oldroy wrote:
You say that the only mandate in ACA is that we have to be insured and go on to say it can be by anybody we choose.
Yes, that's the only mandate applied to us as consumers. Other's on this site (I apparently ruffled some feathers) think I missed the point about mandated procedures, but that applies to providers and has no bearing on a consumers freedom of choice.
oldroy wrote:
However, in so saying you miss out on the Obama words about being able to keep what you have, if you like it.
Keeping what you have if you like it means you're insured right? How does that conflict with a rule that says you have to be insured?
oldroy wrote:
Can you do that if your employer decides to drop the legally forced program he has for you?
"The" legally forced program? Roy... the mandate is simply to be insured. ACA doesn't care WHO you are insured with or what program you or your employer choose. There is no forced program. Maybe you need to look at the actual bill and stop listening to these clowns that I'm arguing with... LOL.
oldroy wrote:
Hey, Straight, you may have spilled some of the beans with your statements that included the words, public option. I always wondered what the left leaners meant by that and here you are telling us that those exchanges amount to some kind of public option.
Well, the term "public option" is in the language of the bill. It's not something the "left leaners" came up with. The term "option" means you can take it or leave it, as in "optional". Pretty straight forward really.
oldroy wrote:
I thought that the term meant that the government would pay for all of us.
The "government" has no money, so they can't pay for all of us... You might be thinking of "publicly funded health care" which is funded by tax payers... we see this in Canada, but it's not part of the ACA.
The public option will be paid for by the people who choose that option, just like any other insurance program. The difference is that the public option will not refuse anyone and it's premiums will be cheaper because the government will have greater leverage (force) when negotiating with providers and it will pay less for overhead... kind of like what we all wish regular insurance companies would do.
Of course this will give regular insurance companies some tough competition... something they h**e the idea of and it's driving them bonkers which us why they're rattling cages to get the conservatives all agitated. They are hoping that they can misinform and infuriate enough v**ers to somehow stop the train.
oldroy wrote:
Public option, government pays? That does sound so much like the same thing.
but it's not.
oldroy wrote:
Thanks for telling me what it is all about. You being so adept at medical insurance may well make you better informed about ACA than the rest of us.
I'm just not caught up in the propaganda circus. Anyone can read the bill or read about the bill - there are plenty of objective arguments worth reading that cover the pros AND the cons. You're just not going to find them on Glenn Beck.
My personal feeling is that it's too soon to tell if this is going to be a disaster or not. But I KNOW that we have to do something. We pay far more for health care than any other developed nation, including those with socialized medicine and although we have *some* outstanding hospitals and we do excel in a *few* areas such as cancer treatment, overall, we get substandard service and the insurance companies are really making things worse for the patients. I say we go for it. See what ACA can do - give it a run. If it fails we can always go back to the abysmal state it's in now.