Trump's America, March 2017: Using His Inside VOICE

so I kinda exaggerated the mandate above, obv what it is = taking the 63 day period that they used for pre-existing condition exclusions back in the day and now assessing you a 30% surcharge.

which is kinda hilarious cos in many cases, that's a much larger annual financial hit than the ACA mandate penalty, and even that had exemptions that one could easily qualify for to avoid the penalty (I still find most people who whine about the mandate don't realize the existence of these).

Repubs will argue it's not the same because "hey you don't HAVE to enroll in the coverage and take the surcharge" or "insurance companies don't HAVE to charge you the extra 30%" (like they won't), but it is.

I guess the "low deductibles/premiums, you're gonna love em" speech was, as per usual, smoke and mirrors.

why so many Americans (and so many poor ones) think that affordable care is a bad thing

really need that rolling explaining conservatism thread don't we

jed_ I don't think it's any one thing. The arguments against it vary but typically it was:

*In the earlygoing, lots of misstatements about some of the tenets of the plan, such as that it would "ration" healthcare or there would be "death panels". or be a slippery slope to single payer which would lead to long waits to get health care. that died down after a while.

*it's tyrannical to force your populace to buy health insurance, it's unconstitutional (yawn), etc, etc. I have a right to be uninsured all I want! coupled with...

*People who were proudly ignorant of the many exceptions to the penalty, such as the one that made you exempt if the premiums would cost more than 8% of your income (or something along those lines). I know several friends and family members who were uninsured and who qualified for the exemptions and just didn't apply for them because it was "too hard" or they literally didn't know they existed. and now lately it's

*OMG prices are skyrocketing and deductibles are too high. which of course was the case prior to ACA which everybody has forgotten. That being said, ACA does have a lot of blind spots, particularly in states that didn't expand Medicaid. My mother's insurance was ridiculously expensive. Single payer is the only actual means of providing affordable quality health care, really.

to paraphrase a friend, people used to picket against actual injustice, now they fight for the right to do dumb harmful shit to themselves because "nobody can tell me what to do!".

my dad drove without a seatbelt for a while to protest the police being able to ticket him - all the while admitting he was basically going to be torn like tissue paper if he got in an accident.

xp
Always figured it was "Blah, blah, blah my tax dollars paying for someone else's bad choices" by people young/lucky enough not to have needed any serious medical care yet.

why so many Americans (and so many poor ones) think that affordable care is a bad thing

People are isolated these days, get pretty much all of their information from sources that tell them this, and it's tied up with the dopamine-rush of hatred.

There was that too. Some of it was well-intentioned, but misguided - a liberal friend of mine was loudly against it because his mother was dying of cancer at the time and he was feeling immense personal pain over it and he didn't feel it was fair that, in his eyes, she should be forced to subsidize someone else's health care. His argument didn't make sense but he was going through Hell at the time so I understood why he wasn't approaching it with a clear head.

Often times the people who talk about their tax dollars paying for shit are the people who get massive refunds each year so they can stfu

ACA is actually the most popular it's ever been in the US, too (which isn't saying a lot, still almost half of the country hates it, but it started out much worse).

humorously of course, the whole campaign started with Town Halls which tea party people infiltrated and disrupted by yelling and being disruptive, which apparently isn't cool now that Democrats and independents are flooding town halls.

Yeah, that is funny, single-payer healthcare is actually pretty popular. We just don't have a government that listens to any of us ... a few years ago there was a Princeton study that showed citizens have a 0% influence on legislation and policy in Congress.

But don't doubt the propaganda shit for the people who fall for it, it's crafted intentionally to screw with people's heads in very well-engineered ways. And it works, too. People have figured that stuff out down to a science, and there are no laws to stop it right now.

white ppl who get anything from the guvmint are traitors to the race. so think the 'billies

yup. in my 20s, the people I met that would say shit like "why should we tax our best people" were never people that resembled that remark. they were kids up to their ears in debt who probably borrowed money from their parents to pay for things.

sometimes I want to grab some of these idiots by the scruff of their neck and say "fucko, I pay more in taxes than you do, stfu"

Single-payer healthcare, jobs programs, and taxpayer-funded largesse are always popular, right up until the part where it's clarified that brown people, too, are eligible. Even those white people who pay nothing in federal taxes hate nothing more than the idea that people darker than them could get benefits that are funded by federal taxes.

I don't even think it's the "brown people", these same people voted for Obama for president, and got pissed off when they still got shat on when they tossed out their prejudices for hope.

People have 0% influence on US government. Nobody likes feeling powerless, and having their livelihoods, communities, identities taken from them, and then to be dehumanized and treated like objects. What's happening now is people are kicking downward.

And there are people more than happy to take advantage of that. Sick shit.

sometimes I think BF Skinner was right all along

For spectulation's sake, Nazi Germany came to being from many Germans feeling powerless, humiliated, and dehumanized after WWI. Many Americans are feeling that way from Americans themselves, from our system itself. We're in some strange waters here.

And now we've got hate entrepreneurs ready to take full advantage of it.

Thanks for the replies. I have some reading to do, clearly.

If you believe opinion polls -- and who knows whether you should, but it's what we've got -- universal coverage up to and including some version of single-payer has typically polled above 60 percent pretty consistently, at least in concept. Obama may have been relying on that when he pushed ahead, figuring that regardless of the political fight it would end up being popular. But, as he usually did, he overestimated the power of rational argument and underestimated tribal affiliation. If Republicans had decided to work with him and make the ACA something they could sell, the story would have been different. But once it became a with-him-or-against-him issue, a lot of people who probably would have been ok with it in principle instead decided it was the worst thing ever. None of the "repeal Obamacare" posturing since has really had anything to do with the substance of the law or people's actual ideas about how to provide a functional health care system (which, of course, most people don't really understand well enough to have an opinion about anyway). Which leads to the current predicament, where Republicans feel duty-bound to repeal a thing they've spent the last seven years demonizing, even though probably a good number of them understand it's not actually a demon and they don't actually have any ideas that are going to provide more or better health care.

take with a speculative grain of salt, but

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-russia-collusion-campaign-us-spies-nsa-agent-considerable-intelligence-a7613266.html

How much of it is tribalism, and how much of it is the fact that our entire media system is owned and controlled by entities that did everything they could to shoot down single payer? This is the sole source of information for most people, especially since our communities, social lives, and society in general has been gutted. Not only that, but we've been dehumanized and turned against each other by the same system.

I mean, the New York Times has even attacked the bearers of single payer.

xp

I don't even think it's the "brown people", these same people voted for Obama for president, and got pissed off when they still got shat on when they tossed out their prejudices for hope.

― larry appleton

I do think there's a "brown people shouldn't get white people level health care, unless they can pay for it" aspect to it.

How much of that is propaganda, though? People giving up a significant benefit to themselves has to have some impetus, and tied into that "brown people" argument is also the same line of thinking espoused by the very sources of that argument: free market, etc. Hmmm.

All wrapped up in the dopamine rush of patriotism, glory, nostalgia, and hatred.

As I've been saying, people need to be deprogrammed from this shit, but with the way our system and laws are setup, hard chance right now. People need to start talking to each other again separated from the media apparatus as it is.

How much of it is tribalism, and how much of it is the fact that our entire media system is owned and controlled by entities that did everything they could to shoot down single payer? This is the sole source of information for most people, especially since our communities, social lives, and society in general has been gutted. Not only that, but we've been dehumanized and turned against each other by the same system.

I mean, the New York Times has even attacked the bearers of single payer.

― larry appleton

It starts with the elite right, and is adopted by the prole right as their code. They don't necessarily read/watch the MSM, but it gets to them filters by the hard-core right outlets.

"filtered"

What I meant by that is that we're on our own out here, and we have to determine our destinies for ourselves. Even "liberal bastions" of the New York Times aren't on our sides, when it comes down to it. Unless you're part of the take-the-sack-of-money-and-run class.

tons of xps, voting for Obama to be the President doesn't have to have anything to do with believing in actual equal opportunity

Orange King really seems to have become a paranoid deluded man recently - I think we may see a president Pence soon after he looses it completelty - he will FIRE himself

Crossing my fingers for a win by Antonio French in St Louis today. It would be a major surprise, the white status quo candidate is the favourite, but man, it would be good.

Louise Mensch's husband manages Metallica and the Chili Peppers?

Yep.

Wow. Maybe the Trump/Russia stuff will ultimately take them out, too.

I can imagine her seducing liberals, their hearts sad and guilty yet overflowing with lust

Peter Mensch also managed Lostprophets, as British Twitter delights in mentioning.

take with a speculative grain of salt, but

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-russia-collusion-campaign-us-spies-nsa-agent-considerable-intelligence-a7613266.html

Pinning your hopes on the boy who has cried wolf is only going to lead to heartbreak.

http://thehill.com/homenews/house/322664-chaffetz-americans-may-need-to-choose-between-buying-new-iphone-or-healthcare

like buying an iphone every fucking month you asshole. god i hate this smug prick

Key to understanding some dissatisfaction with ACA is, I think, recognizing that it didn't make healthcare FEEL more accessible for a lot of people. A $5k deductible (might as well be $5mn for many) combined with all the HMO bullshit of obstruction and obstacles (I've had three different insurance companies + three different GPs in three years due to plans not being offered or companies dropping out) does not make people feel ownership over their healthcare.

Pin a bunch of blame on Republican states refusing money and insurance companies being evil but those are part of the ACA experience.

ACA mess distilled down via headline to "GOP Plan Doesn't Know What Problem It Is Trying To Solve."

Schindler's claims are become so crazy that the dude really has to start backing them up with more than just claims. At least Rick Wilson's claim of an oppo drop came to be, and he seemed as perplexed as anyone that it took as long as it did. But Schindler is getting quotes like "he will die in jail," or who claims that the IC has tapes, or this latest one:

John Schindler, a security expert and former counterintelligence officer, tweeted: “Learned fm very reliable IC sources that Trump WH, w/help fm Russian intel, is targeting US journalists. Rough road ahead. Get ready, peeps.”

I mean, peeps have been ready for almost a year. What gives, slowpokes?

https://pmcdeadline2.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/peeps__140422233738.jpg

Power to the peeple

We are coming up on Peeps season, so ...

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51MiDDBIwzL.jpg

https://c3.staticflickr.com/2/1053/530921810_f59ab404aa_m.jpg

http://abcnews.go.com/US/video/clapper-trump-asked-refute-unconfirmed-dossier-45950221

Crossing my fingers for a win by Antonio French in St Louis today. It would be a major surprise, the white status quo candidate is the favourite, but man, it would be good.

Me and most of my friends from the area are rooting for Tishaura Jones.