You're acknowledging that my sources do in fact defend my point, and calling me silly?
Right-o.
The many vague, and poorly thought up economic policies of the far left.
- Thread starter Gergar12
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Right-o.
They don't defend your point. Your point is that it impacted overall spending. Your sources claim some specific areas have had savings, while spendings more in other places. And to be sure, that's the only reasonable expectation, all the major economic forces and players are unchanged, why would you expect the total spend to change? We're just moving money from one place to another.
Perhaps you need reminding:
You're basically trying to argue the same as me and tell me I'm wrong. You've got nothing here, move on.
No, I'm not. You seem to think that there is this big group of people that lacked insurance that are insured now and that's great, and if it didn't specifically drive up costs that's pure benefit (though I'm not going to forget that you argued that things cost less than they would have overall until you specifically withdraw the wrong claim).
But that's not the situation. Medicare and Medicaid cover the poor, disabled, and elderly. Those people were covered. The people who were previously uninsured were and are predominantly healthy, working-aged people. Getting them insured has not meaningfully expanded their access to healthcare at all, they weren't trying to use the healthcare system in the first place. Healthcare has become an increased expense for most of the people who are now insured and weren't, and the consequence of that is spending coming down in other places, subsidized by an influx of people who pay in more than they get out.
And that's not a surprising thing, that was the plan. That was the express purpose of the individual mandate: get people who aren't using health services to contribute more to subsidize those who are a net draw from the health system. We've moved money from one place to another while overall spending the same. Nothing really changed, we just locked everyone into the status quo.
Medicaid did not cover a huge number of poor people, because they were stuck above the level it could be offered but couldn't afford insurance. "Disabled" is a misleading description. It's well known that people with common and potentially serious conditions - which aren't the same as being disabled - were caught in this sort of no-man's land and had decidedly inferior healthcare treatment and outcomes, sometime fatally. This mess, of course, including the issue with people who had "prior conditions" getting insurance. These problems with Medicaid were hardly little known, I'm not sure what you think you're trying to get away with here.
Yes, congratulations, that's how insurance works, anywhere and everywhere. (Frankly, to a large extent that's how taxation for public services works, too: everyone pays although not everyone benefits equally.) Attempting to attack the entire concept of insurance is just bizarre.
Something has changed: there are now a lot more people with health cover, but the governmental spending on healthcare overall appears to have been little altered. This despite government subsidising healthcare cover. If government is effectively paying for more people, but overall costs have not gone up, then the cost to provide cover per person has decreased. Because the ACA seems to have driven efficiencies in healthcare delivery. That's a win.
eh... the concept of insurance doesn't actually contain specifically the idea that younger, healthier people are subsidizing others that are predictably less healthy due to age, since if a more at risk population is identifiable, they can just be made to pay more for the insurance. that is one of the things actuaries are meant to calculate. charging younger people who never see a doctor more than is justified by their own risk to pay for costly routine maintenance on old people (to say nothing of the much larger risk of catastrophic events) is something that can be done with insurance but certainly does not have to be. it is a choice-- one that makes it a good idea for younger people on average to avoid buying insurance altogether. obviously this is not going to result in better health outcomes, since some number of younger people will have medical issues that are then left untreated, but financially it is the correct play: thus the mandate. insurance companies, left completely to their whims, would almost certainly not make this choice. they'd charge old people a lot more instead, whether younger people were forced to buy insurance or not.
No, attempting to argue that insurance is a cost saving measure is bizarre. Insurance adds cost to mitigate personal risk.
It's funny you mention this; the UK, with its enclosure policy, was one of the first to industrialize; it's farming to push people into making it to cities for general factory work.
The US largely learned from the UK here.
Well, you sure pulled that out of your backside. If you want to argue with your own imagination, you don't need to bring me into it.
Cost savings come from the wider ACA through a range of measures and impacts which allow for increased efficiency or other reductions. Although to be fair, more people insured may have led to some of them (efficiencies of scale, or improved access to cheaper, early, preventative treatments).
Otherwise, I'm pretty sure the individual mandate is effectively dead, from years ago... and yet people are still using the expanded healthcare access. This means that people voluntarily want to pay for cover to mitigate their personal risk, even if some are effectively subsidising others who use healthcare services more, just like any insurance. So what's your real complaint here? It seems to me like complaining for the sake of it.
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You're imagining the cost savings. You're just imagining them.
Stop calling insurance "healthcare access". It's not the same thing. And most of the people who were added to insurance were through the employer mandate which is still very much in effect.
I have two complaints:
1) The number one thing driving inefficiencies in the US healthcare system is the ridiculous price-setting schemes facilitated by the insurance companies. Absolutely ridiculous prices are set for things, prices people just wouldn't pay even in a market as inelastic as healthcare, but hidden pricing and questionable "rebates" allow places to charge absurd amounts, and insurance is integral in that process because it makes the stupid charges come out of other people's money. The ACA not only did nothing to improve this situation, it mandated that everyone had to take part in it. It sold the American people off to exactly the companies ruining the health system, companies that would have been trust-busted decades ago if they weren't colluding with Medicare as well.
2) You. My biggest complaint here is you. You regurgitate political talking points from a party that isn't even in your own country, and you are willing to rationalize them in any way necessary, sometimes even contradicting your previous arguments, to make sure Democrats are right at all times. Like, at least the communists here can tell when the Democrats do something kinda crappy...
The current US system with its utterly bloated private for profit insurance companies is one of the least efficient healthcare systems in the world. Pretty much every possible way to organize healthcare differently would be more cost efficient.
Now ACA is only a flawed compromise, not a proper reform. But it looks a bit closer to real healthcare systems in countries where this stuff works and most of the money actually goes to providing treatments, care and medicine. That is why so many people from outside look favorable on it as a step in the right direction.
Reading analyses and making evidence-based judgements on their conclusions is not "imagining".
Useless pedantry. If healthcare requires payment and people cannot afford that payment, they therefore cannot access healthcare. Thus making healthcare affordable for them is making healthcare accessible to them.
Sure, I totally agree that there are a huge number of problems with US healthcare, and I've already said so. But as I have also already pointed out, your party seems to have had little or no interest in tackling any of them, have consistently blocked the Democrats trying to do much about them, and even the milquetoast major reforms the Democrats did squeak through were designed in that gimped fashion due to the mere threat of Republican intransigence.
So anyone looking at who is more to blame for the persistent inadequacies of the US healthcare system can see the evidence point squarely at the Republicans.
Cry more.This is just losing the argument and resorting to ad hominem.
Literally none of this is true, but, for "teh lulz", let's pretend that it all is:
He's both still correct more often and makes more reasonable arguments than you do. Please let that sink in; a "foreign national partisan troll" would be more connected to reality than you are...
I'm not convinced you read a word of the analyses you posted. You seemed surprised by what they actually contained. And if you hadn't believed you found something to support your claim (though you didn't actually succeed), you would have not posted them. Your conclusions are foregone.
You believe the Democrats have tried to do much... Democrats run on selling solutions to the problems they made in the first place. They're not trying to fix crap.
I'm not saying your argument is wrong because you suck. I'm just saying that you suck, and it inspires me to rip apart your arguments that are terrible in their own right. You can't even use "ad hominem" correctly.
I am correct 100% of the time. Disagreeing is only telling on yourself.
I remember you talking before about people having 'tells'. The shift from vague sophistry to preening petulance is one of yours, marking the turning point in a conversation when you realise you've failed to make a compelling case.
Have you considered the context of the conversation? Agema essentially went with "it doesn't matter what you argue, as long as Republicans are the bad guys" as an argument, and in the same post said "cry more" at the suggestion that he simps for Democrats. My arguments have been at least compelling enough for him to fully pants himself like that.
That didn't happen, though. If that's what you took then you weren't paying honest attention.
I believe he is, but it would also not be surprising to see him try to claim that honestly so....