Affordable Health Care Law under review by SCOTUS

[cardboardbox]

NEWS: @realDonaldTrump spoke to Paul Ryan at 3 pm and asked him to pull the bill, per a leadership aide

— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) March 24, 2017

[dslaw]

For years I have heard how they want to repeal Obamacare and had 50 million votes to try to repeal it (maybe a slight exaggeration). Why don't they just do it instead of this "repeal and replace". Did they just now figure out that people like parts of Obamacare? I know my congressman (Chaffetz) is a freaking lemming and will follow whoever off a cliff but it seems like there should be someone in that party who stood up in the past and said "Wait a minute, we can't repeal due to ..." But all of them wanted to repeal it until they actually had the power to do so.

Don't want to rail on (R) too much because (D) are just as guilty in many instances but this whole thing is getting ridiculous. They have to vote on 3/23 because of the anniversary. If that is so important they need to take a year to get a good plan and vote on 3/23/18. This is still before any more elections so they will still control Congress. I guess passing bills is kind of like reporting - being 1st is the most important thing. Being correct falls somewhere else down the line.

[GwynnInTheHall]

It Is DED

[Hornsby]

Can you believe it's only been two months?

No sir, seems like 2 years.

I think that any momentum that the GOP had is now lost on repealing Obamacare, oh, they'll continue to try, but that's dead as hell, IMO. Too many people realized finally what it actually IS, and how it helped them and their family and friends. Now the fixing has to start, and hopefully, once 2018 rolls around enough people will remember this debacle and vote the GOP out in droves so it can take effect in earnest.

I don't think that Trump cares one way or another about dealing with Health Care again, and Ryan has been neutered...of course, a nasty politician is never really dead.

[The Feral Slasher]

I think that the GOP will actually "own" it at this point, simply because they've been promising for years to repeal it, and no find themselves in real danger of not being able to do it. Also, the public actually likes the ACA more than not, and this turmoil has made people in poor circumstances realize that Obamacare and the ACA are one and the same, and people actually liked their ACA.

I believe that it's actually easier to fix something that works, albit somewhat poorly in many respects, than to create something from whole cloth with the main goal seemingly to toss millions off of their insurance.

Again, single payer is real fix, and trump could probably sweep to a 2nd term if he's push lowering the age of Medicare eligibility to 55...

Time will tell, but if Obamacare is left intact I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that everyone is going to be happy with it. As you state in the last paragraph single payer is the real fix and hopefully the Dems will push for that instead of tweaks to Obamacare

[Hornsby]

Time will tell, but if Obamacare is left intact I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that everyone is going to be happy with it. As you state in the last paragraph single payer is the real fix and hopefully the Dems will push for that instead of tweaks to Obamacare

I think that they will, they now see (or damn well should) there's a real appetite for everyone to have decent health care. It'll be a tough sell, but I think that it can be done if enough Republicans are smart about it.

[The Feral Slasher]

I thought this was an interesting article. I'm sure our resident libertarians will be interested in the paragraph below

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/24/upshot/health-insurance-medicare-obamacare-american-health-care-act.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fupshot&action=click&contentCollection=upshot&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=1&smid=tw-upshotnyt&smtyp=cur

Part of the appeal of Medicare for all is that single-payer systems reduce financial incentives that generate waste and abuse. Mr. Ryan insisted that by relegating health care to private insurers, competition would lead to lower prices and higher quality. Economic theory tells us that this is a reasonable expectation when certain conditions are met. A crucial one is that buyers must be able to compare the quality of offerings of different sellers. In practice, however, people have little knowledge of the treatment options for the various maladies they might suffer, and policy language describing insurance coverage is notoriously complex and technical. Consumers simply cannot make informed quality comparisons in this industry.

[Hornsby]

I thought this was an interesting article. I'm sure our resident libertarians will be interested in the paragraph below

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/24/upshot/health-insurance-medicare-obamacare-american-health-care-act.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fupshot&action=click&contentCollection=upshot®ion=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=1&smid=tw-upshotnyt&smtyp=cur

Part of the appeal of Medicare for all is that single-payer systems reduce financial incentives that generate waste and abuse. Mr. Ryan insisted that by relegating health care to private insurers, competition would lead to lower prices and higher quality. Economic theory tells us that this is a reasonable expectation when certain conditions are met. A crucial one is that buyers must be able to compare the quality of offerings of different sellers. In practice, however, people have little knowledge of the treatment options for the various maladies they might suffer, and policy language describing insurance coverage is notoriously complex and technical. Consumers simply cannot make informed quality comparisons in this industry.

Amen to that!

[Fresno Bob]

Please post if you felt that the plan being offered by the GOP was superior to the current state of healthcare

[Bernie Brewer]

No sir, seems like 2 years.

I think that any momentum that the GOP had is now lost on repealing Obamacare, oh, they'll continue to try, but that's dead as hell, IMO. Too many people realized finally what it actually IS, and how it helped them and their family and friends. Now the fixing has to start, and hopefully, once 2018 rolls around enough people will remember this debacle and vote the GOP out in droves so it can take effect in earnest.

I don't think that Trump cares one way or another about dealing with Health Care again, and Ryan has been neutered...of course, a nasty politician is never really dead.

is Ryan a nasty politician in your mind the same way Chuck Shumer, Elizabeth Warren, and Nancy Pelosi are nasty politicians in my mind? Just asking. Two people, two differing views. American, she's a beautiful country.

As for momentum being lost, I get that it was the other team's plan and that they've been pretty assholey about your team's plan, and that it's human nature to pick sides and cheer the other team's epic face plant from afar. But, with that said, isn't This really all of our losses together? As I read this thread, it appears to me that a majority of posters agree that ACA needs to be, minimally, modified. Whether its as little as subtle tweaks or as big as a complete repeal and replace, I don't profess to know answer, but what I'm reading is that majority of us can agree that something needs to be done.

As someone who makes insurance decisions for a small company and its employees, the last several years have not been fun. I've been forced to figure out how best to split between the company and employees the costs of increases over the last three years that ranged from 8.5% to 12%. We could have cancelled employee health insurance altogether and given the insurance credit but to retain and attract quality people this is not really an option. While we have had to split the burden with employees, as a company of only 26 people, being a very highly competitive industry, we don't have the ability to pass on cost increases to customers. Our pricing is typically determined by competitive factors and rates on treasuries. The good news is we participate in a larger insurance network that purchases, which includes 4000 employees, so a catastrophic event at our little company does not completely knock us out of the market. We've had three such catastrophic events in the last three years, one cancer event, and tow cardiac by pass Surgeries and stroke recoveries. So far we haven't lost an employee due to increased cost, however, we have seen a couple of our employees add spousal and family coverage because there spouses employers have either cancelled coverage, or passed along even more dramatically increased costs.

Prices go up over time on everything, except maybe TVs, so some of these increases are understandable. When we have sought to find more competitive pricing options at renewal, we have been told the the number of options have decreased as companies have pulled out of the Illinois marketplace. United healthcare for one, leaving us pretty much with variations of plans with BCBS. So something needs to change. Because without change there will be less and less competition, more increases, and the tangential impact small business survivability. Small business in many respects drives our economy. When small businesses fail they force 10-100 people on to unemployment. Do that to 100s maybe 1,000s of small businesses and the impact becomes rather large.

[Hornsby]

is Ryan a nasty politician in your mind the same way Chuck Shumer, Elizabeth Warren, and Nancy Pelosi are nasty politicians in my mind? Just asking. Two people, two differing views. American, she's a beautiful country.

As for momentum being lost, I get that it was the other team's plan and that they've been pretty assholey about your team's plan, and that it's human nature to pick sides and cheer the other team's epic face plant from afar. But, with that said, isn't This really all of our losses together? As I read this thread, it appears to me that a majority of posters agree that ACA needs to be, minimally, modified. Whether its as little as subtle tweaks or as big as a complete repeal and replace, I don't profess to know answer, but what I'm reading is that majority of us can agree that something needs to be done.

As someone who makes insurance decisions for a small company and its employees, the last several years have not been fun. I've been forced to figure out how best to split between the company and employees the costs of increases over the last three years that ranged from 8.5% to 12%. We could have cancelled employee health insurance altogether and given the insurance credit but to retain and attract quality people this is not really an option. While we have had to split the burden with employees, as a company of only 26 people, being a very highly competitive industry, we don't have the ability to pass on cost increases to customers. Our pricing is typically determined by competitive factors and rates on treasuries. The good news is we participate in a larger insurance network that purchases, which includes 4000 employees, so a catastrophic event at our little company does not completely knock us out of the market. We've had three such catastrophic events in the last three years, one cancer event, and tow cardiac by pass Surgeries and stroke recoveries. So far we haven't lost an employee due to increased cost, however, we have seen a couple of our employees add spousal and family coverage because there spouses employers have either cancelled coverage, or passed along even more dramatically increased costs.

Prices go up over time on everything, except maybe TVs, so some of these increases are understandable. When we have sought to find more competitive pricing options at renewal, we have been told the the number of options have decreased as companies have pulled out of the Illinois marketplace. United healthcare for one, leaving us pretty much with variations of plans with BCBS. So something needs to change. Because without change there will be less and less competition, more increases, and the tangential impact small business survivability. Small business in many respects drives our economy. When small businesses fail they force 10-100 people on to unemployment. Do that to 100s maybe 1,000s of small businesses and the impact becomes rather large.

Paul Ryan is a nasty politician, IMO, because he totally threw the needs of the many overboard in order to promote the needs of the few. The three real takeaways from Trumpcare/Ryancare was that it was going to throw millions of people off of insurance, up to 26 million, according to the White House figures. And that it was going to increase the expenses on the older Americans, the very ones who need care most. Add in the fact that it gave the wealthiest Americans a tax cut...which, IMO is exactly the wrong way to go about it.

I understand that the ACA is struggling, but a live patient is better than a dead one any day of the week. It can be fixed, or it can be replaced, but not with the haphazard crap that Ryan threw together. Here's a quote from GOP Senator Tom Cotton this morning on Fox News Sunday:

-- SEN. TOM COTTON (R-ARK.) on CBS’S “FACE THE NATION” – JOHN DICKERSON: “So you said, ‘Written in secret.’ Well, that’s on Paul Ryan then. I mean, he controlled that process. So are you saying basically that the House leaders, the House speaker did it and the process was poorly handled?”COTTON: “I think you can’t expect to try to solve a problem that addresses 1/6th of the country’s economy and touches every American in a very personal and intimate way in 18 days. You know, when the Democrats came to power in 2009, for 60 years at least they had been pursuing a national health care system. Yet they didn’t introduce legislation for eight months. They didn’t pass it over a year of Barack Obama’s first term. So it went through very public hearings, and took testimony, developed a fact-based foundation of knowledge. President Obama traveled around the country, held town halls. He spoke to a joint session of Congress. I’m not saying that we needed 14 months to do this. But I think a more careful and deliberate approach, which we now have time to do, because we’re going to have to revisit health care anyway, would have gotten us further down the path towards a solution.”

So yeah, Paul Ryan took an egotistical and nasty path towards an issue that affects every American, no matter where they live, no matter what they do, no matter their personal income level.

It's a national disgrace that we're still debating this issue in the year 2017, and the hope is that this FINALLY sparks a real movement towards a single payer system. It can be fixed, or it can be remade out whole cloth, but it CANNOT remain a drain on the poor and the sick.

[Bernie Brewer]

Paul Ryan is a nasty politician, IMO, because he totally threw the needs of the many overboard in order to promote the needs of the few. The three real takeaways from Trumpcare/Ryancare was that it was going to throw millions of people off of insurance, up to 26 million, according to the White House figures. And that it was going to increase the expenses on the older Americans, the very ones who need care most. Add in the fact that it gave the wealthiest Americans a tax cut...which, IMO is exactly the wrong way to go about it.

I understand that the ACA is struggling, but a live patient is better than a dead one any day of the week. It can be fixed, or it can be replaced, but not with the haphazard crap that Ryan threw together. Here's a quote from GOP Senator Tom Cotton this morning on Fox News Sunday:



So yeah, Paul Ryan took an egotistical and nasty path towards an issue that affects every American, no matter where they live, no matter what they do, no matter their personal income level.

It's a national disgrace that we're still debating this issue in the year 2017, and the hope is that this FINALLY sparks a real movement towards a single payer system. It can be fixed, or it can be remade out whole cloth, but it CANNOT remain a drain on the poor and the sick.

Well, that's one way to go. I'll choose to go with my way. Thanks playing. By the way, I agree with the older comments from Tom Cotton.

[Redbirds Fan]

I was impressed when Paul Ryan publicly recognized that there is a fundamental difference between being an opposition party and being a governing party.

[GwynnInTheHall]

is Ryan a nasty politician in your mind the same way Chuck Shumer, Elizabeth Warren, and Nancy Pelosi are nasty politicians in my mind? Just asking. Two people, two differing views. American, she's a beautiful country.

As for momentum being lost, I get that it was the other team's plan and that they've been pretty assholey about your team's plan, and that it's human nature to pick sides and cheer the other team's epic face plant from afar. But, with that said, isn't This really all of our losses together? As I read this thread, it appears to me that a majority of posters agree that ACA needs to be, minimally, modified. Whether its as little as subtle tweaks or as big as a complete repeal and replace, I don't profess to know answer, but what I'm reading is that majority of us can agree that something needs to be done.

As someone who makes insurance decisions for a small company and its employees, the last several years have not been fun. I've been forced to figure out how best to split between the company and employees the costs of increases over the last three years that ranged from 8.5% to 12%. We could have cancelled employee health insurance altogether and given the insurance credit but to retain and attract quality people this is not really an option. While we have had to split the burden with employees, as a company of only 26 people, being a very highly competitive industry, we don't have the ability to pass on cost increases to customers. Our pricing is typically determined by competitive factors and rates on treasuries. The good news is we participate in a larger insurance network that purchases, which includes 4000 employees, so a catastrophic event at our little company does not completely knock us out of the market. We've had three such catastrophic events in the last three years, one cancer event, and tow cardiac by pass Surgeries and stroke recoveries. So far we haven't lost an employee due to increased cost, however, we have seen a couple of our employees add spousal and family coverage because there spouses employers have either cancelled coverage, or passed along even more dramatically increased costs.

Prices go up over time on everything, except maybe TVs, so some of these increases are understandable. When we have sought to find more competitive pricing options at renewal, we have been told the the number of options have decreased as companies have pulled out of the Illinois marketplace. United healthcare for one, leaving us pretty much with variations of plans with BCBS. So something needs to change. Because without change there will be less and less competition, more increases, and the tangential impact small business survivability. Small business in many respects drives our economy. When small businesses fail they force 10-100 people on to unemployment. Do that to 100s maybe 1,000s of small businesses and the impact becomes rather large.

I can understand Pelosi, possibly Schumer, but why would you call Warren nasty?

[Bernie Brewer]

I can understand Pelosi, possibly Schumer, but why would you call Warren nasty?

I was attempting to illustrate a partisan point. Unlike some on this board (for example, Horns who just labeled him "nasty"), I happen to really like Paul Ryan. He was handed a shit sandwich when he accepted the Speakership. He got handed a double decker shit sandwich when Trump ran. He he got a triple decker with a double load of shit when Trump win. He is now eating the sandwiches and doesn't even have ketchup to smooth out the taste. He didn't want the Speakership, but took for the good of the party. He had a healthcare plan and a party vision that was totally different than the Trumped up versions he's forced to promote now. You don't have to agree with his policitcs, but he's not a nasty guy. And I wouldn't want to be in his shoes for anything right now. He IS NOT the problem.

Now, Truth be told, I don't think Warren is nasty, but I sure don't like her politics. We can agree to disagree on that, I suspect.