(05-16-2016 07:54 AM)QuestionSocratic Wrote:  And the bad news continues to flow:

Quote:Health-insurance customers in a growing number of mostly rural regions will have just one insurer’s plans to choose from on the Affordable Care Act’s exchanges next year...The entire states of Alaska and Alabama are expected to have only one insurer on the health law’s signature online marketplaces next year... The same is expected to be true in parts of several other states, including Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Arizona and Oklahoma....

LInk

Why pass a law when you know it will probably fail? Oh yeah, so they can justify single payer.

The failure of Obamacare is absolutely the justification for a single payer system that some have wanted. I find it hard to believe that Obama knew it would be a failure though. the man is too much of a narcissist for that. IMO opinion he either truly believed Obamacare would work, or he was duped like the rest of the public that supported Obamacare.

(05-16-2016 08:00 AM)200yrs2late Wrote:  The failure of Obamacare is absolutely the justification for a single payer system that some have wanted. I find it hard to believe that Obama knew it would be a failure though. the man is too much of a narcissist for that. IMO opinion he either truly believed Obamacare would work, or he was duped like the rest of the public that supported Obamacare.

Maybe, but Barack Obama didn't really draft Obamacare. He simply gave the broad strokes... appointed the people to design it and then championed it/sold it to the people. There are so many provisions that are so obviously designed to act like a fish-hook... easy to insert, impossible to remove once inserted... that it is obvious that the designers knew that 'the truth' would never pass with the people, even if they had the votes in government to pass it. Pelosi essentially admitted this, knowing that 'once we pass it', you've given 'free' stuff to millions and once given, it will be tough to take it away from them.

The tax/penalty... insurance vs healthcare... 'you can keep your plan and doctor' when so many obviously couldn't... save money... Medicaid rather than Medicare expansion to hide the real costs/push costs to the states for Federal mandates... expiring (after 2 terms) subsidies, exemptions for purely political reasons and (imo) the most appalling of them all by Democrats lamenting the wealth gap, that one of the LAST provisions to be enacted (rather than one of the first) was to 'tax the rich'.

If he was duped, then he's truly stupid. He had people smart enough to know what was going to happen and willing to tell him the truth about 'why' it was a penalty rather than a tax and why expand Medicaid rather than Medicare etc... so they HAD to tell him... and he had no reason to think they were just lying to him.

Of all the things I'd say about Obama, being THAT ignorant just wouldn't be one of them. But maybe I'm wrong when it comes to his politics. I wouldn't say Hillary is stupid either, but HER healthcare plan was an even bigger mess than Obamacare.

Even the NY Times is beginning to get what should have been obvious to anyone who knew anything about Medicare (which they don't since they say everyone takes Medicare):

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/15/sunday...ef=opinion

"AMY MOSES and her circle of self-employed small-business owners were supporters of President Obama and the Affordable Care Act. They bought policies on the newly created New York State exchange. But when they called doctors and hospitals in Manhattan to schedule appointments, they were dismayed to be turned away again and again with a common refrain: “We don’t take Obamacare,” the umbrella epithet for the hundreds of plans offered through the president’s signature health legislation.

“Anyone who is on these plans knows it’s a two-tiered system,” said Ms. Moses, describing the emotional sting of those words to a successful entrepreneur.

“Anytime one of us needs a doctor,” she continued, “we send out an alert: ‘Does anyone have anyone on an exchange plan that does mammography or colonoscopy? Who takes our insurance?’ It’s really a problem.”...."

health insurance is not health care. You can't just mandate a $50 reimbursement for something that costs more than that and expect people to 'fall in line'.