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Comment by wvenable | Hacker News Reader

The ACA was actually a conservative plan that is actually good for people. In some sense, you could argue that everybody agreed with it until it became a partisan issue.

NN is also good for people and also has bipartisan support (from constituents) but just got repealed. Yes, the sky won't fall but it is now a little darker.

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Depends on how you spin it. Yes it was a conservative plan originally. The reasoning went something like:

"Too many poor people are showing up to hospitals without health insurance and getting treated for free, driving up the cost for everyone else. We need to FORCE them to buy health insurance or else there is a penalty!"

Doesn't sound that great in those terms, but that's exactly what you got. Change the way you talk about it, sprinkle in a couple keywords like "affordable", mix in some coverage for pre-existing conditions, and suddenly its more palatable to liberals.

> Doesn't sound that great in those terms, but that's exactly what you got.

Imho, many solutions don't benefit from a partisan branding. Some things are just good ideas. If research shows it's simply cheaper to hire a bunch of people to offer the homeless free apartments and a simple job no-questions-asked than to keep cleaning up after them, keep designing the city to be anti-homeless and keep paying for the all the police time to deal with them.. Well, you'd have to be pretty damn stupid not to put that idea into law. But if you put a partisan stamp on it (‘We have to help people’ or ‘We need to keep poor people from bothering us’) all of the sudden you have the other camp against you.

I didn't mean that statement as my own opinion, I'm simply pointing out how the same legislation can be demonized or embraced based on how its spun. But you can't tell a Republican that it was actually another Republican that came up with the idea of ACA, they simply can't get passed the fact that its coming from terrible horrible Obama so it must be bad! Just as Democrats don't want to hear that it was a Republican idea.

I agree that political branding is whats toxic.

Principled doesn't mean stupid. You can research and calculate all you want to show someone that it's cheaper to euthanize their retarded child instead of raising them. Some people will still never do it.

As unpalatable as you think that sounds, it's also exactly what we do with car insurance, and has worked mostly fine there for decades, excluding enforcement problems and illegals.

It works for car insurance because it’s actually, you know, _insurance_. Health insurance is more of a weird discount club for an industry where there’s zero price transparency and competition.

And also because costs are relatively predictable with Auto Insurance, unlike Medical, where costs skyrocket very quickly. Also, Car Insurance requirements also stipulate clear minimums that the insurance must carry.

IMO Auto Insurance is a lot closer to Dental than Medical.

Car insurance has deductibles. ObamaCare has deductibles. They're still both insurance.

Car insurance doesn't cover oil changes though.

Not saying its unpalatable to me, I actually agree it was necessary to force everyone to buy health insurance. I'm simply pointing out how the SAME legislation can be demonized or embraced, depending on how its spun. I bet if this were some alternative universe where Republicans were pushing ACA, it would get demonized as an attack on the poor by the other side.

Couldn't we just give everyone health insurance for free and then raise their tax a lil bit?

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