We aren't a wealthy country. The upper 0.01% has all the money, the rest is turning into a third world shithole.
Either way, the ACA was written in such a way as to incentivize the creation of state exchanges and that provision has now backfired. Oops.
It's common knowledge that Maine is the Ethiopia of New England. What with all the difficulties finding the travel-size Poland Spring bottles of water and hiding from roving bands of tourists and lobster fisherman, it's a miracle you and Tamar can post as frequently as you do.
That's because you know who really runs this country? Lobbyists and the party of I Got Mine and Fuck the Rest of You.
“Well, Conjecture, Tendentious Misreadings, and Cherry Picking Are Kinds of Evidence.” Neil Seigel summarizes the problems with the hackwork of the 2 (of 8) federal judges who accepted the latest and possibly very weakest ad hoc challenge to the ACA perfectly: Halbig and King (plus the Indiana and Oklahoma cases) are different. I can accept as reasonable, even if ultimately unpersuasive, the argument that the relevant provisions of the ACA are ambiguous. What I cannot accept as reasonable or responsible, however, is the argument—accepted by the D.C. Circuit panel majority in Halbig—that the ACA Congress clearly and unambiguously accomplished what no Member of Congress, no one in the Congressional Budget Office, none of the four dissenting Justices in NFIB v. Sebelius, and no state official realized that Congress had accomplished when it passed the ACA: self-destructively limit the tax subsidies that make health insurance affordable for millions of Americans to those who have the good fortune of happening to reside in states that set up their own health insurance exchanges. As we’ve discussed before, the bolded fact is critical — we’re being asked to believe that Congress “clearly and unambiguously” did something that both makes no sense on its face and that neither federal officials nor state officials (some who certainly would have established exchanges had they thought their citizens wouldn’t be eligible for the tax credits) thought it did. Trying to get around this problem, some conservertarians who are gleeful over the prospect tens of millions of people being denied medical care and hence determined to stop the legislation from working believe they have a smoking gun: a youTube video featuring ACA “architect” Jonathan Gruber seeming to claim that subsidies would not be available on federally established state exchanges. Well, I happen to have Jonathan Gruber right here, and: Among those who say they are surprised by the statement is Gruber himself, whom I was able to reach by phone. “I honestly don’t remember why I said that,” he said, attempting to reconstruct what he might have been thinking at the time. “I was speaking off-the-cuff. It was just a mistake.” As evidence that it was not indicative of his beliefs, he noted that his projections of the law’s impact have always assumed that all eligible people would get subsides, even though, he said, he did not assume all states would choose to run their own marketplaces. [...] [Gruber:] But there was never any intention to literally withhold money, to withhold tax credits, from the states that didn’t take that step. That’s clear in the intent of the law and if you talk to anybody who worked on the law. My subsequent statement was just a speak-o—you know, like a typo. There are few people who worked as closely with Obama administration and Congress as I did, and at no point was it ever even implied that there’d be differential tax credits based on whether the states set up their own exchange. And that was the basis of all the modeling I did, and that was the basis of any sensible analysis of this law that’s been done by any expert, left and right. I didn’t assume every state would set up its own exchanges but I assumed that subsidies would be available in every state. It was never contemplated by anybody who modeled or worked on this law that availability of subsides would be conditional of who ran the exchanges. So much for that. Gruber seems to gave been suggesting that states that didn’t set up their own exchanges might have their citizens temporarily denied the tax credits depending on the progress of the federal backstop, not that any such denial would be permanent. . . . . And, again, let’s return to Seigel’s first point. The challengers don’t just have to show that their interpretation is plausible; they have to show that it’s the only possible reasonable interpretation. Even if we assume that Gruber in a a single ambiguous YouTube video trumps everything Gruber has said before or since, a single ACA supporter agreeing with the silly interpretation of the law created after the fact by some of its most fanatical enemies is of little help in climbing Mount Chevron. Congress didn’t establish a federal backstop that was designed to fail; they established a federal backstop because they knew some states wouldn’t establish health care exchanges and they wanted to substantially reduce the number of people without health insurance. Unless you insist on projecting your own hostility to the federal government acting to expand coverage onto members of Congress who rejected it, this is entirely obvious. ---------------- Those two "judges" on the D.C. circuit are utterly legally incompetent, embarrassments to the human condition whose opinion is not in any way, shape, or form a legal opinion, and should be removed from the bench posthaste.
The classification of what constitutes a live birth varies between countries so the IMR ranking isn't consistent. Most countries don't consider it a live birth unless the baby lives for 24 hours (France) or sometimes a week for others. If you were to make it uniform, the US would skyrocket to the top of the rankings. I think you're also confusing health insurance with health care. Health care is available. Paying for it is not. Health care costs have spiraled out of any sane economic validity for a long time. Cheap insurance does nothing to fight this and possibly is the root cause of it in the first place.
You can keep trying Liet but it's clear as day in the law and even the law's supporters said it was clear as day. Until a court made them eat those words and now they've all changed to "it's a typo!"
Diacanu's observation is not that far off the mark. The increasing gap between the one percent and everyone else along with the massive debt this country keeps piling up is a recipe for disaster.
If you can't see third world conditions as the endgame for the current trend of wealth disparity, you're too dumb to talk to.
The erosion of the middle class paired with (and certainly related to) rising income and wealth inequality, left unchecked, has one rather obvious destiny.
Agree with everything but perhaps your last sentence. Do you mean low premium cost insurance? Do you mean insurance that provides the illusion of low cost medical care (low co-pay, no deductible, etc.)? I do think the employer contribution model has led to a market in which there is no incentive to reduce costs, but I wouldn't say that insurance is cheap. Those employers are paying a huge amount of money for that share of employee compensation.
The thing that really leads to a lack of incentives to reduce costs is the fee-for-service model. Various pilot programs have shown that switching over to a fee-for-condition model significantly incentivizes doctors to control costs and actually manages to produce care at least as good if not better overall. Turns out that when doctors have real motivation not to have their patients readmitted to the hospital they're much more likely to get things right the first time around.
Agree completely, but it also doesn't help if the patient doesn't see the fee structure to begin with.
If Canada keeps electing shrubbery like Stephen Harper then it won't be long before our health care system is as good as Canada's without any risk of us turning into Canuckistan South.
Yanno, it would have been a lot simpler if the PPACA had made it mandatory for states to set up their own exchanges or lose all their federal funding. I'm sure Lanz and FF would be down with that...
Oh look our Mr. Gruber amazingly enough made the same "mistake" again: Now, I guess I'm enough of a believer in democracy to think that when the voters in states see that by not setting up an exchange the politicians of a state are costing state residents hundreds and millions and billions of dollars, that they'll eventually throw the guys out. But I don't know that for sure.And that is really the ultimate threat, is, will people understand that, gee, if your governor doesn't set up an exchange, you're losing hundreds of millions of dollars of tax credits to be delivered to your citizens. http://reason.com/blog/2014/07/25/obamacare-architect-jonathan-gruber-says
Is this what happens when zombie members of Congress choose to listen to their leaders and vote in favor of a law they haven't read?
So the first emergence of him agreeing with the court, he puts that down to a "speak-o" () -- another one emerges, from a week earlier, where he said essentially the very same thing -- oh, that was a "speak-o", too. Guy should get a job at the IRS.
