White House delays employer mandate requirement until 2015

[overtone]

You seem to think there are good liberal Democrats and bad conservative Democrats. That may be, but it doesn't matter.

I think there are a few center-left Democrats, a plurality or maybe even a majority of center-right Democrats ("conservative", technically, if the word had meaning), and a significant fraction of fringe rightwing authoritarian Democrats ("Blue Dogs", etc). And that is how we got rightwing Republican-written healthcare legislation passed by Congress.

 

Because there are no center anything Repuiblicans left in Congress. Every one of them is an advocate and vote for the wingnut authoritarian right.

 

 

 

I believe the constitution requires the president to implement enacted laws as written.

So Congressional Republicans who work to prevent that from happening are in violation of their oath to support the Constitution, as well as their basic duty to enable national governance.

 

Every politician is judged by how they vote and with whom they vote. Zero Republicans voted for ACA.

So zero Republicans voted for their own legislation - again. The Republicans in this Congress are setting some kind of record for voting against legislation they and their supporters wrote and pushed and established as the only remaining possibility - in several cases recently, legislation they themselves introduced and signed as author.

 

So if we were to judge the Republicans by their votes, that would be an important factor- right? First they get their almost unworkable and halfassed nonsense established as the only alternative to disaster, then they vote against it and speak against it and try to prevent it from working even as well as it could. We've seen this with several pieces of legislation,

 

they are apparently simply voting against anything and everything coming in which is supported by the current administration, regardless of where it came from or who wrote it or what it is, in an attempt to ruin that administration's tenure in office. That is destructive behavior for the nation overall, preventing the national government from functioning at a time of serious trouble and national need.

 

So if we judge them by their votes our judgments of them are going to be very, very negative - right? How else would one judge such dishonest and corrupt behavior, such betrayal of principle, honor, oath, and country, for partisan political advantage?

Edited July 11, 2013 by overtone

[waitforufo]

I think there are a few center-left Democrats, a plurality or maybe even a majority of center-right Democrats ("conservative", technically, if the word had meaning), and a significant fraction of fringe rightwing authoritarian Democrats ("Blue Dogs", etc). And that is how we got rightwing Republican-written healthcare legislation passed by Congress.

 

Because there are no center anything Repuiblicans left in Congress. Every one of them is an advocate and vote for the wingnut authoritarian right.

 

 

 

So Congressional Republicans who work to prevent that from happening are in violation of their oath to support the Constitution, as well as their basic duty to enable national governance.

 

So zero Republicans voted for their own legislation - again. The Republicans in this Congress are setting some kind of record for voting against legislation they and their supporters wrote and pushed and established as the only remaining possibility - in several cases recently, legislation they themselves introduced and signed as author.

 

So if we were to judge the Republicans by their votes, that would be an important factor- right? First they get their almost unworkable and halfassed nonsense established as the only alternative to disaster, then they vote against it and speak against it and try to prevent it from working even as well as it could. We've seen this with several pieces of legislation,

 

they are apparently simply voting against anything and everything coming in which is supported by the current administration, regardless of where it came from or who wrote it or what it is, in an attempt to ruin that administration's tenure in office. That is destructive behavior for the nation overall, preventing the national government from functioning at a time of serious trouble and national need.

 

So if we judge them by their votes our judgments of them are going to be very, very negative - right? How else would one judge such dishonest and corrupt behavior, such betrayal of principle, honor, oath, and country, for partisan political advantage?

If what you say above is true, all the Democrats who voted for ACA should the thrown out as gullible idiots. As I said before Republicans telegraphed for some time that none of them would vote for ACA. Democrats, if you are correct, then gladly became bag holders. If I’m reading you correctly, based on their willing bag holder status they should be let off the hook. Maybe you should make those arguments in front of a mirror. Perhaps then you will see how ridiculous they are.

 

Congress passed a law. Congress is then done with their responsibility. The President must enforce the law. That is the Presidents job. He is not doing his job. One reason that a President must sign a bill into law is that by doing so the President is accepting the responsibility to implement that new law as written. If President Obama did not think he could implement ACA he should not have signed ACA. The President signed, so he should implement. If he can't now implement ACA he should ask for the repeal of ACA.

 

You speak of a disaster. What disaster? Not health care. We may not have had optimal health care, but it was not a disaster prior to ACA. ACA on the other hand, well the postponement of the employer mandate points to the avoidance of a future disaster. If that is not true, why postpone?

Edited July 11, 2013 by waitforufo

[iNow]

You speak of a disaster. What disaster? Not health care. We may not have had optimal health care, but it was not a disaster prior to ACA.

This would be a difficult position to defend, objectively speaking and relative to other nations.

[waitforufo]

This would be a difficult position to defend, objectively speaking and relative to other nations.

A relative disaster... I guess I can live with that. But why not end the relative disaster and implement the law on schedule?

[iNow]

Because it will be easier to implement if delayed, just as I shared back in post #16.

 

http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/77300-white-house-delays-employer-mandate-requirement-until-2015/#entry755564

[waitforufo]

Because it will be easier to implement if delayed, just as I shared back in post #16.

 

http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/77300-white-house-delays-employer-mandate-requirement-until-2015/#entry755564

Sure, don't implement the hard parts and of course it will be easier. Particularly if you leave out the parts you don't like. That is not how this game is played. Laws are required to be implemented as written.

[iNow]

They are implementing them.

[overtone]

 

 

You speak of a disaster. What disaster? Not health care. We may not have had optimal health care, but it was not a disaster prior to ACA.

Sure it was, and is, and will be (the new law is just now taking effect, and won't help much in my opinion) - we are spending twice as much on medical care as anyone else on the planet, it is drving our entire economy into the ground (17% of the GDP and increasing rapidly), and almost half the country isn't getting normal first world health care (nor is the country getting the benefits of having provided it).

 

There are individual health insurance providers whose pro-rated share of this mess rivals Katrina in its effects on the country as a whole.

 

When something does this level of damage and shorts us this level of expected benefit, a word like "disaster" is reasonable. You would prefer "tragedy"? "Colossal fuckup"?

 

 

 

If I’m reading you correctly, based on their willing bag holder status they should be let off the hook.

I have said nothing about letting any Democrats off the hook, except those who have been working hard for single payer all these years. What I object to is letting the Republicans off the hook. This law is their creation, their establishment, a product of their ideological base and media influence and corporate support. They don't get to palm off the consequences of their three decades of work and rhetoric just because they decided to do partisan political damage at the last minute.

 

 

 

If President Obama did not think he could implement ACA he should not have signed ACA. The President signed, so he should implement. If he can't now implement ACA he should ask for the repeal of ACA.

Lessee if I got this straight: if the Republicans acting in concert with their pet media can successfully misinform, misrepresent, delay, obstruct, and wreck some piece of legislation, the President is to blame and should ask for it to be repealed?

[iNow]

Not intending to pile on here, but I feel at my core that claims such as this...

What disaster? Not health care. We may not have had optimal health care, but it was not a disaster prior to ACA.

...must be squashed and squashed hard with facts and evidence.

http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/the-state-of-us-health-aint-so-good/

There’s a ridiculously fantastic manuscript over at JAMA that you should go read right now. “The State of US Health, 1990-2010: Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors“: ... This study specifically looked at the burden of disease, injuries, and risk factors in the US versus other countries. The methods are amazingly detailed.

So how did we do compared to other countries? Not well. Between 1990 and 2010, among the 34 countries in the OECD, the US dropped from 18th to 27th in age-standardized death rate. The US dropped from 23rd to 28th for age-standardized years of life lost. It dropped from 20th to 27th in life expectancy at birth. It dropped from 14th to 26th for healthy life expectancy. The only bit of good news was that the US only dropped from 5th to 6th in years lived with disability.

There’s a chart I’d like to highlight. This is the rank of age-standardized years of life lost rates among the 34 OECD countries in 2010. The numbers in each cell show the rank of the country in years of life lost for each cause (1 is best). The countries are sorted overall on age-standardized all-cause years of life lost. The colors show if the age-standardized years of life lost for a country is significantly lower than the mean (green), indistinguishable from the mean (yellow), or higher than the mean (red) for all OECD countries:



Things don’t look so good for the US. There’s an awful lot of red there. A little bit of yellow. One green. Best in the world, my ass.

 

The author goes on to highlight a few other key points that supplement this, and the cited JAMA study really puts a few more nails in the coffin.

And here's another I read just yesterday that speaks to the broader topic of how the fixation we have on profits is part of the problem, and how silly it is to have a market idea like this in something such as healthcare... The author is a neurosurgeon who has been a U.S. Army flight surgeon, a clinician and researcher in both academia and private practice and a medical device developer with NASA.

http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2013/07/11/u-s-health-cares-dangerous-profit-fixation/

[iNow]

Specific to the delay, here's an article discussing specifically that. In short, HHS released a short video to talk about how on schedule they actually are. It suggests lowered expectations, but remains true in many ways.

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/07/15/from-the-department-of-lowered-obamacare-expectations-this-video/

[waitforufo]

More bad news.

 

 

In a joint letter, James P. Hoffa of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Joseph Hansen of the UFCW and D. Taylor of UNITE-HERE state that Obamacare will “destroy the 40 hour work week that is the backbone of the American middle class” and “destroy the very health and wellbeing of our members along with millions of other hardworking Americans.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2013/07/19/the-insiders-obamacare-is-falling-apart/?hpid=z3

[iNow]

Funny, really.

 

[overtone]

 

 

More bad news.

Yep, the leftwing folks have never liked Romney's Heritage Foundation notion of helath care reform - the unions, especially. Even the authoritarian union leadership is down on it. Always has been, btw.

 

Why do you suppose that is? How do you suppose it captured so many Dem votes in the face of union opposition?

[iNow]

You speak of a disaster. What disaster? Not health care. We may not have had optimal health care, but it was not a disaster prior to ACA.

 

Okay, screw it. Let's pile on.

 

 

One of these things is not like the others. Can you tell which one?

 

 

 

 

 

You can see the line has, at least, leveled off a bit since the implementation of Obamacare, but still... Not a disaster? Seriously?

[Phi for All]

 

Okay, screw it. Let's pile on.

 

 

One of these things is not like the others. Can you tell which one?

 

 

 

 

 

You can see the line has, at least, leveled off a bit since the implementation of Obamacare, but still... Not a disaster? Seriously?

 

I've seen this piece of evidence, along with charts showing how effective medical practice is around the world, for several years now. The only good thing people can say about how much more we spend is that we get comparably better care for the extra money, but it's clear we don't. We're only leading the world on a few types of cancer treatment. There are plenty of countries offering better overall care for a lot less money. Why this doesn't raise all kinds of red flags with more people is beyond me. If paying extra doesn't get us extra, why are we paying extra?

[overtone]

 

 

You can see the line has, at least, leveled off a bit since the implementation of Obamacare,

Obamacare's care savings, if any, have not taken effect - certainly not in time to account for the recent leveling of of the boom curve. Other factors must account for that - my guess is a forced and probably temporary reduction in both supply and demand (unemployed and newly temp hired people running out of medical coverage, postponement of childbearing and voluntary surgeries, closing of emergency rooms and other expensive service providers, reduction of the violence and accident rate among people living smaller and cheaper lives, etc. The effects of the Crash, in general).

 

The use of percentage of GDP as a metric in such graphs seriously misleads, for two reasons:

 

The US has a much higher GDP per capita than most of the countries in that chart, so even an equivalent percentage would mean much greater expense per capita - the visual impression of the graph seriously understates the difference in expenditure per citizen;

 

And the US is far less egalitarian in its distribution of GDP, so that using the arithmetic mean of per capita GDP underestimates the comparative burden of health care costs on most of the US population. What is a modest burden on everyone in most First World countries is in the US pocket change for the wealthy, crushing debt for the middle class, and simply unaffordable for the poor.

 

So far from piling on, inow is modestly understating the scale and scope of the US problem.

 

And the use of such understated and misleading numbers by even the politically charged and activist factions in the US, the norm and the common circumstance, is kind of interesting in itself.

 

I have never seen a chart of US per capita medical costs graphed as a multiple of median US hourly take home (after tax) wages, for example, corrected for inflation or not.

 

I have never seen a chart of US per capita taxpaid medical expenditures compared with other countries per capita medical tax burden, measured in absolute dollars at the average exchange rate. (a few years ago I ran into a supported but not nailed claim that the US taxpayer pays as much in taxes per capita as the French taxpayer for medical care - and then has to buy health care on top of that, which the French taxpayer has already paid for and receives).

Edited July 25, 2013 by overtone

[Phi for All]

(a few years ago I ran into a supported but not nailed claim that the US taxpayer pays as much in taxes per capita as the French taxpayer for medical care - and then has to buy health care on top of that, which the French taxpayer has already paid for and receives).

 

I'd love to see a link to this if you have it. Most Americans don't realize how much they already support healthcare through their taxes, even if they have no coverage. They also don't realize that our healthcare isn't the best in the world. And they don't realize that they've been heavily spun against foreign systems, especially European healthcare systems, which means they have no smart, tested alternative and therefore are at the mercy of what insurers and politicians cook up together.