Obamacare

[Oberon]

I must admit I am struggling to see how a nation can make such a screw up of a free health care scheme...I mean, sure, our NHS isn't perfect, and it can be a financial sinkhole, but that's more to do with the money being syphoned off into directors and executives than it has with the idea of free health care. It's a good thing there wasn't this much drama here in 1946!

[Buddahaid]

I just had open enrollment at work and all of the preventive care is now at no additional cost thanks to Obamacare. No copay at all. That includes physicals, mammograms, colonoscopies, etc.

[AVGWarhawk]

Originally Posted by Buddahaid

I just had open enrollment at work and all of the preventive care is now at no additional cost thanks to Obamacare. No copay at all. That includes physicals, mammograms, colonoscopies, etc.

You then received several subsidies?

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Tchocky

Healthcare and pharmaceutical supply are not monopolies in the US. Not even close. So your basic premise is wrong.

No. The whole business branch is one big monopoly. Thats why comparable heathcare standards cost Americans almost twice as much money than Germans.

That is a problem present everywhere. In Europe, in no other country drugs have so high price tags, like in Germany. Formally, there should be competition and market regulating prices itself. But that means little when market participants cheat and play foul. Abusing patent laws for example. And our politicians are in the pockets of the business lobby anyway.

You too easily fall for the superficial shine and put too much trust into the label they have attached to it. When reality is that this business branch is one off the most corrupted there is. Only energy, second hand cars and bio-patents on genetically altered seeds maybe rank worse.

I could recommend you literature on it, unfortunately all three books are German, by Austrian and German and Swiss authors.

Pharmaceutics and health insurrances are highly criminal businesses, to put it in plain English. Politics, as far as they have not been sacked by the lobbies, are lagging 20 or 30 years behind the state of things in Europe. In America its described to be even worse.

No monopolies, you say? Sleep on and have nice dreams. There is far more cartels than free market at work.

[Tchocky]

You don't seem to understand what a monopoly is. I'm wondering how basic to be here.

The industry more closely resembles a heavily regulated oligopoly than anything else - but even that isn't quite correct. This is the US healthcare sector I'm talking about.

In the UK you have a monopolistic system, but it isn't a monopoly due to the NHS being a state body. Words and definitions matter.

How can US healthcare be a monopoly when multiple corporations and hospital chains compete for business, multiple health insurance bodies compete for business? You say it's corrupt? You might be right but corruption is not an economic industry structure whereas a monopoly is.

Corruption is bad, a monopoly is also bad but that doesn't make them the same thing!

Prices are high due to a perverse incentive model, a skewed risk pool, and overly lax consumer protections. All of which the ACA at least attempts to address.

Edit - there's a load of stuff I could recommend you read as well. Such as - what's in the law and what it means.

EDIT 2 - For anyone talking about how "the people don't want Obamacare"

NYTimes: Closer Look at Polls Finds Views of Health Law a Bit Less Negative
http://nyti.ms/1aJd4xV

True, it's more unpopular than popular. But that includes people who think it doesn't go far enough. And no poll finds even a plurality in favour of shutting down the government over it.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Tchocky

You don't seem to understand what a monopoly is. I'm wondering how basic to be here.

The industry more closely resembles a heavily regulated oligopoly than anything else - but even that isn't quite correct. This is the US healthcare sector I'm talking about.

In the UK you have a monopolistic system, but it isn't a monopoly due to the NHS being a state body. Words and definitions matter.

How can US healthcare be a monopoly when multiple corporations and hospital chains compete for business, multiple health insurance bodies compete for business? You say it's corrupt? You might be right but corruption is not an economic industry structure whereas a monopoly is.

Corruption is bad, a monopoly is also bad but that doesn't make them the same thing!

Prices are high due to a perverse incentive model, a skewed risk pool, and overly lax consumer protections. All of which the ACA at least attempts to address.

Edit - there's a load of stuff I could recommend you read as well. Such as - what's in the law and what it means.

EDIT 2 - For anyone talking about how "the people don't want Obamacare"

NYTimes: Closer Look at Polls Finds Views of Health Law a Bit Less Negative
http://nyti.ms/1aJd4xV

True, it's more unpopular than popular. But that includes people who think it doesn't go far enough. And no poll finds even a plurality in favour of shutting down the government over it.

Monopolism is the corruption - the cancer - of free market mechanisms.
Cartels are monopolists cooperating. Cartels influence the general price-building on the market, preventing free markets, and turning competition into show. And that is the case with pharmaceutical industries, and health service providers over here, and over there as well.
What laws say, is not the relevant thing. What is being done in reality, independent from whether the law allows it or not, wants it or not, is what counts. BTW, you may want to question the m,otives of those making the laws. Irt'S not as if they are free of from their own egoist drives. And lobbies and bribers sit in their most inner circles. The rules are made to the liking of those they once were meant to regulate.

#And is the state really the more competent regulator? Planned economies are a fetish of socialism, putting bureaucracy above free market. I am opposing this idea. History has proven it wrong, so very often. One should have the decency to finally learn the lessons. The problems we have today is last but not least due to the state/law-maker/politicians thinking it/theory can outsmart the market and forsee things so much better and regulate so much more competently. The violation of basic free market reasonability is the original sin that has led us to where we are today. And as Einstein already said: the kind of thinking that has caused a problem to build up in the first is very unlikely to produce the solution to it.

The law-maker only should be active regarding destroying monopolies, and preventing them.
The law maker also should not be allowed to print money. He is a monopolist himself - holding a monopoly for creating money out of nothing. This is one of the very basic roots of problems today.

I understand perfectly what monopolies are. Its just that I do not take something as granted just because it is written in a witty formulation on some piece of paper. Armies of bureaucrats are busy with watering down such formulations and adding appendices and formulations that make the formulation appear to say one thing, while allowing so very many other things and exceptions at the same time. Not to mention that the formulation itself has been left to lobbies to create and/or heavily influence them: making the fox the guardian of the hen-house that way.

I am a nihilist regarding these formal issues. But the term nihilism is often misused and misunderstood, and I refer to Camus himself when saying nihilism does not mean to not believe in anything. According to Camus it means to not believe in what just seems to be. And that are two completely different statements.

[Tchocky]

I understand perfectly what monopolies are. Its just that I do not take something as granted just because it is written in a witty formulation on some piece of paper.

You clearly don't understand. Take my word for it.

I am a nihilist regarding these formal issues.

Quite.

Your approach to word definitions is unusual.

Language is not a conspiracy against you.

Lets stop with the subsidy nonsense and look at the facts as presented on the subsidy calculator.

You brought it up.
Your calculator doesn't work for the subsidies on your policy as its your employer who is subsidised for your insurance.

[AVGWarhawk]

Originally Posted by Tribesman

You brought it up.
Your calculator doesn't work for the subsidies on your policy as its your employer who is subsidised for your insurance.

No, you answered for another member that I asked a pointed question. Now, for the love of heaven.....

Let's try this....if my employer said he has no interest in carrying my HC anymore and I should go to the market place for coverage I would not be able to afford it at my current rate of pay to tax credit/subsidy ratio.

Let's try this.....I run my own business. I have a family of 4. I have no health insurance. As of Oct 1 I was told by law I needed to get health insurance. I sign on to the ACA sight to see a smiling woman indicating how wonderful this is. I input my gross income. I input all other required information. A magical unsubsidized/ zero tax credit number calculated on my income pops up. $10,000.00. This is not budgeted into my current lifestyle. I would think there are many others in the same boat.

Now, I input a single parent of 1 that makes less than $25k per year. It pops up, Medicade. Or in laymans terms, free.

[Tchocky]

Wait, Bubbles. You dislike viewing the Constitution as A living document - except for the parts you don't like.

[Bubblehead1980]

Originally Posted by Tchocky

Wait, Bubbles. You dislike viewing the Constitution as A living document - except for the parts you don't like.

No, I accept that the 16th amendment is law unfortunately, but it's something the progressives rammed through back in 1913, the founders would have never been okay with it, it is unamerican for the government to get a piece of my income.Sales tax etc, okay, I purchase things, but taking a percentage of my income? its WRONG and essentially unamerican.How DARE you accuse me of believing in that garbage theory. No idea what you are talking about! I did not try say amendment means something different than what is says.I simply said it is wrong, should have never been and hope, one day we can do away with it if our people would rise up, perhaps we could.

[Tchocky]

Starting to sound like Bubblehead in here

[Mr Quatro]

Originally Posted by Tchocky

Starting to sound like Bubblehead in here

without the pendulum there is no slang and without the ying there is no yang

[AVGWarhawk]

Originally Posted by Mr Quatro

without the pendulum there is no slang and without the ying there is no yang

Glad that was cleared up.

[AVGWarhawk]

Originally Posted by Tchocky

Starting to sound like Bubblehead in here

Well Tchocky, some like to drink the juice.