Principled Opposition and the Affordable Care Act

[rowyn]

A recurring sentiment I keep seeing on Twitter is 'Those conservatives oppose the ACA because they want poor people to suffer!' That's about the nicest way I see it phrased. Most of the other ways are more hyperbolic. 'I didn't think that real evil -- the kind of monsters who want to make people suffer -- existed on a large scale in the world. But

Comments

[verdanthe]

the countries that have the best outcomes and the lowest cost have a mixed private/public system, where basic care is available to everyone at public expense, and the citizenry can pay for elective/faster/alternative health services if they have the resources and want to. poor outcomes and high cost? that'd be the system we had before aca.
we've never had a free market in health care since health insurance became widely adopted, and won't even after aca protections are repealed. just try to get a price quote in advance for any medical procedure.
so, with aca we have broader access and some of the benefits of a public system.
without aca, we don't even get the benefits of a free market system, because insurers don't work that way.

[tuftears]

That's exactly what I was thinking.

I think it's almost certainly better if basic health care is universal because sickness tends to spread. Similar thoughts on vaccines, vaccines need to be universal to truly prevent the diseases they are meant to stop, or infections will spread. Economies of scale apply too: any individual payer has far less discriminatory power (the ability to influence the seller) than the government as a whole.

If you're the seller, of course, your incentives are to maximize profit, so you lobby government to get rid of universal health care.

[verdanthe]

exactly. if my neighbor gets smallpox, I want her treated, even if she doesn't have a dime to her name and has never had a job. humans are social animals, and pretending health is an individual, not community, concern is inefficient and unwise.
I'm sure you meant by "universal" "everyone who can be safely vaccinated". vaccines aren't safe for the immuno-compromised.

[level_head]

Hah! The most typing I've done in a long while. But there is much more to say about this. The upshot: The parts that are good can be done without the 98% of it that is bad. And that's what alternative plans are trying to accomplish.

By the way, people with my disease (CIDP from food poisoning) must not get flu or pneumonia shots. I learned this from an info sheet handed to me in the hospital after my shot that said this. I mentioned that and showed them the page the page they'd given me, and they said "oops."

My prescriptions are now regularly screwed up, sometimes at great pain and great cost to my quality of life. And I am able to watch this carefully, keeping-track on spreadsheets. Most patients are not. And these healthcare workers are good people. They're just dealing with an insane system.

===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle

[tagryn]

Good post