Friar Bijou wrote:
GOP "plan" wrote:
•Fully repeals President Obama's health care law, eliminating billions in taxes and thousands of pages of unworkable regulations and mandates that are driving up health care costs.
•Spurs competition to lower health care costs by allowing Americans to purchase health insurance across state lines and enabling small businesses to pool together and get the same buying power as large corporations.
•Reforms medical malpractice laws in a commonsense way that limits trial lawyer fees and non-economic damages while maintaining strong protections for patients.
•Provides tax reform that allows families and individuals to deduct health care costs, just like companies, leveling the playing field and providing all Americans with a standard deduction for health insurance.
•Expands access to Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), increasing the amount of pre-tax dollars individuals can deposit into portable savings accounts to be used for health care expenses.
•Safeguards individuals with pre-existing conditions from being discriminated against purchasing health insurance by bolstering state-based high risk pools and extending HIPAA guaranteed availability protections.
•Protects the unborn by ensuring no federal funding of abortions.
None of which gets me, Bijou, health insurance.
What was preventing you from getting health insurance before?
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Well, before ACA I couldn't get health insurance AT ALL and I couldn't afford it even if I could get it. (Which, y'know, I couldn't due to PEC's).
Yeah. Looks like the GOP plan addresses that exact problem.
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Much like millions of other Americans.
Who would have been helped by the GOP plan without needing all the other garbage that the ACA contains.
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Which is sort of the point of the ACA.
No. The point of the ACA was to hold people like you hostage by steadfastly refusing to just fix the problems that were preventing you from getting health care (as the GOP plan would have done), and instead required that in order for you to get what you wanted, you must comply with a ton of other things that the ACA does. All of which quite clearly had the primary aim of putting the federal government as much in charge of health care as possible.
The primary difference between the two plans in terms of effect on people's health is minimal. It's the other stuff that the ACA lumps in that the GOP plan(s) would not have that are the point of contention. Things like mandating that healthy people who don't want to buy insurance must do so. Things like mandating that all insurance plans must cover a set of things, not determined by the health industry itself, but by a group of federal bureaucrats. The biggest difference was not in who would or wouldn't be covered, but in who would be empowered to determine what that coverage would be.
That's the problem with the ACA.
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You previously mentioned that Romney's Mass. health care which seems to work just fine is "untenable" on a national scale. You have said this on several occasions. I have never seen, though, an explanation as to why it is so very unworkable at a national scale. This seems a good a thread as any to explain that one.
I know for a fact that I argued this very point at least once in the past on this forum. But I'll repeat it, since you may or may not have read it previously (or remember it).
If you pass laws like that at the state level, then different states can look at the successes and failures of other state health care laws and make adjustments accordingly. Similarly, citizens can look at the different laws in different states and vote with their feet in terms of where they want to live based on those laws (obviously taking all laws, not just health care into consideration). Businesses also can do this, choosing to operate in states based on the effects of their laws. The point is that you have 50 different options to chose from, and over time the best ones that reflect the best balance of the needs of the people and the costs and impact on businesses and tax payers will rise to the top. States can change their laws over time and have a much easier time doing this than the federal government can.
When you do something like this at the federal level, it tends to be a "pick your law, one time, and you're stuck with it". It affects everyone in every state, so it's hard to see where the problems are. There might be a ton of better ways to implement any of a hundred different components of the law, but not seeing the effects of those different elements side by side, we can't see where the problems are. We can't account for different geographical/economic areas maybe doing better with different laws. And now, instead of just having to get the citizens of one state to vote for changes incrementally, each in their own areas, where it affects them the most, every tiny little change becomes a national issue, with all of the negatives that accompany that.
That's just the quick surface level answer. When we on the Right oppose "big government", we're usually talking about doing something at the federal level, that could better be done at the state or local level. The one virtue to doing it at the federal level is that you can force everyone, everywhere, to comply with the same set of rules. But that's also a huge negative. If you pick the wrong rules (or just less than perfect rules), you've screwed everyone. And, as I mentioned above, it's much much harder to change federal level legislation. The reason the Left tends to prefer this is precisely because of this concentration of power. It's hard to get a majority in 50 different states to all agree on something (kinda the point, right?). But instead of accepting that different people in different states maybe should be allowed to have their own slightly different solutions, the Liberal wants to force them all to be the same. And the easiest way to do this is to get a majority among just a few hundred legislators in Congress. So that's how they do things.
It's not about health. It really isn't. For the Left, it's about power and control. What laws or issues they're pushing don't really matter. They believe in top level control of the society. So every solution is a federal government solution. Health, education, marriage, etc, etc, etc. All are best solved from the Left's point of view at the top of the government food chain. Conservatives believe that we should do things at the lowest level possible so as to maximize the degree to which each individual has a say in the laws that affect him or her. That is the real disagreement. As I said, it's not really about health care. That's just the issue of the day.
