Supreme Court ingame decision thread : Nominated Post

[Shaudius]

Shaudius, you're assuming that the bottom 15% will only use an average amount of medical care services as compared to the remaining 85% and that's where your logic is extremely flawed.

What makes you think the 15% that are uninsured are the bottom 15%? The fact of the matter is that many of the uninsured are perfectly healthy but had chosen to cost shift their potential care onto the taxpayer in so much as they did not have insurance and would have potential not been able to afford emergency treatment. There is no reason to believe this segment of the population will seek massive amounts of additional care now that they have insurance.

The other group is those with preexisting conditions. By their nature preexisting conditions(generally speaking) are conditions that require care, there are of course extreme examples of preexisting conditions happening years in the past and therefore people not being able to get insurance, but those people are no different than the uninsured healthy people group above in so much as the amount of care they actually needed was small. The other group is people with preexisting conditions who require regular treatment. This group was already receiving treatment without the Affordable Care Act, or they were avoiding treatment until they urgently needed it, either way the amount of care they require will not be more, it may be sooner, but either they were already in treatment or they will get more preventative care versus emergency care.

You're making assumptions that have no basis in fact and you clearly have no idea what is actually happening now. Therefore, you are NOT in a position to make any kind of analysis as to what will happen if ObamaCare is fully implemented.

I have sold disability and life insurance to physicians for over 20 years and met with over 5,000 physicians during that 20 year period. I met with physicians covering the entire specialty spectrum and in affluent areas as well as poor ones. In order to become as successful as I could possibly be, I found it worthwhile to spend many hours talking with physicians in regards to all aspects of their medical practices.

As part of the underwriting process, tax returns were required and you would be amazed at how much money physicians in poor areas made solely dealing with medicaid patients. You would be even more amazed when learning how poorly medicaid pays these physicians for the medical services performed.

My response to this is, that's nice so what? The Medicaid portion of the Affordable Care Act was struck down today in case you didn't notice. Therefore the only part that remains of the challenged parts is the individual mandate which was put in place to get the stuff that people actually want guaranteed issue and community rating. I'm not really sure that you realize this based on the paragraphs I just quoted. You also haven't explained why my analysis in my OP is wrong you've just said I have no knowledge of the subject.

If you're interested, I could go into great detail about the mindset of people in the bottom 10% and it shouldn't surprise you to learn that when someone else is paying the tab, this bottom 10% abuses medical care more than you could possibly imagine.

The bottom 10% of what? Income? As in people who already qualify for Medcaid or Medicare in a lot of cases? Again, Medicaid expansion got struck down, which you again don't seem to realize. All I continue to talk about is the individual mandate and guaranteed issue and community rating, why both of your posts seem to think that the Medicaid expansion still exists.

We are all guilty of making thinly substantiated claims without knowing what the hell we're talking about and that is the case with you and most liberal democrats when it comes to trying to predict what the medical landscape is going to look like if ObamaCare winds up being fully implemented (both legislatively and financially).

I predict that it will look largely the same, some people who couldn't get insurance who had preexisting conditions will be able to get it now, and some people who didn't have health insurance by choice will get it. Since there's no expansion of Medicaid a large number of people in poverty will still lack health insurance, and will be exempt from the penalty because of the amount of their income.

After speaking with 1000's of physicians, I have a pretty good idea as to what is going to happen and all of the things Americans have taken for granted in regards to their medical care will not be there under an ObamaCare socialized medicine system.

You continue to think that Obamacare is socialized medicine. The Medicaid expansion was just that, an expansion of a program that already exists for those in poverty with dependent children, the disabled, and the elderly. The Medicaid expansion got shot down, so those are the only groups that will continue to have Medicaid, the only new people coming into the system will be those with preexisting conditions, and they'll be covered by private insurance offered on health exchanges.

Before responding back about what ObamaCare is designed to do, you have to realize that once its fully enacted, there will have to be major adjustments made as the private sector is pushed out of medical care with the federal and state governments filling those huge gaps.

Ummm, what? How is the private sector being pushed out medical care? Is having to treat people will preexisting conditions going to cause all that? You don't actually back up any of your claims with evidence, and seem to be basing everything on the idea that the Medicaid expansion was unheld.

Unfortunately, once the U.S. goes down the road of converting its medical care system from private to public, it will be impossible to go back for all sorts of reasons.

I don't know what to tell you if you really believe Obamacare is converting the medical care system from private to public. Its completely ridiculous on its face.

The federal/state governments have taken on the responsibility of managing education, social security, medicare, etc and have failed miserably in all of them.

The only one of the three things you mentioned thats an actual thing outside of government is education. Social Security is a government program, so I'm not really sure how anyone but the government could manage it. If you mean retirement, do you think Social Security has been going badly for the last 80 years? As far as Medicare is concerned, do people on Medicare not like what they have? Again, Medicare is not healthcare, Medicare is a government run insurance program. But you seem to have conflated programs with actual policy areas.

Our country's public educational system is an absolute joke with unions hijacking the system to enrich its members as opposed to delivering a quality education to our children. Social security and medicare are both completely unsustainable long-term piling up TRILLIONS AND TRILLIONS of unfunded liabilities which are country will NEVER be able to cover.

This is pretty off topic, but if it was the unions that were causing all of this why do the states that don't have public school teachers unions have some of the worst education systems in the country? Unions are a boogy man of the right that really don't do all that much. Its as if you think that everything would be all honkey doory with the US education system if only there were no unions. Tell me, what kind of education systems do you think that the countries with better education systems than the US' have, do you think they're all private schools or that they don't have strong benefits packages for their teachers?

As far as Social Security and Medicare are concerned. The Social Security trust fund has enough money in it(if the other parts of the government didn't stop borrowing from it) to last for ~25 years at current benefit levels, after that time, it wouldn't become insolvent it just wouldn't bring in enough money to cover all of its liabilities. All that is really required to save SS is to gradually raise the retirement age or to stop exempting from the SS tax income over $106,000 or any number of things, but its a great myth that SS is what is bankrupting our nation, it basically pays for itself right now, even after 25 years the gap will only be ~10% of benefits.

As far as Medicare is concerned, the reason that it supposedly has all of these long term unsustainable liabilities is because of the rapid rise in the cost of healthcare in general. No system would be sustainable with the models used to calculate the sustainability of Medicare, and frankly if medical care keeps rising at the same rate forever no one will be able to afford anything.

In my opinion, today's SCOTUS decision ensures Obama's defeat come November and perhaps Chief Justice Roberts was thinking just that when making his decision to break ranks on this healthcare issue.

Maybe maybe not, I don't think its as big of an issue as you do, the polls show that while the majority favors repeal, its not such an overwhelming majority(54% or so) and even when looking at those numbers the numbers break back down toward Obama when asked about a head to head match-up, we'll see what affect today's ruling has.