I was literally disgusted the other day when I commented on a link posted by a celebrity I follow on Facebook that mentioned how the new healthcare bill will leave 23 million more people uninsured etc. Somebody replied to it with, and I s**t you not, "Or get a job and buy health insurance yourself". I was like.....ARE. YOU. KIDDING. ME? I felt like I had too much and not enough words for him all at the same time...but at the end of the day, I knew regardless of what I said it wouldn't make a difference because he just views this so black and white. He views the world as either "You have a job and work and in the end you'll be taken care of because surely hard working individual won't ever be forgotten about or you are forgotten about because you aren't trying hard enough/don't care enough to put any effort in." It was just shocking really that somebody had the testicular fortitude to say "just get a job and pay for healthcare" as if these people weren't already doing it because it's just so unimaginable that they would be. What you said reminded me of it because, in this guy's eyes, your husband just isn't working a good enough job. Surely if he just worked harder/tried harder/cared more he could work for a place that would afford him the correct healthcare to not worry about this - which is just such a negative and horrible way to think and is very clearly false.
Now I don't agree with whoever made the statement you're mad about, but let me point out a few facts.
We have 4.something percent unemployment among job seekers. People that want a job with benefits can mostly get one fairly quick without a lot of trouble.
On the other hand, we have a high number of people who have stopped looking for work. Labor participation rate is always a tricky thing cause you don't know who is a stay at home spouse or retired because they want to be rather than can't get viable work. But, the numbers are high enough that we know there is a real problem.
Then there's public benefit programs that don't get people help and force them off assistance in a finite time. Certainly nothing close to all people taking assistance are lazy or any sort of thing like that, but the design of too many assistance programs enables some to give up and decide to just live like that forever.
I personally do not like this healthcare bill at all, but let's at least understand it.
On the CBO grading, you should understand that the baseline they used is messed up. They missed the guess on how many people would get coverage under Obamacare by 7-9million. Yet they're now using a baseline that says those extra people are insured when they're really not.
From that false starting point, they then say how many people would be covered if all states who refused the Medicaid expansion now accepted it. Keep in mind there was a transition bonus for states that took it to cover half the costs for a couple years. That's gone now. Other states didn't accept it because they didn't want to be stuck with the bill after that initial money went away. The idea that they'd reverse that decision, when it is even more against their interests to do so, is just ludicrous.
Then they guessed how many more people would get insurance due to the individual mandate. Which is already in force, so logically it is zero additional people, but they came up with millions without any support for why.
They also assume cost will not significantly rise above current levels and choice will exist where they already don't. So that the currently insured people will stay insured.
All of that is in their methodology. So this theoretical number of people that would be insured at an arbitrary point in the future is absolutely unquestionably wrong based on provable facts that already exist today. Yet when they take an equally errant guess at how many will be insured under the new bill and subtract it from their fictional number, we are supposed to put some weight to that? The math is just wrong, provably so, and not in a small way.
In reality, the number insured likely won't change much. The proposed reforms should stabilize or slightly reduce costs for most people. Some may have to pay more, rather than it becoming unaffordable for all, but that's not really clear cause several of the earlier high risk pools had the same or lower rates than standard plans. It all depends on how much care gets used versus how much is paid into the pot. The thing doesn't repeal Obamacare at all. It puts some temporary fixes in place so modified Obamacare can live on longer, but eventually it'll fail cause it's a stupid system, and then the only alternative will likely be single-payer similar to NHS, which is what Obama wanted in the first place.
And by the way, we're counting people on Medicaid as covered. You might want to look at the few dozen studies that exist saying health outcomes for people on Medicaid are the same or worse than uninsured people. Not one study saying Medicaid is beneficial. And where Medicaid was expanded, often the number of newly eligible people who signed up was low, but they're not penalized. Just FYI.
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