like_that;1842999 wrote:lol, nobody is going to read this shit.
I am. More people should get their news from the actual documents anyway; wouldn't you agree?
BoatShoes;1843691 wrote:Said unironically as his party's leaders desperstely try to pass Obamacare lite.
Technically, it isn't an either/or situation. I ultimately agree with his statement, but I largely agree with yours as well.
ptown_trojans_1;1843714 wrote:ACA is full of problems, but prices were increasing before it was implemented...
True, but it did expedite the increases, which really shouldn't come as a surprise, since we were adding people to the pool receiving benefits without necessarily maintaining the ability to pay for it at the individual level to the same degree.
That, of course, also doesn't take into account the additional oversight of the program itself or the infrastructure, like the dumpster fire referred to as HealthCare.gov which, on the low side of estimates, still cost close to nine figures (which is obscene, even for a site that needs to handle that level of security, storage, and bandwidth).
I'm certainly not blaming all the price increases on the additional governmental involvement, but it does seem like it gave the increases a booster shot.
ptown_trojans_1;1843718 wrote:Again, ACA sucks, but just removing it will not stop the rise of health insurance. It's a little more complicated than just saying repeal and everything will be fine! Free market!
That's certainly fair. The health insurance market ... hell, MOST major markets ... have not qualified as ACTUAL laissez-faire market since before I was born.
ptown_trojans_1;1843720 wrote:If I am an insurance company, why the hell would I want to cover someone who smokes, has a history of cancer in the family, in a coal mining area, and barely makes any money? Why would I take that risk? I would not want to cover them, or if I am going to, set the deductible so high it makes it not worth it.
Why, indeed? They're terribly expensive to insure, and as cold as it sounds, companies and organizations don't exist for the purpose of operating at a loss, which I hardly think makes them greedy or terrible. Every organization wants to work at AT LEAST a breakeven (lumping non-profits in here, as they don't want to operate at a loss, either).
I WOULD submit, however, that problems like these are the sorts of things that many entrepreneurs try to tackle in innovative ways so as to minimize the collective burden while maximizing effectiveness. But with something even like the ACA, you sort of remove the incentive to do so, or at the very least, you create competition that can essentially keep itself afloat without really having to bend to the desires for prices, efficiencies, or service levels expressed by the citizenry in the market, really at any level (the USPS or the DMV/BMV, for example).
ptown_trojans_1;1843724 wrote:Yeah, that's the hard part to square. How do you ensure that people can pay for healthcare, yet balance individual freedom?
I don't know the answer, but do know the ACA and the ACHA do not even come close to addressing the core problem. Also, the free market will not address it.
Ultimately, I can't see a way to guarantee it, but I do think that an actual free market comes closest.
There's less overhead cost if federal bureaucrats don't need to be employed to monitor or regulate it, so that would lower the cost to the citizenry as a whole.
There would be a lower cost of entry into that market to compete if there is no need to pay for licenses or permissions.
If law doesn't mandate that the service is used by the citizenry, it diminishes the ability to collude, since the market itself can shrink more easily based on the desires of the people in the market to either pay for service or refrain from doing so.
The lower overhead allows for attempts to use price as competitive leverage.
Obviously, price isn't the only thing that matters in a niche (or car companies like Mercedes would be out of business), but providers would have fewer restraints in their attempts to leverage different parts of their services and/or payment structures to maximize their competitiveness in the market while still remaining as profitable as possible.
Sure, you might have a couple companies try to buy up the market and collude to raise prices, but with the lower cost of market entry and smaller requirements for conforming to regulatory standards, any entrepreneurially-minded individual would see that as an opening in that space. While one might point to the larger players' ability to temporarily drop prices and take the loss to put the small guy out of business, if it's a big enough market, they'd likely end up having to do it constantly, which isn't good for shareholders.
BoatShoes;1844057 wrote:Do you think black folks for the most part felt more free after the Civil Rights Act? Do you think a cancer survivor feels more free when trying to buy individual health insurance now as opposed to before the ACA?
Both of these indeed involve coercion on other market players. The pursuit of greater and more robust liberty through some degrees of coercion is the telos of Republican liberal democracy and the balance that gets it done right is hard to do - as the ACA readily shows.
I would submit that they might have felt freer than before, but no, I don't think they would have seen themselves as "free." I would contend that many could make a good case that they, as minorities, are still not.
However, the problem with this link being used between "freedom" and coercion is that it only helps itself to one side of coercion.
Prior to much of the Civil Rights reform, there was still equitable coercion. It was just in the opposite direction. Business owners could be jailed and heavily fined for running a desegregated business. That is ALSO coercion.
So, since there was coercion in regard to racial consideration within businesses both before and after the Civil Rights movement, I would contend that it wasn't "coercion" that brought about the greater presence of freedom. Rather, it was merely a change of the wind within the already coercive system.
If the market was permitted to operate under more of a "freedom of association" model, it would be up to the business owners whether or not they wanted segregation within their business. And if the general societal trend was for more racial equality (which I'd argue was necessary for the success of the Civil Rights movement anyway), it would hurt those wishing to segregate their businesses and help those interested in running desegregated businesses. You might have ended up arriving at a better level of equality more quickly, because the viability of a desegregated business would have increased more and more anyway with the dominant consciousness trending that way. Nobody would have had to wait for a change in the law.
Ultimately, the problem with attempts like this through coercion is that it doesn't guarantee that the wind doesn't one day change back. If we live under the auspice that coercion is the best means for getting everyone to play nicely, you have to trust that whoever has the clout to adjust it will be benevolent enough to do so in the best interest of the people, instead of letting the people decide who they want to associate with for themselves.
gut;1844143 wrote:I didn't argue for no govt. That is the classic strawman rebuttal. I said big govt and big debt are highly correlated with slower growth, fewer jobs and lower wages (just as REAL economics would predict). That is a FACT.
One that, quite frankly, is only logical. If you take an industry and add a regulatory body, comprised of paid employees and needs for initial and ongoing infrastructure, that industry is going to cost more as a whole, regardless of how it is paid for or who is paying for it. It will simply be more expensive, because you're adding costs that don't make up for themselves in efficiencies.
