State of The Union address minute by minute on Twitter
twitter.github.io
twitter.github.io
I have no health insurance, and I don't plan on getting it. This is, of course, crazy. But the reason is because I can't afford it. I'm in the same position as many others across the nation.
Under Obamacare, I am going to be fined some hundreds of dollars for not having health insurance; health insurance which, itself, costs at least $200/mo (even under Obamacare). Then next year, I'm going to be fined triple that amount iirc, with increasing penalties each year.
Isn't this the opposite of free health care? I'm not involved in this debate one way or the other. I don't know enough about the issues. But I will say that I don't appreciate the government intruding on my private life, forcing me to buy a product for at least $200/mo, a $200/mo I literally can't afford.
I don't know how this is going to play out, but the government's expectation that everyone will buy health insurance just because they're enacting tax penalties seems somewhat naive. People simply have no money for $200/mo of extra costs. People are also bad at long-term planning, so the impending threat of "next year I'll probably be fined" isn't going to persuade those who are bad at finances (the vast majority of Americans) to sign up for an immediate $200/mo expense.
If you detail more information I can always Google.
Perhaps I should be trying to maximize every possible opportunity offered to me. But I just can't stomach the idea of taking money away from other people to pay for my own personal problems.
Economically and socially, of course, but epidemiologically as well!
Maintenance is cheaper than repair.
A comment from reason.com sums it up nicely: "Emergency rooms are required by law to treat it. If you are poor, they are unlikely to ever collect the bill for doing so. So why would a poor person wait days or weeks to see a doctor then they can go down to an emergency room and see one in hours?
Moreover, if you are being forced to pay for health insurance, you are more likely not less likely to seek treatment since you will rationally think "well I am paying for it so I might as well use it.". The idea that making people buy insurance will reduce overall healthcare costs has always been an insane one."
http://reason.com/blog/2014/01/02/no-obamacare-wont-reduce-e...
Because if you don't have a life threatening condition, you're not going to see a doctor in "hours" in the emergency room. You're going to be triage'd to the lowest possible slot, and it's my understanding that if they believe you can just be sent on your way, they'll do that. You can't go in for an ear ache.
> Moreover, if you are being forced to pay for health insurance, you are more likely not less likely to seek treatment since you will rationally think "well I am paying for it so I might as well use it." The idea that making people buy insurance will reduce overall healthcare costs has always been an insane one.
First of all, there are plenty of respected folks who don't think that's "insane". Presumably more respected than "John" from the comments section.
But regardless, that's what co-pays and deductibles are for. Let's also not forget that going to the doctor is still not a joy ride. There's forms, and there's a wait. I have health insurance, and I don't take a trip to the doctor's office like it's the local candy shop. Why would the poor, who feel the impact of a co-pay even more than I do?
You're spot on about doctor visits not being fun. We also have free GP access and people will see a doctor if they have a reason but most people would rather stay home and rest than go out to the Doctor's just because they have a sniffle.
Copays aren't that big of a deal when you're in extreme pain. Ours was $100 per ER trip. Surely that would dissuade people with ear aches. Had it been a 20% coinsurance charge, then we probably would have tried urgent care first, or waited longer. But you can see how having insurance (or a certain type of insurance) can affect your behavior, in a way that's not so predictable. Many policy makers were surprised by the results of the Oregon Medicare Study as are many people learning about moral hazard for the first time. It's counter-intuitive.
I live in a country FAR less wealthy than the U.S. (Uruguay), yet basic healthcare here must sound like a science fiction future for the average American.
U$ 50/month gives me access to a doctor that goes TO MY HOUSE in hours in case of ilness (including something like a flu, ear ache or whatever), or I can go to a clinic of said private emergency service, and get a doctor in minutes (yes, they're the least trained and paid doctors, but every single one has at least 7 years of university training).
Every single freaking Uruguayan can be treated for free, and most have access to decent hospital services. Yes, there are some big downsides - getting an operation scheduled takes months, and if you don't have money, quality of life stuff is practically ignored, but not a single Uruguayan has gotten bankrupt due to a severe or life threatening condition, you get stuff up to and including cancer and HIV treatments for free.
And you wouldn't believe how cheap the very best health coverage is, I'm paying for the 2nd best one.. U$ 150/month.
If you have a difficult operation or strange disease, there's no place like the U.S., but for everyday healthcare the U.S. sounds like a Medieval country.
People want everyone to be covered, which is how Obamacare got pushed through in the first place. You not getting covored can potential end up costing us more in the healthcare system (healthcare costs being the biggest reason for personal bankruptcy) if you don't take this and use it.
This is interesting. Is this true?
I apologize if it sounded like I was complaining. I only meant I chose this life. How is it reasonable for me to choose this, and then force other people to pay for me?
The other alternative is that I should feel like a shitty human for choosing not to maximize my earning potential and getting myself into this position in the first place. But part of having freedom of choice is the freedom to choose poorly. It's my own life, a life I'm not burdening others with. If I break my arm, can't afford to pay for it, and then become bankrupt as a result, then I have suffered a personal penalty which society will remember and will punish me for. And while I may have temporarily burdened others by not being able to pay for my emergency care, I've still been penalized as a result, which seems quite fair. Whereas taking a handout to cover the same expense feels like I got something for nothing.
I admit that there are some good arguments in this thread, though, so perhaps I should reevaluate my moral perspectives. But it's extremely difficult for me to become comfortable with the idea of encroaching on other people's lives by force.
Relevant bit: "Although the individual causes of bankruptcy are complex and multifaceted, the majority of personal bankruptcies involve substantial medical bills"
No matter what your intentions on the topic, if you end up in the emergency room for a preventable condition (which will lead to more treatment), you will end up costing everybody much more than simply taking the vouchers... take that fact as you will, but statistically speaking it's very likely you'll end up "costing" society more by not participating in the healthcare system.
That's nice, but earlier you did say:
> I don't appreciate the government intruding on my private life, forcing me to buy a product for at least $200/mo, a $200/mo I literally can't afford. (...) People simply have no money for $200/mo of extra costs.
Which seems rather straightforward. You want to be angry at the government for enacting the ACA, for "forcing" this $200/mo charge on not only yourself but also the "many others" in your same position. You're quite upset at this mandate that you and those many apparently can't afford. Backpedaling only after someone points out the obvious (vouchers, tax credits, etc) doesn't change your original message.
You are invited to drop your American citizenship and live on an island. Otherwise you don't really get your life and not be affected or influenced by others. That is a silly idea born out of fairy tales for kids and teenagers.
You are a part of a society. The moment you step out you are on a public street that someone paid for. On a private side-walk that someone else owns. You ride in a public transportation system that someone else has paid for. You are also driving a car because someone has granted you a license after you passed a test. Like it or not you are also protected from random other countries coming in and taking your stuff away by having a very very large military force.
If your house catches on fire people will come in a red car with sirens on it and drag your ass our of the building and save your life.
If someone assaulted you, you can sue them in a court of law and ask the judge to rule in your favor and force the other party to pay you some money.
If you have a family and your break your arm you know cannot earn money for them. It is not just you suffering in silence, now your children, wife, other dependents are now starving. Same happens if you happen to take up heroin and start stealing and not going to work. It is not just your doing whatever you like in a hypothetical bubble. You now your family is starving. You just going about doing your own thing have caused quite a bit of a mess.
No it wouldn't. I provide it to my countrymen no matter their condition.
> Perhaps I should be trying to maximize every possible opportunity offered to me. But I just can't stomach the idea of taking money away from other people to pay for my own personal problems.
You live in a world where your tax money already is pooled and so you already do take money from people to pay for things as simple as the roads you drive on, or the emergency services you use.
There's no moral argument to not participating. You've paid the taxes and you have a right to the return.
That's in your head. Realistically it's in everybody's interest to keep their countrymen happy.
"But I just can't stomach the idea of taking money away from other people to pay for my own personal problems."
If you're found unconscious somewhere because of an untreated ailment, the "cost to other people for paying to for your own personal problems" will be dramatically higher. If you're conscious, you could maybe refuse emergency assistance, though I'd encourage you not to.
If you really need to make it up to your fellow citizens, meet your civic responsibilities: put thought and research into voting, serve - honestly and intelligently - on juries when called, etc. We ask some of you, it's fair for you to take what you're given without being exploitative.
If you earn very little, you might qualify for Medicaid, which is essentially taxpayer-paid healthcare via the government.
If you earn low amounts, you might qualify for various levels of subsidies on private insurance plans through the state-run health exchanges.
However, there are certainly situations in which you may not qualify for medicaid, and still not earn enough to afford a private plan, even with subsidies. There are definitely people in this situation.
This wasn't unforeseen, it was known it would happen.
Its not "free money", its taxes paid by taxpayers. There is no "free money" in government.
That's not actually true, particularly, there is no necessary reason why, as long as economic growth can be maintained over the long term (even if that's not always the case over shorter terms) a country can't sustainably have an ever-increasing debt balance, without ever paying any of it off other than by issuing new debt.
Even if it was true, if government deficit spending increases stimulate economic expansion, the tax funds to pay for the spending can be produced by the spending.
"if government deficit spending increases stimulate economic expansion"
Which it didn't and hasn't - the best times in our economy were when the government spent and taxed less (e.g. 1946 & 1948 fiscal changes).
"the tax funds to pay for the spending can be produced by the spending"
No, they cannot and that's just twisted logic - you cannot spend your way out of debt
If that was true, corporate finance would be a lot different.
But not out of funds that they would have had without the expenditure. So they have literally given up nothing.
The original plan was to force the States to extend Medicaid (Government provided health insurance) to cover those that would not be getting subsidies because they made too little. The problem was, the Federal Government was only going to float the bill for this for a few years, then it was going to be up to the States to come up with the money to keep it going! Many States balked and refused to expand Medicaid, citing the fact that they could not afford this massive increase in their budget. The Supreme Court agreed with the States that the Federal Government could not force them to expand Medicaid unless the Federal Government was going to float the bill.
So now, anyone that doesn't earn a certain amount of money will be without health insurance, and the cost of healthcare will be higher for them when they do get sick (For many reasons, such as the medical device tax). Fortunately, for now, if you live in a State that did not expand Medicaid, and you would have qualified had they expanded it, you won't have to pay the penalty tax.
Exactly this. So, who pays for the 10% after three years? The 100% after 2022? That's right, the State. Sure, maybe they didn't like Obamacare. But that doesn't mean there wasn't a real concern for a very real budget, which the legislature is constitutionally required to keep balanced.
And exactly how common of an occurrence is that in the United States? Yes, one can bemoan the lack of preventative medicine and proper follow-ups, but if you show up at the E.R. of most American hospitals with a life-threatening condition, you're going to get treated regardless of how much you can pay.
If we're going to properly fight the problem, hyperbole needs to go out the window.
You are right that there is near to zero chance of that occuring. Which is probably what the previous poster meant. Since you can show up with a life threatening issue at a hospital and get stabilizing life saving treatment regardless of your insurance anyone who doesn't have insurance is effectively already leeching.
Yes, and taxpayers are going to foot the bill. If taxpayers are going to foot the bill anyway, they might as well do it in a way that is efficient (preventative care) rather than one that is extremely inefficient (emergency care).
Source: Second hand knowledge. Take it for what you will.
They gave no tax credits(discounts) whatsoever and took him directly to buy plans for paying the full amount.
There is medicaid but not every state is accepting new people.
As far as moving, I have many other considerations, and my wife and son have good insurance, so I am satisfied to stay where I am (physically) for now while we work on the financial issues.
Just to let you know, this is not about the state not having the money. This is about them not accepting the money from the federal government solely out of political spite. And you and your family are on the receiving end of that.
Perhaps it was political spite, but to say there were no real concerns for how the State was going to pay for it is itself, a partisan, politically motivated statement.
> CBO estimates show that the federal government will bear nearly 93 percent of the costs of the Medicaid expansion over its first nine years.
> The additional cost to the states represents a 2.8 percent increase in what states would have spent on Medicaid from 2014 to 2022 in the absence of health reform.
> This 2.8 percent figure overstates the net impact on state budgets because it does not reflect the savings that state and local governments will realize in health-care costs for the uninsured.
So no, I don't consider my statement to be partisan, given that the facts back it up. Your government just doesn't care all that much about you getting insured.
However, you have completely ignored what happens after the 'first nine years'. Sure, a lot of politicians don't care about the future, especially if they don't plan on being in office at that point (or being in a different office). But perhaps Missouri's legislature does?
If things don't get better within a few months, I am going to be doing just that. My profile hasn't been updated in forever (like since I opened the account) but I do or have done everything in that list. I could add Python programming to that list, as I have been teaching myself over the past year. Thanks for the offer, right now I am trying to figure out what the future has in store for me and my family.
> Isn't this the opposite of free health care? I'm not involved in this debate one way or the other. I don't know enough about the issues.
One of the side effects of not being involved in the debate means you don't realize that the actual "free healthcare" option was taken off the table due to spirited lobbying. On the balance, I'm willing to eat the cost either way (getting healthcare, or being penalized) if it means people who were entirely unable to get it before are able to do so now.
But then again, I'm crazy. Either because I'm nominally altruistic or because I don't have health care or whatever. I'm sure a reason can be found.
I would have preferred to have the dread specter of "long lines" combined with actual free health care for everyone than this, but eh. Politics.
On this topic, you can look at real data and not rely on idle speculation. I just don't see a reasonable way to draw the conclusion that "the government's expectation that everyone will buy health insurance just because they're enacting tax penalties seems somewhat naive." Unless you literally mean every single last person.
But then again, US politics is truly one-of-a-kind in most ways.
I really hope this happens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leahy-Smith_America_Invents_Ac...
Basically, it moves US patent law from first-to-invent to first-to-file. So it lowers litigation costs for the big guys who take ideas from the little guys and use their big legal departments to file the patent on it before the little guy can.
One Big Wallet, one heck of a lot of votes.
EDIT: So I went backed and checked it out some more. Completely breaks my back button as they load 20+ URLs while I try to (jerkily) scroll through the text. under ideal circumstances this interface could be really cool, but I found it unusable.
I absolutely despise when sites do this. One scroll gesture and now I can't go back to the site I came from? Another common archetype for this behavior is sites that show a slideshow. I click through 20 slides, and now I can't get back to the page I came from. Webdevs: you can still have permalinks to each paragraph/slide/whatever without completely muddling the user's browser history! Use replaceState instead of pushState to mitigate this problem.
Browsers should evolve to account for this kind of abuse. Holding down the back button should present two options: One to list all the anchors you've been to on the current page (in this case, paragraphs on the page), and one list of your previous history stack that doesn't account for URL fragments/hashes.
Chrome does this (as I discovered when trying to escape this page)
"The state of the union speech Barack Obama would never give"
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/the-state-of-the-union-speech-b...
(I get that is is some sort of relative keyword frequency;)
Might be interesting to see retweet patterns, to illuminate how sentiment is forwarded through the network.
Considering the high engagement from certain areas of the US at that point in the speech, I'm willing to bet a lot of other folks felt the same way.
That's about as far as he is going to go if he isn't going to say 'no more fracking'.
I'd argue that it also "explain"s USA.