No time like the present for a public option (should have been there all along).

Agreed, but that won't happen unless there are 60+ Dem Senators and even then you need to dodge the Leiberman-types who would join a filibuster of the public option.

I'm self employed so I buy my own insurance. I got incredible benefits and premium reductions when Obamacare first hit but I'm also getting all of these rate hikes in recent years.

Leiberman was such a dick about the ACA. I remember when he proposed Medicare for all but then backed away when he realized liberals liked the idea.

Yup, I am on ACA now, too, with my switch to a fulltime restaurant job. I have had a sciatica problem the past few weeks which has shown me how terrible my coverage is.

I wonder what the benefits are. The article says $290 or something for a plan, but where I work an individual plan is much more than that per month with no subsidies if you are a janitor and getting paid $30k.

The exchanges were devised to protect the insurance companies, so if they're unable or unwilling to offer a decent price we really need to allow a Medicare buy-in or some other public option. If insurance companies don't like it they can take a loss on the small percentage of exchange plans so that their employer plans remain unchallenged.

How would that individual not qualify for subsidies?

I barely qualified for any subsidies and my income with the switch ended up in the $32K to $35K range. So it wouldn't shock me if there wasn't much of a subsidy even for a $30K janitor.

The subsidy issue is interesting to me, because one of the complaints made against ACA in the beginning was that the subsidies were way too high. I'm all in favor of increasing subsidies. But I'll never be in favor of doing away with the coverage for pre-existing conditions.

I'm in a similar boat. All the Illinois insurers are fleeing the state so we have only a couple options. I've had to switch insurers the last 3 years not because of the rates but because the insurer decided they didn't want to be part of the exchange anymore.

So now I'm in a situation where there are only a couple options at best in the state. None of them cover the doctors I've seen over the last decade. They don't even cover the hospitals in my area. So my option now is to pay like $80 more a month for a plan that has severe limitations on doctors that are far away.

There are things I liked about the ACA but the thing has been a disaster for me. Seems like it screws over middle-class people who are self-employed like myself or don't have insurance offered at their full-time job. I'd get better medical coverage by being dirt poor and on Medicaid. At least my current doctors accept that.

Feels like this is the right place for this:

Glenn Beck regrets "freaking out about Barack Obama"

So after nearly 8 years I finally voted in this poll. I think that when history looks back on the 8 years of the first black president of the US, who took over during one of the biggest economically turbulent times, who was faced with political opponents who would pull out almost all the stops to keep him from being a success, it will say that while he wasn't able to come through with a lot of what he wanted to do, that he will go down as one of the most popular and successful presidents of modern times.

Same, but I went the other way. I think history will not look back as favorably as his polling suggests. He allowed ISIS to become a major force in the Middle East. His foreign policy set us back in many more ways than GWB's did. Race relations are worse at the end of his Presidency than at the beginning. The crown jewel of his internal policies, the ACA, has hurt many people in this country.

The counters to those points:

ISIS grew quickly. Most of them started as Sadaam's Republican Guard which was eliminated and sent home. They were minorities who were involved in the sectarian violence in Iraq and lent a lot of the organization and firepower to ISIS. We'd be in a completely different bog if we'd gone against the wishes of the Iraq government and set up large military bases there to keep the peace. We'd have had our soldiers as the target, and there would be a never ending anger of get our troops out and the failure would still be his. This result has been a better result than that.

I would argue that the US has much greater standing in the world right now then it did at the end of the Bush II administration.

Race relations are more at the forefront of the news. Now you hear about it. Nothing changed, except that you didn't hear about the problems in the communities. Now you hear about it. The perception is that it's worse, but I'd argue that by lifting the rug, you're seeing the dirt that's always been there and now you have an opportunity to do something about it.

Simply saying ACA has hurt a lot of people is a generic blanket statement. I could say that before ACA a lot of people were hurt because they didn't have health care and insurance companies were free to discriminate on who and what they covered and that, THAT, hurt a lot of people.

I think overall he will be viewed favorably. I think he did great domestically (all things considered) but do think his foreign policies/actions (or lack of) is a negative.

ACA wise, I supported a single payer option but that went down in flames because of the GOP. It'll be interesting to see specifics on what Hillary will do to enhance ACA.

If Trump loses (probably) but stays around in the political arena, Hillary will have 4 years of "distractions". If Paul Ryan somehow reclaims the GOP, it'll be more busy as usual. It'll be a mix of the two extremes and unfortunately more of the former than latter.

I agree with this. No doubt people with pre-existing conditions were discriminated against and alot of people were helped.

I really believe ACA or like is needed for some basic healthcare for the subset of people (and their children) that are not employed or at companies that don't provide health benefits. Sure, some don't deserve it but overall its for the greater good.

What I struggle with is ... are the benefits worth the cost? If they are, do we believe the costs (and bureaucracy/government) will grow to a point where benefits are not worth the cost?

For me its yes to the first but definitely concerned about the second.

I wonder if that is actually true. I think they are 100x better because issues which were shoved between the cushions for years are finally on full display.

I can see the argument for this in 2016 (even if I don't agree with it), but historians are going to juxtapose his administration with Bush's, and it'll look favorable, from a foreign policy standpoint. I don't think people really understand exactly how badly the Bush Administration not only hurt U.S. standing in the world, but also seriously weakened both the armed forces and the State Department.


It's helped way more people than it has "hurt". When historians look back on this, they'll not focus on the anecdotes, but the data, and the data paints a pretty clear picture, especially when compared to the decade that preceded it.

I don't think that's quite accurate either. Better put:

"I think they may be better in the future, because issues which were shoved between the cushions for years are finally on full display."

Yeah, that's it.

We're in the middle of a painful process right now. Stuff that was always there but that wasn't talked about is now out in the open. When everyone in a dysfunctional family simply obeys the rules and customs, things are for the most part pleasant and comfortable...but dysfunctional. Now that stuff is being talked about, it feels much more difficult to those who were blissfully unaware that there ever were issues bubbling beneath the surface. Long-term, it's likely to be better, but the process isn't easy.

When my wife and I started dating, it wreaked havoc on the relationship my wife had with her parents. The underlying issue is that she'd always been docile and done exactly what they wanted her to do. As long as she did, everything was "fine." She started dating me, and all hell broke loose. Both my wife and my in-laws would have said that during that time, their relationship was "the worst that it had ever been." Now, they'd say that the relationship is better than ever, and that is in part *because* of the long process of unlearning old patterns and ripping off the masks.

To be fair, he couldn't get it passed the dems. The GOP didn't need to kill it.

Lieberman killed the public option and he was an independent. The Dems were all on board.

Well stated. We are finally dealing with stuff we should have dealt with a long time ago. For instance, cell phone video is finally capturing stuff that has been going on for generations, but now it can't be a he said, he said (in favor of law enforcement always) - now we have to deal with some hard truths and re-evaluate what we trust and don't.

Has it? It may have looked that way initially, but right now most people I know are seeing rates rise by nearly 50% (some more) while insurance companies are bailing out on being part of the exchange. NPR says the average increase is 22-25% next year, but is mostly offset by subsidies. Time shows 8 states with a 30% or more increase next year. Forbes argues against the CNBC/Ginsburg and Adler view and says ACA caused premiums to rise.

Add in the horrible job situation, participation rates are below the average for the time they've been tracked and are 3-4% lower than they were in 2008, and I think this presidency ends up looking worse than it's currently being viewed but still viewed slightly favorably.

So more people have insurance, and the cost to most hasn't gone up. Sounds good to me.

So, you only read one of the three links and only partially read that one (if you even got past my comment on it). Kudos to not even pretending to take an honest look at an opposing view.

I don't see where he's done wrong. From NPR's link:


That seems quite definitely to help more than hurt overall, esp when 90% of the population are covered by insurance today.

$75 a month? That is total bullshit. I am on ACA. There were no options less than $200 per month, and I am as simple as you can get, single, no dependents. It's a little lower if you're younger, but "70%" of people aren't younger than me.

LOL at $75 a month.

These are also the people that told us we wouldn't have to change doctors.

I think this is a very short-sighted and narrow way to look at it. His main foreign policy point is that the Middle East isn't all that important and our relationship with Asia will define the rest of the century. Chavez had broad support and led an anti-American bloc of Latin countries, and that's completely been marginalized by Obama pretty much ignoring him until everyone else did too. Even in the context of our long war vs radical Islam, you can't ignore the tens of thousands in ISIS (and I'd say after taking a while to warm up they're being as defeated as a force like them can be), but you also need to pay attention to the tens of millions in a place like Indonesia where the entire education system is now being funded by Saudi money and pushing the entire country to a harsher interpretation of Islam.

I'd also argue that it's whack a mole to an extent, and ISIS's prominence is due in part to his killing of bin Laden and overall weakening of Al-Qaeda. As ISIS continues to be marginalized AQ will probably be talked about more again. Maybe Lashkar e-Taiba pulls another attack and the narrative focuses on Kashmir & the sub-continent for a bit. Maybe we finally get serious about Iran's Quds Force. Maybe we focus even more on the threat of homegrown sympathizers.

Do you qualify for subsidies? Because if you don't, then you really aren't actually responding to what it's talking about.

I do.

I guess what I am wondering is, how has Obama destroyed America? So many say he turned this country into an awful place, what are they referring to? Particularly, how has the destruction of America personally impacted said people?

I'd imagine you are on the higher end then. Most people on the exchanges are actually your lower income earners. People who work retail or food service, where they aren't offered insurance. People who work for themselves are a low percentage of those folks on the exchanges.

I mean just put in someone in my area of my age (36) that makes $20,000 a month and the site spat out a bronze level (HMO) plan for $51.50 a month ($6,800 deductible, though). Though a bit lower down I saw one for $73.82 a month with a $2,000 deductible.

The point of the subsidies argument (whether it's 75/mo or 200/mo you're paying now) is that the subsidies aren't a flat amount. They're set as a % of your income that you are expected to spend on healthcare, so if the premiums go up, then your subsidies go up as well to offset that cost.

Oh sure, Subby says something and everyone is like "right on brother!"

PilotMan says pretty much the same thing a few posts earlier and nobody cares. Boooohooo. ;)

I'm not sure what this means for the Obama legacy. It certainly did not help but it could be argued it was more a repudiation of Hillary and business as usual than Obama himself.

Obama and Michelle must feel like crap. It seems that they did everything they could to help Hillary and yet failed.

While working on my PhD, I taught a couple of classes and took student loans to cover the rest of my expenses last year. My taxable income was $9164. Living in Virginia, my lowest option is $207.71 with a $7150 deductible. The next lowest option is $247.17.

IIRC this is the biggest hole in Obamacare. There is a weird gap in many states where some people make too much for medicaid and not enough for obamacare subsidies. I'm pretty sure you fell in that gap. If you made like $13,000 I believe your experience would be drastically different.

What is The Minimum Income For ObamaCare? - Obamacare Facts

Welcome to my fucking world.

You probably ain't interested in sitting on the couch beside me, but I'm willing to share custody of it. You can sit while I grab drink,I'll steal it back when you to the bathroom.

Yep, which means I either have to get one of the jobs I'm interviewing for in the very near future, or December 15 rolls around and I'm screwed with costs that make no sense in relation to my income.

Isn't that mostly because GOP legislatures have refused to expand medicaid as was planned in the ACA?

I'm not sure what dividends the pivot to Asia has reaped yet. I do agree that our big enemy right now, whether we realize it or not is China, so the pivot to Asia makes sense, but we have been strong allies with South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines for a long time. So what has fundamentally changed there?

With regards to the Middle East, I do not believe it had to become whack a mole. Isis was also becoming a threat prior to bin Laden being knocked off, it just wasn't played up by the media yet.

Our relations with Russia are certainly worse than they were 8 years ago. Chavez was always going to be marginalized once his money used dried up. I think that would have happened regardless of who was in the White House.

I'm mainly just posting here b/c its where we've discussed our experiences with Obamacare. I can move anywhere I want and keep the same salary b/c of my remote work. I've been looking at healthcare and other cost of living factors in a lot of places cheaper than Raleigh (aka the midwest). lets just say there are some of you that are distraught over your personal experiences with obamacare that have NO... IDEA...


I can save 20-40% on healthcare for comparable plans if I leave North Carolina for Michigan, Indiana, Alabama, Kentucky (kentucky I would actually save 60% IIRC), Iowa, or Illinois. I have a lot more research to do but so far Minnesota is the only state I've looked at that is more expensive for healthcare than where I currently live. I'm floored at the difference.

This is at least partially the case in Florida - its been a fantastic vehicle for the Republican party to cripple the benefits of Obamacare without their voters realizing why ....

The Army Corps of Engineers shut down the Dakota Access pipeline construction in order to make an environmental study, probably at Obama's behest.

Trump supports construction so let's see if the current protesters have the energy to get back out there in January.

Army Corps of Engineers Had Actually Recommended Dakota Access Pipeline Route Approval

This probably gives Trump all the ammunition he needs to get the thing built, as if he needed any.

Well, they didn't realize it until you posted it on the internets. Thanks a lot. :)

He's British, they don't listen to his tea drinking, crumpet eating, not real sport programming self anyway.

Wow. Its hard to believe we only have about 6 weeks of Obama left. Where did the time go?

My income, which is quite low (below 40K currently), gets me just a $1 saving off of my nearly $300 per month premium for the lowest priced available plans for 2017?

Fuck you, Obamacare. Fuck double damn you.

Is $300/month a lot for healthcare? At my employer (quite large) we pay about that for a single person, plus the likely double that our employer plays. How much should you pay?

It also depends how much the deductible is too.

I pay about $350 a month for me and my family. It has a $25 co-pay. There is a $3000 minimum. So I need a new Insulin pump. But I have to pay about $2600 right now to get a new one. Cant afford that. Hoping my current pump doesnt die. I will re-check in September and hope I have reached my limit.

I really dont know that much about my plan. I am willfully ignorant. But it confuses the crap out of me.

$300/month is 10% of my income. Before taxes. It's about 15% or more of my take home.

Does that sound like a good amount to pay for health care to you?

Keep in mind, too, this is the cheapest that is available to me.

Some other sites indicate I might get more of a tax break (around $50), but there is so much contradictory info out there, I have no idea which is legit.

Dola, this is just me too. No dependents, no spouse, no serious health issues, 44 years old.

I mean, I don't know. People where I work (large university) pay the same whether they are a Dean or a janitor, there are no individual plans since that would defeat the purpose. I just don't really know what people expect, and the devil is always in the details (co-pays, deductibles, etc). I actually don't think 10% of your income is bad to cover your healthcare provided it actually covers things.

It doesn't cover things. As it is a cheaper plan, the deductible is ridiculously high. You are extremely limited in your choice of medical professionals you may go to. Considering I have to have insurance, thanks to the government's uber awesome healthcare system, I basically pay 15% of my take home to receive nothing, unless I have a catastrophic health event. That and paid for preventative care visits (once per year) is all I got for the $3600 I would shell out, which is a severe cost considering I already live in an area with cost of living so high.

I pay $300 semi-monthly for my plan -- and that's with a $750 work contribution. Granted, this is for a family of four and includes medical/dental.

We typically don't have many large items, but do have smaller stuff (I mean, kids). But my wife's recent kidney stone surgery? Glad we had it for that.

So, one of the reasons a good number of economists favor eliminating the corporate tax break for health care is because most people don't really know the exact cost of their health care coverage, due to the fact that the employer tends to pay quite a lot for it. For example, I pay (roughly, because we get paid biweekly as opposed to semi-monthly) $136 a month for health insurance, but the Department pays $400 a month. So the total cost of my insurance is actually $536, but it is "hidden". And there are other employers who are far more generous than that (usually the big multinational corporations).

You realize this is kind of the definition of insurance, right?

This. After having a year of various surgeries/treatments for my wife for cancer, my yearly maximum on my plan for the family was $7,000 + 10% above that point. I'm sure billing would have been different if I didn't have insurance, but I think we paid around $15,000 total when the bill was low six figures if I didn't have it.

I think that Obamacare is a mess, but the function of catastrophic coverage is still there and still does work for the most part.

Right, that $3600 more than works if something happens. Which at 44 is much more likely than at 25. But you are healthy which is why it is low. That is the definition of insurance.

The healthcare.gov site is still a disaster and it's infuriating watching moron politicians who backed this dumb system keep telling people to use that site.

Define catastrophic.

I'm with CR on this one. The cheapest ACA plan in North Carolina is $409/mo. It doesn't cover anything except a physical - not primary care visits, not prescriptions, certainly nothing at an ER or Urgent Care Clinic, until I've met a $7150 deductible.


Who exactly does this plan benefit? I went to the ER last year with what turned out to be a kidney stone (thought it was appendix). Between the very brief ER stay and tests, the hospital claims were $6000. Under this cheapest of plans, I'd pay the full bill and still have to go to urgent care 4 more times before I'd meet my deductible and get any coverage at all.


I can afford better, so if I were to stay in North Carolina, I'd pay the $600/mo for actual coverage, with copays and a deductible that makes sense ($1500) if I end up in the hospital. Someone like my sister who makes under $40,000/yr is paying, as CR said, about 15% of her take home pay for coverage that does NOTHING until surgery is needed, or multiple ER visits.


NC does appear to be one of the worst states in the US for this. I think I mentioned up above a number of posts ago, in a state like Indiana I can pay $300/mo and get coverage that would cost me ~$500/mo here or more.

$3600 is what I pay just to have coverage. It doesn't count the $5000 deductible I would have to pay first before insurance pays anything.

So my "catastrophic cost" is over $8000. Obviously, if I have a catastrophic event, I will be happy to have it. But what if (far more likely), I have a non-catastrophic event that fails to reach my deductible? That is all out of pocket.

For instance, this year I developed sciatica and had to go to PT. Each session cost me $50, and they wanted me to go more than once a week (I shut that down and went just once per week). If this happened under this plan, I am paying $200/month just for the PT (4 sessions per month) in addition to the health insurance premium.

What am I paying for? I am paying for health insurance. Health insurance that doesn't cover anything until I am in the poor house. So really it's covering nothing.

This is a fair point. And I think there are legitimate criticisms that certain plans are too expensive or don't offer coverage at levels that make sense for self or small business employed or part time workers. I have a really good plan through my employer and still blanche sometimes at the deductible amounts.

But I do think there has to be a realization that paying for health insurance doesn't automatically make your health care free. That's the point I was trying to make. Insurance is just that--insurance. Protection against something out of the ordinary course. Or catastrophic. At some point, maybe it's semantics?

Except that now we're required to have it, no matter the cost or the benefit to us. And it doesn't do anything for you outside of one doctor's visit per year, short of that catastrophe, but we all need basic health care throughout the year.

I don't expect health care to be free at all. But if you're going to make it mandatory, you better damn well be helping out enough so that people can afford it.

Personally, I think the government should be stepping in for the corporate employer in health care for part time workers, the self-employed and small business owners/workers. I don't expect the same premiums I got when I worked at my title industry job, but in the ballpark would be nice.

If the government has decided we all need to have required healthcare, they should set up the program that helps the people first, not the health insurance companies first.

Sounds like something a public option would help take care of....

Alas, the people don't have lobbyists like health insurance companies do.

The best you can do is get really healthy so that you can avoid as much contact with the health industry as possible and get the lowest expenses possible for you age/sex/race/whatever.

Yeah, definitely this is true. Practically speaking though, the current state of the "bronze tier" plans is just a huge mess. Given how little they actually cover, they should be extremely inexpensive. If you want a $10 copay to see the doctor and lower deductibles, sure, pay for that as a luxury.


Because I'm moving out of the state soon (with healthcare costs compared to other states as the last straw that actually made the decision for me), I decided not to renew my BCBSNC coverage for 2017. I've signed up for a short term plan at a rate of $72/mo that covers nothing up to a $10k deductible and then provides pretty darn good coverage if I end up in the hospital. Its legit catastrophic coverage. It's not an ACA approved plan, so I'm subject to penalties if I don't finish my move and get approved coverage in my new state in 2 months. That's what the bronze tier plans should be IMO.

I have some pro Diamond Joe bias in me, well a lot of pro Diamond Joe bias if I'm honest, but regardless of your stripes, I think this is pretty cool.

This, IMO, is an ENORMOUS point that's gotten almost completely lost in the discussion.

I've mentioned before about how I'm literally bewildered how (or even when) insurance went from being something used for major situation rather than being every time someone sneezes.

In the long run it's cheaper to pay for routine checkups rather than waiting for major illnesses. Insurance became routine because insurance companies did the math.

And it created an absurd entitlement mentality that is a pox upon the nation.

Right about the time a normal office visit went from being able to be paid out of pocket to needing insurance to avoid a a bill in the hundreds for a simple visit.

I'm seeing it with vet bills now. Pushing more medical insurance for pets, and the cost of each visit going up substantially.

I get that you're a Social Darwinist and as long as you're willing to live in a cut throat, all against all, kind of society, that would be valid cultural opinion that would be worthwhile, but this country was never that.

So insurance companies should pay more just so you feel like people are getting the proper amount of suffering?

It's more along the lines that the have's and have not's exist for a reason and that if you're member of the have's you are in a position to have something that helps you. Have not's would hence need to work to attain that, and that would provide motivation for them to add to society to improve their lot, but that by providing that service, it's a dis-incentive for them and they can no longer be productive members of society, and therefore haven't earned their lot, unlike the have's which have.

As in, that's what Jon would say.

But the initial question was about why insurance covers preventive care. They do because it's better for the bottom line. This isn't charity, it's capitalism.

I want to know why Insurance costs more and has worse coverage?

What kind of business model would survive that except health insurance?

Is it because it has become an entitlement like Jon says?

Or are they just squeezing every last cent out of our pockets?

While the insurance companies are the ones clearly charging more, they are charging more for a reason. Health care facilities are charging more because they are enabled by the current insurance system. I have a ton of doctors and nurses in my family (I'm the black sheep). Everyone in the game knows how it works. You have to make a drastic change in both industries to make real change.

Yeah, add in that the more expensive insurance becomes the more people don't have it, and the more people don't have it the more people can't or won't pay for healthcare visits, and the more people who don't pay the more healthcare providers are incentivized to raise the prices for the insurance companies and people who do, you have a real shit sandwich of a vicious cycle.

The only way to get around that to my tiny mind is to have some form of single payer or government intervention to force everyone to keep prices low, but you can't suggest that without being accused of being unamerican and a socialist, so what next?

One of the last times I'll be able to bring up this thread.

Obama to Free Manning, Jailed for a Vast Leak of U.S. Secrets

Definitely not a fan of commuting the sentence of traitors.

We need more Mannings and Snowdens. Telling the truth about evil, illegal activity should never be a crime.

Manning dumped a lot of information w/o scrutinizing it. In his mind it was petty revenge.

And who knows what was going through Snowden's mind. I'm not sure of his real intentions.

Well, I suppose you're right. It's not a crime, but what he did was.

I'm a little torn about the whole thing, especially with my line of work (InfoSec). I don't believe Manning's motivation was anything more noble than revenge, and it put people's lives in real danger. More than anything though I think it showed an embarrassing lack of security controls in place when I consider what my organisation was doing to protect our (comparatively almost insignificant) data even back in 2010.

Obama is determined to give Carter a run for his money right to the wire I guess.

Manning ought to have been shot. And Obie isn't really much better at this point, this might be as vile an act as he's committed.

And this probably ought to be the catalyst for an end to executive clemency.

He would've been better off hacking in than infiltrating the ranks and being a dispicable turn coat. He deserves to die, not be pardoned by our President.

He wasn't pardoned.

Shh, just let the outrage flow.

Nope, but she will be released from prison in May and will not have to serve anymore time.

There is zero way Manning should have been released. I'm not as outraged as many are, but I think it sets an incredibly horrific tone. Of course, I'm one of the right wing nut jobs that doesn't think Snowden is a hero at all, so I'm probably not the right one to talk about.

I expect Obama will have more controversial commutes and pardons in his last few days. I highly doubt anything will be worse than this one.

I don't agree with his decision.

Not sure I agree with the commutation but the sentence seemed somewhat absurd. The government wasn't able to prove the most serious charges. Manning basically got over-sentenced for stealing sports memorabilia when Snowden had committed a brutal double homicide.

Thanks for the he/she correction. Sincerely.

I think it is fair to criticize the commutation, but we should be talking about what actually happened rather than frothing about what didn't.

Well...Good morning, sunshine! :)

Bottom line. Obama having her sentence commuted was a terrible decision for any President to make. We need to rethink this executive power. Could you imagine if Obama had started this behind closed doors by saying "We should pardon him?" Makes you wonder if if he's qualified to make sound legal decisions like that.

So, on the one hand you're arguing that we should all be rational and give Trump a chance and on the other you're playing the "could you imagine game?" Sounds just like a MSM talking head!

Trump vs the MSM. That's an excellent topic too. :)