It certainly was a very pertinent example of exactly what you weren't trying to argue, yes.
"We do not have universal healthcare, but only insofar as our healthcare isn't universal".
I see it is very important to you that I not be arguing what I am.
Strange how all the talk of the value of equity, the little cartoon of people trying to see over the fence, goes out the window in this context. We help pay for the healthcare of those most in need of the healthcare or most in need of the help. If you find that laughable, I don't want to hear you arguing equitable anything ever again. The government being involved in half the payment has created the hellscape we have now, and I have no hesitance saying that a single-payer system would correct for a lot of that, but given your position on many things, you have no space to laugh at the idea of programs made specifically for the poor.
You did, yes.
Can afford and should do are different things. Can the US afford to do Medicare for All? Yes. But it would be a logistical nightmare (already is), that would allow people under its care to be neglected (already does) and would cause all manner of inefficiencies. Other nations with universal healthcare systems typically deploy in smaller regions with guidance from above rather than the federal system that is Medicare, and they do that because it's a better system. So yes, we can afford it, but it's stupid to be inefficient just cause you can, so any effort towards universal healthcare ought to be looking at managing the system at state or local levels. I would support that.
And here I was thinking you were arguing that universal healthcare over broad and disparate areas was unmanageable.
If you think equity involves supporting only a fraction of those in direst need, and nobody else across a broad spectrum of needs and means, you've colossally failed to understand the concept.
The ACA was the recognition that there was insufficient political will in the legislature to achieve long-term reforms, and that the most llikely way to deliver better healthcare for millions of Americans was effectively to work with the existing system rather than substantially reform it. There is little or no major criticism of the ACA which isn't implicit criticism of the prior status quo, because that's where the biggest flaws in the healthcare system lie.
Republicans did do something, they did the ACA. The ACA wasn't only reminiscent of Romney Care, it was built quite similarly to ideas proposed by Bush senior, it built off policy ideas from the Reagan Administration, it was eventually saved by John McCain. And the final bill having the public option gutted out but the individual mandate retained was certainly a bipartisan effort.
Lol, no. ACA Marketplace insurance still costs money. It is reduced and subsidized a bit if you're poor enough, but if you are poor enough for it to be effectively free you already qualified for Medicaid. If the rules change got you employer based insurance, that's really just coming out of your paycheck anyway. And most of the uninsured were (and are) working aged people who aren't going to hit the deductibles in a year.
Your argument here is a form of damning your own party with faint praise.
Costs as in governmental budget expenditure and per capita premiums, not whether people still have to fork out money from their own pockets.
People still have to fork out money from their own pockets. It's a marketplace where you buy private insurance, and the subsidies are set to pay for people if their premiums would cost more than 8.5% of their income. Everyone being covered by the ACA is still paying 8.5% of their total income on health insurance, and there are copays and deductibles beyond that. And then there are limits each way, if you are under (or a little over) the poverty line, you qualify for Medicaid, you aren't even allowed to use the Marketplace if you want to, and if you make a median full-time income you don't qualify for subsidies at all (and also are getting insurance through the employer).
Tell me what you could possibly be basing this on.
I already told you I was referring to overall healthcare costs, not the fact that individuals still have to pay towards insurance.
Please step back and look at this from a pure scholarly perspective. Does this chart from the second link suggest to you that the ACA slowed the rate of growth in health spending?
The graph is consistent with the claim that the ACA slowed the rate of growth in health spending.
Your play here is to lie to my face? I could go through that papers and spit back every version of "growth trends are inconclusive about the degree to which the ACA contributed to lower spending growth rates" back in your face, it's not particularly worth my time if you're just going to lie about it.
I think you need to appreciate the difference between "is consistent with" and "proves the case that". The former does not assume that evidence is conclusive.
You can't even be bothered to pull a single word out yourself, I'm not writing an entire paper to explain to you that you've provided no evidence that the ACA impacted the overall growth rate of health expenditure.
I provided two papers that made a case that the ACA has held down healthcare costs, and they explain why. As your argument appears to be "I can't be arsed reading those papers or interpreting them holistically", the only reasonable conclusion is that you're attempting to dodge the issue.
One paper suggests that it has held down costs in a very limited sense, not overall. The other also comments on areas where costs have been kept down, while also acknowledging that the money put into ACA changes eats up that entire cost savings. Do you actually imagine I don't read things? Do you think "that user that sometimes hunts down twitter sources in the Palestine thread is citing the sources I provided, he probably didn't even read them."
