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Comment by strictnein | Hacker News Reader

> ACA has saved tons of lives

It was the Medicaid expansion that has been cited as saving lives [0]. An expansion that has almost nothing to do with the rest of the ACA.

> "There's a very clear type of fallacy you are engaging ... There's no intellectual rigor or honesty in that sort of thinking"

So you're claiming that the person who posted that is not only falling into a fallacy, but they are neither intellectually rigorous or honest? I think you're reading a lot into their comment which seemed pretty benign, but possibly contrary to your viewpoint?

[0] https://news.uchicago.edu/story/new-research-shows-medicaid-...

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Your linked to article does not demonstrate what you claim it does. Your reasoning is wrong.

Medicaid expansion was a big part of the ACA.

> Medicaid expansion was a big part of the ACA.

Well see, first you narrowly define the ACA to be "everything that didn't help"...

> "Findings suggest Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act saved about 27,400 lives between 2010-22, including among younger adults."

> "Their findings show that Medicaid expansions led to a 12% increase in enrollment and significantly reduced mortality—not just among older adults, but also younger ones, who accounted for nearly half of the life-years saved."

Huh? Did you read it? My point was that we could have just expanded Medicaid to achieve this.

> we could have just expanded Medicaid

Laws need votes.

If we are going to be unbound by reality then we could "just" put a medbed to cure all diseases, reverse ageing, and regrow limbs using quantum space-age tech in everyone's home.

Too many people think snark is a substitute for insight.

The major GOP complaint about the entire thing was that it was the federal government forcing people to buy a product from companies. The Supreme Court ruled that it had that power.

The ACA was the Republican plan until championed by Obama. The Republican goal was to say anything to denigrate their own plan. Romney later became the nominee for President and it was his plan that the ACA was largely based off of.

Republicans fought hard to discredit their own plan. They just wanted to move to the right of whatever it was that the black man championed.

I missed the part of your insight where the GOP would have voted to expanded Medicaid to all.

If they are down for it, I can make a call and it would be a near unanimous vote.

It was the Medicaid expansion that has been cited as saving lives [0].

Medicaid expansion saved lives. That is true and not in dispute. Other lives were saved too. It wasn’t just poor people who obtained life saving care from ACA. In an alternate world where only Medicaid expansion occurred fewer lives would have been saved than were saved with ACA as it exists now.

Paid for how? The expansion of people not on medicaid to be paying in was supposed to be how expanding medicaid could be achieved.

The Feds pay ~$150 billion a year and the states pay ~$20 billion a year for that Medicaid expansion. Those are increases on top of previous spending.

How are we paying for that? Debt.

On top of that, the ACA provides $100 billion a year to subsidize the healthcare markets.

> An expansion that has almost nothing to do with the rest of the ACA.

That's a very strange assertion, it's literally "the ACA medicaid expansion" and was a key part of the whole thing.

I'm saying most political argumentation is dishonest and not intellectually rigorous, and that's what the comment was doing. It wasn't arguing based on facts or data or actual specifics, but rather according to vague political ideologies.

That's one reason that I believe politics are discouraged on HN. It turns off our brains and we start using less interesting or useful ways of thinking.

"Saved lives" or "Could Save Lives" is a ridiculous, un-falsifiable, and unprovable claim.

First, it involves twisting correlation and causation into an Escher knot. Secondly, it's not even what cited source says.

Yes, "reduced mortality along a timeline for a certain demographic" is a good and desirable statistic, but there is no way that it translates into the self-aggrandizing and sensationalistic "ACA/Medicaid saved tons of lives" (whatever "tons" is supposed to mean, in terms of lives. Perhaps grossly obese people died less.)

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