The livestock believe there are no casualties and that those who follow the Judas goats are merely going on a short vacation. That is why the Animal Farm does not rebel and kill the supremes.
I am often faintly amused at the more militant right wing nationalists and militia folk, that believe they can win this war with force of arms. While that is a quaint and even effective method at times, it is nowhere close to enough to win this war on a strategic and logistical level.
Why? Because they are already farming and killing off your cadre and capital investments, while the response is.... what? Giving the IRS more money each year?
There is a big problem even in attrition warfare when the enemy is killing thousands and millions of you each year, while everybody is sitting around talking about how they are gonna get the opposition next time at the election. Oh they are getting you all right.
Ymarsakr, please stay on topic. If you want to make speeches about whatever comes to mind, you should get your own site and develop your own audience.
To the OP - the studies show that at minimum, the ACA did not dramatically improve outcomes, as promised. This is not to say that any Republican plan would have been better, only that the hand-wringing of how terrible things would be if we did not have this turned out to be untrue. I would add that given the continuing, if gradual, improvement in medical care year after year, which could be expected to make the ACA look better than it really was, at least on a small scale, it is a further indictment of the overall idea.
It's basically a law that forces people to buy expensive high-deductible health insurance, so that the others can feel better. High-deductible health insurance does have some value. What matters is the cost-benefit, and I think the ACA is losing on that score. It did succeeed on the "make the others feel better" score, though.
The problem isn't the high-deductible thing, but the expensive thing. The plans I had before O-care were high-deductible but cheap, so if I needed to go to the doctor I had extra money on hand to do so. Since O-care, I don't have extra money. It rose in price 20%+ per year for years, and even now is still climbing in the double digits. There's no way you are going to get raises that compete with that.
Since your deductibles are still high, but now you've got less in terms of savings month-by-month, you just stop going to the doctor.
If death rates are higher, I'll bet that's how it happens.
Who could have guessed that, if you penalize hospitals for readmissions, they'll quietly stop readmitting people? Or that people who weren't successfully treated the first time around might die in greater numbers if they're turned away from the hospital for the second go-round?
Every time I read a story like this I'm more fanatically determined to put my hands on some health care that I pay for with my own money, so that all my doctors need to care about it is whether they can deliver a benefit to me that I believe is worth what they're charging me. I really don't want to have to worry about whether my doctor is afraid of getting marked down by some bureaucrat if he takes me on as a challenging case.
Which was intentional, as I stated decades ago.
ReplyDeleteThe livestock believe there are no casualties and that those who follow the Judas goats are merely going on a short vacation. That is why the Animal Farm does not rebel and kill the supremes.
I am often faintly amused at the more militant right wing nationalists and militia folk, that believe they can win this war with force of arms. While that is a quaint and even effective method at times, it is nowhere close to enough to win this war on a strategic and logistical level.
ReplyDeleteWhy? Because they are already farming and killing off your cadre and capital investments, while the response is.... what? Giving the IRS more money each year?
There is a big problem even in attrition warfare when the enemy is killing thousands and millions of you each year, while everybody is sitting around talking about how they are gonna get the opposition next time at the election. Oh they are getting you all right.
Ymarsakr, please stay on topic. If you want to make speeches about whatever comes to mind, you should get your own site and develop your own audience.
ReplyDeleteTo the OP - the studies show that at minimum, the ACA did not dramatically improve outcomes, as promised. This is not to say that any Republican plan would have been better, only that the hand-wringing of how terrible things would be if we did not have this turned out to be untrue. I would add that given the continuing, if gradual, improvement in medical care year after year, which could be expected to make the ACA look better than it really was, at least on a small scale, it is a further indictment of the overall idea.
It's basically a law that forces people to buy expensive high-deductible health insurance, so that the others can feel better. High-deductible health insurance does have some value. What matters is the cost-benefit, and I think the ACA is losing on that score. It did succeeed on the "make the others feel better" score, though.
The problem isn't the high-deductible thing, but the expensive thing. The plans I had before O-care were high-deductible but cheap, so if I needed to go to the doctor I had extra money on hand to do so. Since O-care, I don't have extra money. It rose in price 20%+ per year for years, and even now is still climbing in the double digits. There's no way you are going to get raises that compete with that.
ReplyDeleteSince your deductibles are still high, but now you've got less in terms of savings month-by-month, you just stop going to the doctor.
If death rates are higher, I'll bet that's how it happens.
Who could have guessed that, if you penalize hospitals for readmissions, they'll quietly stop readmitting people? Or that people who weren't successfully treated the first time around might die in greater numbers if they're turned away from the hospital for the second go-round?
ReplyDeleteEvery time I read a story like this I'm more fanatically determined to put my hands on some health care that I pay for with my own money, so that all my doctors need to care about it is whether they can deliver a benefit to me that I believe is worth what they're charging me. I really don't want to have to worry about whether my doctor is afraid of getting marked down by some bureaucrat if he takes me on as a challenging case.