One-Third Don’t Know Obamacare and Affordable Care Act Are the Same | Hacker News Reader

One-Third Don’t Know Obamacare and Affordable Care Act Are the Same

nytimes.com

61 pointsDiabloD363 comments

The Republicans labeling the affordable health care act "Obamacare" and attacking it from day one was a significant propaganda victory, as we can see. In fact the law is very pro-corporate and could have been written by a moderate Republican - was very similar to the Massachusetts health care program instituted by Mitt Romney.

Another very significant propaganda victory, about half of people in the US who think global warming is not caused by humans, or not happening.

The other big succesful 'dark PR' campaign I can think of was the tabacco companies' attacks on health research on smoking. Probably this is a perenial strategy in societies that require the consent of the populace for government actions.

Actually I suppose almost all wars fit this model.

The labelling of ACA as "Obamacare" will allow Republicans to save face while they preserve much of the substance of the law.

Personally, I say leave it to the states...

So many things could be better or much worse if left to the states.

What would be worse except maybe the military?

Education would probably be worse in some states if there were no federal standards or oversight.

Voting Rights Act of 1965?

Funny, I thought people do nothing but complain about what a mess voting is.

It's not perfect, no. But the 1965 act is specifically the part that protects voting rights of minorities. Would voting be better without that? Especially given that one party has turned voter suppression into an integral part of their strategy for winning elections?

If it were left up to states, a large portion of them would deliberately not have these rules. And the nonstandardization of rules across the other states would mean that even in cases where they existed, the laws and associated court precedents would be a gigantic mess, making it a lot harder to litigate cases.

For reference on situations where minority voting rights are still a problem:

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/ohio-hit-lawsuit-over-gop-passed-...

http://www.southeastgeorgiatoday.com/index.php/8-newsbreaks/...

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/07/federal-appeals-...

http://www.theoaklandpress.com/general-news/20170111/lawsuit...

http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/a...

https://www.justice.gov/crt/cases-raising-claims-under-secti...

etc.

Customs, water rights, environmental protections, trade agreements, equal rights, bill of rights, sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health...

If every state had its own FDA, it'd be as hard for a restaurant / fast food chain, a brand of groceries, etc. to start selling in a new state as for them to start selling in a new country. Same with drug manufacturing.

If every state had its own immigration standards, you'd have to have border checkpoints between states as you do between countries. Even, e.g., Canada and the US have serious border checkpoints. Apart from the inconvenience, it would kill the economy of cities on state borders. (Imagine people from New Jersey commuting into work in Manhattan!)

If every state had its own DMV, you wouldn't necessarily be able to drive between all states.

There's lots of effort to harmonize laws across states. No reason that Minnesota would do much other than rubber stamp a drug approved in Wisconsin (assuming Wisconsin was not famously bad at approving drugs).

Also, is your last paragraph sarcasm? Every state does have its own vehicle regulations. The feds use project funding as a carrot to get states to do things, but the regulation is mostly at the state level.

Every state definitely does have its own DMV, with its own regulations (for instance: some states have Graduated Drivers License programs for teenagers).

The situation with interstate recognition of licenses is interesting: neither the full faith and credit clause nor the dormant commerce clause actually require states to recognize each other's drivers licenses, and in fact many don't recognize each other's learners permits.

"Imagine people from New Jersey commuting into work in Manhattan!?"

There's no need to imagine what it would be like

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/jan/25/el-paso-juare...

Of course. So, for those states that are better run, people will generally migrate there. Similarly, people who seek greater publicly-funded benefits will migrate to those areas that provide more.

There are a lot of things worth leaving to the states, but the way insurance works, the financial feasibility depends a lot on how big the buying group is. It's why healthcare bought on behalf of a company is cheaper and better than healthcare bought by an individual, and it's why PPACA created marketplaces for individual insurance buyers.

It's almost certain there are things that are feasible when the US has a certain healthcare policy that aren't feasible on the state level. I'd guess that single payer is one of them.

Leaving it to a states is great in theory but the one thing that I think needs to be done is something that only the federal government has the power to do. Which is open up competition across borders for insurance companies and pharmaceuticals.

Including international borders but I'd be happy just to be able to buy insurance from the state next door.

Well, putting 'affordable' in the name was its own version of propaganda.

if you define propaganda as any effort to be convincing of anything then there's nothing left that isn't it anywhere, in which case the point was not to point out propaganda but to be right about everything

A lot of the failures of the law I put on Republicans. They knew it was going to pass, and yet they decided to ignore it for political reasons instead of working to fix some of its broken provisions.

https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_...

Interesting, so the law passed with zero Republican support but yet it is their fault for all of it's problems. Maybe the Democrats should be responsible for its failure?

Zero Republican support was baked-into it from the start. Repubs that did work with the democrats, and had their feedback incorporated (161 amendments) were threatened by House leadership (see: Chuck Grassley, Gang of Six).

Obamacare is largely a success. Even the current CBO report shows that it has been working well. The program is only a few years old and needs some tweaking. Its main shortcoming is that it is slightly underfunded, and needs more enrollments from younger people. Also pretty shitty that 19 states would rather see their constituents suffer than to allow the federal government to expand Medicaid for them.

Why would you consider it a failure? And don't forget that the stubbornness of Republicans is the reason the single payer part of the law was dropped, even though that would have had a much larger effect on the cost of healthcare. Additionally, several Republican governors _refused_ federal money for Medicaid expansion, directly making healthcare less affordable for their constituents purely for the political optics of being able to say they stood up against "Obamacare".

> Interesting, so the law passed with zero Republican support but yet it is their fault for all of it's problems.

"a lot of its failures"

And yes, I think that if you're the counterparty and rally all your members to oppose anything that is put up for a vote then you absolutely share responsibility for what comes out.

Not least because by withholding your vote you forced them to find a vote elsewhere. So instead of your opinion, they had to cater to someone else's.

I don't necessarily blame Congressional Republicans for the choice. In the political calculus of a toxic and rabid media campaign to its base and primary challenges from the right, I understand why they did what they did.

But they still don't get a pass by saying "Oh, we voted against that. Therefore we have no responsibility for it."

  A lot of the failures of the law I put on Republicans.

You mean, the Republicans who were not allowed to see the bill at all before having to vote on it?

It's hard to fix something you aren't allowed to read, let alone introduce amendments to.[0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hV-05TLiiLU

EDIT: added Pelosi quote video link

It'd be interesting to see what participation and premiums looked like if they hadn't undermined the risk corridors.

That place you get your information from. It stinks.

Look up: Gang of Six affordable care act.

The HCR bill included 6 core planks of previous Republican health care bills, and the Democrats accepted and incorporated 161 amendments to the bill from Republicans.

http://www.salon.com/2010/02/23/hcr_amendments/ http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/02/five_com...

Your manners need work.

The article you quote is from a month before the final version of the bill was even prepared (H.R. 3590), let alone submitted for vote.

Bills in progress mean nothing, especially to that Democrat leadership, who often used the gut-and-amend procedure to completely redo legislation on the fly, avoiding rules regarding which committee(s) a bill must traverse.

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/the-context-behind-nancy-pelosis-...

Given that the primary point of the act was to make healthcare more affordable, it's not really propaganda.

The stated intent; which may or may not match the actual intent; which may or may not match the results.

Because the implementation effectively just gave the insurers a locked market.

Want a real ACA do what most of the world did - take profit out of the healthcare business.

Put in a 5 year plan that insurers have to convert to non for profit orgs.

Single payer won't work in the US most of the world doesn't use it but has some sort of hybrid system. The common ground is that private providers are often non for profit or have to invest a substnetial percentage of their profit back into health services they provide for free or at highly discounted rates. And non for profit doesn't mean they can't make money it just means they don't pay dividends to shareholders and invest their profits back into healthcare.

When has the government ever set out to make something more affordable for all and actually done so?

Food stamps?

Isn't it a common practice to find nicknames for pieces of legislation? In that case, the Republican found one that stuck. The name "Obamacare" is nothing more than a portmanteau of "Obama" and "Health care", and as such it does not entail any political message per se, except that it's supposed to name an health care legislation in which Barack Obama was particularly involved.

So, calling the use of this word "propaganda" seems highly incorrect.

In fact, IIRC Barack Obama himself appropriated the name and said something like "I don't mind this to be called Obamacare, because I do care" (I'm paraphrasing).

For a large portion of the population, "Obama" is/was an inherently negative word.

While it's true that the word simply indicates it was "his" plan, this is also intrinsically linked to extreme negativity and calling it Obamacare was extremely loaded.

I can understand why this could be seen as propaganda.

In response to your edit, I think this was a good way for Obama to take things in stride. But it doesn't change the inherent negativity for most.

It seems to be increasingly common to make the name of the legislation propaganda in itself. Naming the ACA 'affordable' would be an immediate example - a less contentious example would be "USA PATRIOT" (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act), as attacking PATRIOT immediately sounds politically worse than attacking state surveillance.

Countering 'Affordable' with 'Obamacare' was a very successful propaganda win. Affordable sounds good, Obama sounds bad (to the intended audiences). That you can realistically ask people to take sides between the two (whether they prefer Obamacare or ACA) illustrates this perfectly (if Kimmel is a source, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6m7pWEMPlA)

+ a huge percentage of people who think global warming is caused by humans and happening do nothing about it. the sales of cars are rising, the gas is being bought, the whole USA is under a 24/7 air conditioning, the gluttony is at its highest, the production and consumption of chicken and beef too, etc.

From my perspective the difference between believers and non-believers is invisible.

Eh, changes like that don't happen at the individual level. Crime is at historic lows not because people decided to be less violent, but because of socioeconomic changes (and possibly the elimination of common sources of lead).

Rivers stopped catching on fire in the US not because individuals decided to stop dumping chemicals into rivers, but because Americans took collective action in the form or regulations and fines to force better behaviour through financial consequences.

The reality is pollution is an externality, and a very invisible one. Individuals are unlikely to make decisions that impact it because they don't directly bear the costs. And the reality is our societies aren't structured to make it easy to avoid polluting. Try living in an average American city without burning gas in a car, or oil/gas to heat or cool your home. It's an impossible ask for a typical middle class family, let alone someone lower on the socioeconomic scale.

There's a reason things like carbon taxes and green subsidies are very attractive: it allows you to incentivize the behaviour we want to see by baking in the cost of those externalities into people's decisions.

Yes, but doing business as usual will never bring collective action.

Why would politicians tax energy usage if no people demand it? Why would politicians tax meat if no one demands it?

This kind of appeal to futility only brings change when consequences happen.

A lot of people are demanding it. Heck, some countries like Canada are actively passing things like carbon taxes.

But when a large portion of the populace (and thus elected officials) doesn't believe there's a problem in the first place, it's a little tough to take collective action, which brings us back to the original point.

Some more propaganda victories by the right:

"Inheritance tax is double dipping"- if you inherit a fortune in unrealized capital gains, the government essentially forgives that tax debt. I.e. if you were to cash out at that value, you wouldn't have to pay anything.

"Americans are obscenely litigious"- This, as far as I know, started with the McDonald's case. Since then there has been a steady stream of headlines of people successfully suing businesses for things that were seemingly ridiculous. None of these cases were as ridiculous as they were made out to be.

"The income tax credit on mortgage interest makes it cheaper for americans to buy a home"- The average monthly cost for a home is whatever the market says the monthly cost for a home is. And in fact, because the tax brackets are stratified, and the mortgage interest deduction is mutually exclusive with the standard deduction, more expensive homes rose in value more, as a result of the legislation, than less expensive homes.

"Americans Think Cloud Computing Comes From Actual Clouds"

http://www.webpronews.com/americans-think-cloud-computing-co...

Personally I think people are most ignorant when they're most comfortable. The number of people reading & talking about politics right now, at least in my circles, is higher than it's ever been.

Much of what they're saying it led by FUD and isn't balanced at all, in my opinion, but that's a different issue.

This entire article is the best argument I've seen yet for not using buzzwords for marketing

>To get the embarrassing statistics out of the way first, the survey found that 51 percent of respondents believe that stormy weather can interfere with cloud computing.

To be fair, power outages at data centers caused by storms and hurricanes are a serious problem. Being on-call in NYC during Sandy was not fun.

I can't find another source that says literally that of this poll[0], but Slate's article[1] resonates similarly:

"Wakefield developed a questionnaire that delved into Americans’ misunderstandings of “the cloud.” By releasing a less B2B-focused survey, Citrix was able to, for the first time, connect the brand to “the cloud” for the wider consumer population – not just in B2B circles. Stats such as, “51% think inclement weather interferes with cloud computing,”

[0] http://www.wakefieldresearch.com/works/citrix

[1] http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/08/30/cloud_computi...

Another example of why democracy does not work at least in its current form. So is democracy really something that countries and people should be pursuing?

Example: US presidential election. I'm not the worst enemy of Trump and I'm not his supporter either, but I still can easily understand why many people voted for him. He was direct and gave simple answers to (seemingly) simple problems and what's more, he actually has kept his promises so far. I can't say I remember any politician ever doing what they promised during the elections, but Trump has done it.

Still person like Trump with his ideas is not fit to be the president of United States or any other country either really for the obvious reasons that have been discussed here as well many times. However, as long as we live in democracy things like Trump can and will keep on happening. I hate to sound arrogant, but if you give equal rights to vote for all people despite their level of education, understanding of the world, politics, environment and many other things there will be more Trumps and other kinds of problems. I'm not trying to support dictatorship, but instead maybe there could be some kind of limited/modified democracy or something which is somewhere in the middle of dictatorship and democracy.

Considering the current events, I don't think there will be much choice soon.

That's what the Constitution is for in a democratic republic, like the U.S. It limits the damage a single populist can cause to our lasting institutions.

Unfortunately, it's eroded over time. When we want big government policies, we don't care if it's truly regulating commerce "among the several states", and we don't bother to amend the Constitution to add the powers we feel are appropriate.

Out of all the people that want gun control, none advocate for an amendment to revoke the second. They all seem to conveniently believe that it's constitutional. I understand why some people feel that way, but surely a reading of the second amendment would lead some of them to want to revoke it, but it doesn't, because nobody cares what the second amendment or any other part of the Constitution says.

None?

How about a former Justice of the Supreme Court?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-five-extra-words...

I exaggerated. But very few people bother to say it should be revoked/amended compared to the number that just don't care.

Edit: interesting article, but he is not claiming that his preferred policies are unconstitutional, and that we should change the Constitution to allow them. He is saying that they are already constitutional, and we should update the amendment to more closely match his interpretation.

That doesn't require any courage. It's just another way of saying "I'm right; let's update the text to say so."

Why does it have to be courageous?

It's an acknowledgement of where the law needs to be fixed. That's advocating for gun control in the constitution.

No, because he's also saying that it's already constitutional, and he just wants to add the text to end arguments against him.

It doesn't have to be courageous. But it's not a counterexample to my point that people don't care what the Constitution says -- they only care about their policies and conveniently find that the Constitution allows them.

Amen.

A few great shames IMO have been the steady evisceration of the 10th Amendment by Supreme Court rulings and the passage of the 17th Amendment (which made Senators elected by popular vote). At least the latter was done correctly and constitutionally, but I think having one part of the legislature one step removed from the voting population is a good thing.

  Out of all the people that want gun control, none advocate for an amendment to revoke the second.

Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), for one, is on record as supporting "turn in (all of) your guns", were it politically possibly.

This is such a pernicious problem because (1) people are very susceptible to wishful thinking and (2) there's no mechanism for self-correction when the misinformed don't know (or refuse to accept) that they're misinformed.

Lol. Are the majority of people as dumb as they seem?

I'm continually amazed at how well propaganda works on people and how easily they'll go against their best interests.

Voting seems to be just a battle of propoganda to sway dumb people instead of two sides presenting scientific evidence to back their views and people actively working to make things better with rigorous scientific method.

Maybe I'm naieve but it seems humanity will keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again until we run government scientifically with peer review.

  Are the majority of people as dumb as they seem?

In fact, almost half of them have below-average intelligence.

But seriously, media-managed perceptions have a lot of effect. Most Americans have low approval ratings of Congress in general but much higher approval of their individual Congressmember.

Yeah but isn't insane how politics and government is just a media managed propoganda battle?

These people running our entire society have absolutely no scientific methodology for determining their policies. It's all just propaganda and some politician on a commercial making a bunch of promises.

It's so insane to me.

I wouldn't go to a doctor who had really good commercials, I would want to see their success results,and I want to know and what is going on with my treatment at all times, and see how successful the treatment is, etc.etc..

Yet this is how we elect people to run the entire country??

Then why are we trying to "get out the vote" to send these people to the polls?

Let's encourage people to inform themselves, and participation will come naturally in time. Encouraging participation puts the cart before the horse.

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