis, but as people were enrolling in Obamacare, the numbers we were seeing have dropped. We were down to 80 people that came through the medical clinic in February, all the way down to three people at the medical clinic in March. Our services won’t be needed anymore, and this will conclude our mission.”

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Can’t we celebrate some good news?

Look, the plan the Republicans originally wanted is in, and it’s successful.    More than 7.1 million have signed up for health insurance coverage so far, which exceeds expectations.  The uninsured rate has dropped, which helps all of us who no longer have to cover people who use the emergency room for their health care because it was free (“personal responsibility,” you know, is another good thing).   NYorker

The vast majority of those who are using Obamacare are paying less than before (although you’d never know it from the Fox news coverage of the minority who are paying more, mostly because their previous plans were crappy and worthless).

More and more Americans are supportive of the Affordable Care Act (a majority, in fact) and that number keeps going up.

Most importantly, people are getting covered so that perhaps we will no longer have families going into bankruptcy because of medical bills.

Seriously, why is this a bad thing?  The “free marketplace” is what caused all the problems Obamacare was designed to fix, so don’t go telling me that we should have let the market decide.  We did, and it was terrible.

While in the short term Obamacare may hurt the Democrats (largely because of all the lies being spread about it by the Republicans), in the long run, this will be seen as a large step forward and supported by almost everyone, in the same way Medicare and Social Security have become.

 

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Wimpy Democrats bound to lose again

Sometimes it seems like the Republicans are the Bully Party and the Democrats are the Wimpy party.  (Or maybe that makes the Republicans the Bluto party?)Wimpy

I remember the Dukakis campaign.  I lived in Boston at the time and did a little work on it and recall how the senior Bush called Dukakis a “liberal” as if it was a bad thing — that Dukakis should be ashamed.  Dukakis wimped out and didn’t stand up and say “Yes, I am a liberal, like John F. Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt, and I am proud of that” until about a week before the election, when it was too late.  Instead, liberals cowed down and started calling themselves “progressives” because “liberal” suddenly became bad.  Wimps.

The GOP still sets the agenda by bullying their way in, and the Democrats let them.  The Republicans claim to be the party of fiscal responsibility and morality and everything else and rarely do Democrats challenge them on this like they should.  The GOP is now claiming that Obamacare is a terrible disaster when studies show that it is successful, and that a majority of Americans like it.  Yet Democrats are cowering because they are too frightened to embrace things that the American public wants.

“Obamacare will be a disaster!” the conservatives screamed.  “There’s no way we’ll get 5 million people to sign up for it!”  We’re at 6.5 million as of today, but how many Democrats do you see proclaiming that victory?  Why aren’t the Democrats touting all the success stories about people who are covered now that previously weren’t, and who are paying much less?  Instead, we get Republican commercials full of lies.  (Of course, some of that is due to the Koch brothers spending billions to spread their propaganda, which is very hard to overcome.)

But the public is on our side.

Americans often categorize themselves as “conservative,” but their views on the issues align with Democrats more often than they do with Republicans.

A majority of Americans support Obamacare.  A majority thinks gay marriage,  abortion and marijuana should be legal.  A majority supports more gun control.  A majority want to raise the minimum wage and do something about campaign finance reform.  A majority wants to raise taxes on the wealthy and do not believe that “corporations are people.”

These positions are not radical dreams of the left.  They are mainstream.  For Democrats to shy away from what a majority of Americans want is ridiculous.