I don't believe there is a single person who isn't retarded that doesn't understand subsidized care is cheaper than ACA. It's such a simple concept, no surprise that Castle doesn't get it.
If you'd paid attention at all, you'd know why that question makes you seem either abysmally stupid or deliberately obtuse, though the two are not mutually exclusive. The goal of the ACA is to make health insurance more affordable for everyone. Someone who's paying $100 a month for an employer-sponsored group plan doesn't need to ditch that plan in order to sign on to a plan through the exchanges that offers the identical coverage. Someone who (a) is self-employed, (b) runs a small business, (c) works for a company that does not offer its employees a group plan, has to this point only had access to individual coverage that very often costs multiple times that $100 a month. These are the people who will use the insurance exchanges. You really need to stop claiming "We're all being forced into the exchanges!!1!"
Ok, Castle, you've got me. I confess. I admit I am a hypocrite as well. I want handicapped people to have wheelchairs, and yet when I go to work, I walk!
C'mon, Castle, admit it. You're a figment of some DU poster's imagination. "How to Create the Dumbest Righty Strawman Evah!"
Until their employer drops that plan because it's become much more expensive for them. a, b, and c's under 40 pretty much are because individual coverage equivalent to was available before is now ridiculously expensive.
Have any of you got to sign up to the exchanges? Be interesting for someone to take us through the process first hand.
A lot of employers are making that claim, but I wonder if there's any hard data to support it, or if they're just using it as an excuse for something more and more of them have been doing for the past couple of decades anyway? Because one way or the other, the insurers get their money. Which is why a single-payer system would have been preferable. As it is, those with higher incomes will pay a greater percentage of what the insurers choose to charge than those with lower incomes. Scream bloody murder about "socialism" when the idea of single-payer is mentioned, and this is what happens. Now, if only there were some way to break the hold the insurers and their lobbyists have over Congress and require them to lower their premiums...
I have insurance through the Massachusetts Health Connector. It was pretty easy, and the premium cost was about 2/3 the full premium I had been paying to continue my employer coverage under COBRA. For that reduced cost, I got a very similar plan. But then again, we got a few years head start here, and have a government interested in making it work. I'm sure results in retarded places like Nebraska will differ significantly.
I've applied. The process in CA takes about five minutes (well, five minutes to fill out the application, about 15-20 minutes to compare the various insurers' plans). Chose one of the oldest and most reliable insurers, and a PPO as opposed to an HMO or an EPO. Prior to the ACA, an individual policy with that insurer would have cost me $567 a month. It's now considerably less.
A friend who works in Hollywood as a cinematographer for movies and teevee shows posted this on his Facebook the first week of October:
I happened to catch Hannity on Fox News interviewing several business people who were claiming this. But yeah, they were terribly short on specifics, and they had nobody giving an alternative view, so hardly watertight. Unfortunately that's where people like John Castle get their info from.
YES lets make another useless law requiring those who already have something to drop it and buy something else. MY RATES have gone down thanks to the law. If don't like the law you are free to not buy insurance. But I am sure you already have it.
Not when there's a "penalty" for choosing not to have it. That choice is not free from government coercion. So let's say you make that choice -- you're assessed a "penalty." Let's say you choose not to pay the penalty. Eventually, you face the threat of incarceration. Resist incarceration for refusing to pay the "penalty" for refusing to engage in what should be a private and voluntary transaction, guess what happens then? No, this is something in which government coercion does not belong.
I know a guy just like you who decided to take a principled stand. He'd prefer to not have health insurance, so he pays the tax and thinks he's saving money.
Was that intended as a rebuttal of my point? Obamacare = corporate welfare for health insurers, among other things.
And your comparison would only be valid if people were forced to buy from the exchanges or face a fine. The Obamas probably have insurance already; therefore, they aren't the people who need the exchanges -- and neither are most people with full-time white-collar jobs. The exchanges are there to keep people who are self-employed, work for companies that don't offer insurance, etc., from being SOL.
My comparison is valid because people are being forced to buy a product by their government or face a fine from same. No matter how far you want to try to bend over backwards to justify it, that's what it comes down to. And the especially laughable part is that you're defending it from a paternalistic need to protect people from themselves. Apparently it never occurred to you that people without insurance don't have it, oh, I don't know, because they can't afford it, and that forcing them to buy something they've decided they can't afford or pay a fine not only doesn't help them, but hurts them more than if Obamacare had never been passed.
You are aware, I trust, that for people who can't afford it, there are subsidies built into the ACA? Or are you going to continue your "oh, won't somebody think of the poor people" schtick -- you know, the people you are apparently perfectly happy to leave consigned to basically no health care access whatsoever -- as if you give a shit?
If they cannot afford it, the government pays it!! If your under the poverty level. you can get insurance for almost nothing, The point is to get people BASIC care, instead of going to the emergency room everytime they sneeze.
Except you're forgetting that a heartless bureaucracy is deciding where that line is, and as is already the case with current taxes, it tends to be arbitrary and not take real life into account.
And apparently you haven't been paying attention. Many, many people who could not afford insurance at the current insurance rates can and have found affordable insurance through the exchanges. Anyone actually below the poverty line will be covered by Medicaid. Except in the Red States that are currently cutting Medicaid funding.
The people who can't afford it will get subsidized rates. The fine is for people who can afford it but preferred to mooch at emergency care instead.