Matt Davies for January 03, 2014

Perhaps if Republicans spent less time standing around being critical, more progress could be made to help ALL Americans obtain coverage

Democrats are giving Obama bad grades. Republicans would rather just throw him overboard while the boat is sinking because he is the only one doing anything to save the boat and he is not Republican.

And the score of the system that existed pre-Obamacare? Zero, zero, zero.

Single payer is the answer. Returning to the old system is a recipe for accelerated failure.

It’s a shallow lake. That boat already sank and is on the bottom….

The healthcare system was already sinking and the ACA is an attempt, albeit feeble, flawed and under attack, to save it.

It’s starting to “come around”, and conservatives might want a different boat in 8 more months. (They might also want to stop firing torpedoes and pick up a bucket instead.)

I’d prefer to plug the holes first then pump the boat out instead. That means scrapping Obamacare entirely and getting the government as much as possible out of the health insurance business. Then we move to a system that minimizes the need for health insurance at all preferably one that uses it only for catastrophic care.I have put up more than once my suggestion for an alternate plan that involves just that..Obamacare is a failed idea that does nothing but rearrange the deck chairs so to speak. It doesn’t change the system just how the existing system works by layering on more cost and bureaucracy.

I have a lot of bad things to say about the ACA, but I hope and think it changed the political landscape by putting universal health insurance decisively on the table. The next step is to make it better. In Ontario back in the sixties government health insurance was available, but you had to sign up for it and pay; if you were low income you paid less or nothing. Moreover, doctors could care more than the government paid them, so sometimes patients would have to pay a little out of pocket. Then in the seventies it became automatic; it was funded by taxes; and doctors could only charge what the government paid them (there was a doctors’ strike over that, but the doctors lost that one). So systems can evolve. I would say the next step for the ACA should be government plans to compete with the private plans.

I think you’re mixing apples with oranges. My co-pay is 15% of the “negotiated” (= dictated by insurance with no negotiation with the doctor) fee. That 15% goes against the “out-of-pocket costs”, and after I pay about 10K in those costs, insurance covers 100%. My deductible is the same as before: $5000. NO insurance plan existed without any deductible, unless the premiums were more than outrageous, and I think those days are long gone. High deductible is more like catastrophic insurance. I don’t need to see a doctor for the sniffles. I just want to be sure I can get treatment for cancer if it happens.

If I could choose between $3K and $35, I would certainly choose $35. However, this is not a choice that has existed for many years.

I signed up. Dental was not required.

Thanks to everyone for their insightful talking points. I hadn’t read them yet today. And its’ good to see that you aren’t yet confused by facts.

Tigger: once more a note, I do watch NBC, CBS, rarely ABC (Disney central), CNN, Fox (as long as I can stand it, which isn’t long, but necessary to compare their “view”) and I strongly advise if you can get it, trying Al Jazeera America for some real journalism on the news, and a fairer dichotomy on their “analysis” programs where they fairly let all sides present their views.

BTW, don’t know what’s going on, but NBC has taken a pretty hard right in the last year, and seems much less comprehensive. YEs, I used to prefer them over CBS as far as broadcast news, but all seem more strongly representative of corporate ownership and sponsorship than “fairness”…