Affordable Care Act Timeline, or...

Yeah, the draft will never be used so long as Vietnam is within living memory. Also, drones.

Hey, anything could've happened in those days right after 9/11, ANYTHING.
Martial law, detainment camps, anything.
And if you don't think so, all I gotta point to is the torture.
Who would've ever imagine this country would be a torture country?
If I told your past self that, you would'n't believe me.
Well, it happened, it's real.
There's nothing special or magical about America.
That's dead.
Kiss that fairy wish goodbye.

All I know, is I signed on for a free country, not a police state, and I signed on for a democracy, not an oligarchy.

This thing that parades around in America's skin, that's not the country I had a contract with.
I have no love for it, and no loyalty.

You think there's some little molecules left to hang onto, I don't.

Obamacare?
Too little, too late.
It's just the trains running on time.

This is a bit of a tangent, but does the fact that these things didn't happen reveal anything at all to you?

Dumb luck.

You didn't sign on to anything. You were born on a particular piece of geography defined by particular borders. Big, deep topic, suitable for a different thread.

This thread is for facts about the ACA and how they make Castle squeal like a pig.

All that being said, you don't even need to pay $68 million for a website that works.

Right, back to the show.

I find I must agree in general with this sentiment.

I do tend to think that it is marginally better than what preceded it, but only because the whole system was such a mess that almost anything had to be better.

But it is still a ridiculous monstrosity. The first thing that had to be done with the American health-care system was to separate health insurance care from employment and Obamacare, instead of addressing that fundamental issue, made it even worse.

A pox on the Republicans for not doing anything when they had their chance, and a pox on the Democrats for not coming up with anything better than this when they got their chance.

I think you are being a bit unfair to the Democrats (and maybe also to Republicans). If you ask most Democrats and other liberals, we will tell you that we wanted to see single payer, or at the very least, a public option plan. But nobody thought that could pass, so instead we got what was possible.

At least what we did get turned out to not be the disaster expected by the John Castle's of the world. But that doesn't mean many think it's all a bed of roses.

A compromise where you lose isn't a compromise, it's rolling over.

When one of those parties shows that it is able to govern responsibly and wisely, then I will be "fair" to them. My experience over the last few decades has not encouraged me in that direction. Au contraire.

Who's the "you" who's lost? Not the millions of people who can afford healthcare now.

Promising people that they'd be able to keep their insurance if they liked it was, unfortunately, a political necessity, or at least widely viewed as one. That meant maintaining some sort of preferential status for employer based insurance.

And the PPACA didn't make the tie between work and insurance worse. Yes, it requires more employers to offer insurance to employees, which is dumb and pointless, but it makes it much easier for employees who don't have insurance through work to get it on their own and for employees who leave a job to maintain coverage with different insurance. It also generally improves the quality of insurance offered through work. The main problems with tying insurance to work are crappy insurance and job-jock, and the PPACA deals with both of those problems reasonably well, albeit not ideally.

Democrats.

Remains to be seen.

Got an inside track on the midterms, have you?

Yeah, we're done here.

Oh, they're happy now, but wait 40 years.
A lot of them will be DEAD.
Why, you won't even have to wait that long.

Here's something unusual: an article that points out who the real losers are in Obamacare. The article actually looks at who loses and tries to put them into some other context than OMG! Socialism!!

Ah, it's only a tiny minority, who cares?

...it's probably my perfectionism.

That phrase "don't let perfect be the enemy of good"?

I don't see "perfect", and "good", I see "right", and "absolute worthless miserable garbage".

I know it's bad wiring in my head....but I can't stop it.

When you're sitting on the mountain removed from it all, it's hard to care about what's going on in the valley and affecting real people in everyday situations.

Name one human thing that fits your definition of "right."

Cherry-picking. The self-employed are among those who benefit the most from the ACA. Without seeing the actual policies these people lost, I'd have to conclude that, like all the others, they had caps or exclusions that are no longer legal.

Mozart, Carlin, Twain, a few others that aren't springing to mind.......and then absolute worthless miserable garbage!!!!

...see?

Moon landing!
That was a good one!

Based on purely subjective, emotion-based personal criteria. And they're all dead, suggesting you don't think there'll ever be anyone else who'll meet your criteria.

Again, interesting topic, but nothing to do with access to healthcare, unless you want to argue for the work Mozart didn't get to write in his 40s and 50s.

I wouldn't really call it cherry-picking. The fact is that some people feel that they were better off under the old system and may be able to back that up with something other than Obama hatred or hatred of taxes. That doesn't mean I feel sorry for them or agree with their dislike of Obamacare, because I think they and the rest of us will be better off for it in the long run. It is interesting that sometimes when you ask someone if they've actually tried to get insurance through the system that they explode in rage or simply refuse to answer.

Yes, of course, they're dead.

And Castle is alive. To punish.

I guess it's the demographic that has me baffled - self-employed, over 35, and white. If you ever wanted to create a Jeopardy category whose answer is "Which group of Americans paid the most disproportionate price for health insurance before the ACA?" that would be it.

The article also implies that "Well, this poor guy had Blue Cross, so now the only insurance he can get is Blue Cross." As if.

It still comes down to "I've had this on autopilot for years and now you're asking me to do a little bit of paperwork to find a better deal!"

Yeah, I'm puzzled by the same thing. A former news biz colleague of mine claims she's paying more for insurance now than she was before and I didn't bother to ask because I'm sure it would have just resulted in some sort of explosion.

Whereas I had the opposite experience. I wonder if people are just so reluctant to check the exchanges that they shoot themselves in the foot. Had that conversation with a member here back when T.R's thread was running. He'd been carried on his wife's employer's coverage and was bitching that it had just been "cancelled" (the problem with having HR do the paperwork is that a lot of people never had to deal with the annual renewal themselves, and the media shrieking about "cancellations!!!!" was a learning experience).

I pointed him toward the exchange in his state. Never heard back. Not sure if he found something comparable and won't admit it because an evul Librul suggested it, or didn't even check the exchange.

Horse, water, all that...