Persobnal experience with the Obamacare site

[Jack89]

The site was a flop, even most democrats admit that...

As for the policy, I think it's kinda fucked up that people like me fall in the category of, "You're too poor to get health insurance, but too rich to get help for buying health insurance... so we are going to fine you!".

Not a fan. Even Republicans are coming out in favour of single payer.

This is my biggest beef with obamacare.  The plan counts on healthy young people to cover the cost of the older sick folk, but the young people can't afford it.  They're forced to pay a relatively smaller fine because they can't afford, or don't want to pay for, the insurance.  They pay for not having health care coverage.  Dead in the water before it even gets going.  Another thing about this program is that the federal government coerces people to pay private companies for insurance.  This is wrong at the most fundamental level.  
The broken website is just a glimpse of the ineffectiveness of the huge bloated bureaucracy in our federal government.  If you want universal health care go with a system like Denmark's.

The 'cornerstones' of the Danish healthcare system are: it is a public healthcare system
predominantly financed through general taxes; healthcare is organised in such a way that
responsibility for services provided lies within the lowest possible administrative level, usually the
county councils (subsidiarity); there should be universal, free and equal access for all 5.4 Million
citizens; it should promote efficiency, be of high quality, and enable free choice of provider by users.

Everyone is covered at half the cost that we see in the U.S. and that's with very small counties running things, with just a little guidance from the federal government.  How about that.

[Atheon]

Single payer is an order of magnitude bigger than any of those things.

Yet in Taiwan, when they passed healthcare reform, they put together a single payer system in a short time and it works really well.

By the way, the problems with the Obamacare website have been mostly fixed now. It was a disaster when it rolled out, but these things are pretty much to be expected, whether government or private business. The problems got fixed, though. And even after they're fixed, sometimes glitches occur. How many times have you used YouTube or Google with it messing up? Happens quite frequently to me. It's even happened on this forum.

My reason for not liking Obamacare is the lack of a public option. Beyond that, it's because it's not a single payer universal healthcare system like in Canada or Taiwan.

[Mermaid]

Liberals never talk about anything that's constructive.

Yeah, you're right. We are just uninformed and entitled whiners, aren't we?  =P~

[zarus tathra]

They never talk about building things, only about managing other people's lives. You know this is true. All those hundreds of billions of dollars, and all it does if fund class conflict.

Like I said, Wall Street is the exact same thing. It's another institution whose only purpose is to "redistribute" wealth.

[Mermaid]

They never talk about building things, only about managing other people's lives. You know this is true. All those hundreds of billions of dollars, and all it does if fund class conflict.

Like I said, Wall Street is the exact same thing. It's another institution whose only purpose is to "redistribute" wealth.

Oh. Managing other people's lives. I see.

So. The people who wish to force women to carry out unwanted pregnancies and those who wish to prevent two consenting adults from marrying because they are the same sex. And the ones who want to cut assistance to people who can't earn enough money to support themselves. Those are liberals? I get it now.

[stromboli]

They never talk about building things, only about managing other people's lives. You know this is true. All those hundreds of billions of dollars, and all it does if fund class conflict.

Like I said, Wall Street is the exact same thing. It's another institution whose only purpose is to "redistribute" wealth.

Oh. Managing other people's lives. I see.

So. The people who wish to force women to carry out unwanted pregnancies and those who wish to prevent two consenting adults from marrying because they are the same sex. And the ones who want to cut assistance to people who can't earn enough money to support themselves. Those are liberals? I get it now.

Yeah. (runs)

[Shiranu]

They never talk about building things, only about managing other people's lives. You know this is true. All those hundreds of billions of dollars, and all it does if fund class conflict.

Like I said, Wall Street is the exact same thing. It's another institution whose only purpose is to "redistribute" wealth.

Yeah, never talk about building things like, oh lets see...

1. Expanding funding for science and education (improved schools, funding for NASA, etc.).
2. Improving the health care system.
3. Increase in green energy (building all the infrastructure related to that).
4. Improving public resources (more public transportation, improvement of schools (overlapping 1.), etc.)

Etc. Etc.

Just because you close your ears doesn't mean they don't say it, only that you don't hear it.

[frosty]

They sponsored a massive dinosaur hall for the Smithsonian Institute. If there's one thing that museum-goers love, it's dinosaurs.

Which reminds me. Liberals never talk about anything that's constructive. It's always "don't do this, you over there, you give money to those other people." I mean, one of the main criticisms of Wall Street is that it never creates anything. All it does is take resources from some people and give them to other people. The liberals are basically the same way.

We have to live in a society with each other. Like it or not we have to help each other out, and the same people that level criticisms of "liberals want to take everything we own" seem to at the same time have absolutely no understanding of the fact that liberal or not we must help each other out and contribute to our society or else everything goes to shit. It's easy to whine on the Internet about this stuff but when you actually get out into the real world life is not all peaches and roses, yes we have to work for things, but we also have to cooperate as well.

[Jack89]

We have to live in a society with each other. Like it or not we have to help each other out, and the same people that level criticisms of "liberals want to take everything we own" seem to at the same time have absolutely no understanding of the fact that liberal or not we must help each other out and contribute to our society or else everything goes to shit. It's easy to whine on the Internet about this stuff but when you actually get out into the real world life is not all peaches and roses, yes we have to work for things, but we also have to cooperate as well.

I think most people agree that we need to help each other out, liberals and conservatives alike.  The disagreement is where that help comes from and how it's applied.  As you probably know, liberals in the U.S. tend to be overprotective and unduly interfere in your personal affairs for "your own good" or for the "greater good".  Conservatives tend to be more hard-love paternalistic, judgmental and want to legislate morality.  Both seem to think that their interference needs to be at the national level.  To me, this implies that they think people are either too stupid or ignorant to take care of business at a lower level of government, or without the interference of government at all.

While some may be well-meaning, this type of behavior, in my opinion, strips people of their dignity.  People should be afforded the opportunity to contribute to decisions that affect their lives.  To best accomplish this, matters should be handled at the smallest, least centralized level possible.  If it can be handled without government interference, then it should.  If organized government is deemed necessary, then it should be left to the lowest level of government possible.  Programs at the local level are much easier to manage, modify, improve on and even scrap than huge national level programs.  Smaller level solutions and program management also encourage innovation, which can and do spread to other areas.  

This is nothing new, subsidiarity is a major principle in EU treaties and embraced by several EU countries like Germany and Denmark.  From what I recall, Germany was (is?) real big on decentralization.

So, disagreement with liberal nanny-state attitudes at the national level doesn't necessarily mean that their opponents are against working together.

[FrankDK]

> NASA's good, but again, that's orders of magnitude smaller than a national health service.

So you're saying that the French are that much more technically advanced than the US?

I helped build the IRS' Web site, that gets 16 million hits a day.  It works.  (The information and flow is the IRS' responsibility, and that isn't always right, but that's another matter.)

The ACA Web site was, in fact, contracted out.  The contractor just didn't do a very good job.  Sometimes that happens.  Remember when Amazon first came on line, it didn't work very well, either, and they had some of the best programmers in the world at the time.

Building a Web site to service that magnitude of users is a solved problem.  We don't have to invent anything new.  We just need to hire competent contractors, buy the proper sized servers, and make sure we know before hand what the display should show.  If the French can do it, we certainly can.

Besides, it would almost certainly be phased in.  It would be Medicare for everyone.  They would just lower the age for receiving Medicare benefits each year until it covered everyone.  That's much easier than building a site that has its highest use on the day it goes live.

Frank

[Mermaid]

As you probably know, liberals in the U.S. tend to be overprotective and unduly interfere in your personal affairs for "your own good" or for the "greater good".  .

Unduly interfere in your personal affairs? Can you give an example of that?

[Jack89]

As you probably know, liberals in the U.S. tend to be overprotective and unduly interfere in your personal affairs for "your own good" or for the "greater good".  .

Unduly interfere in your personal affairs? Can you give an example of that?

The Affordable Care Act.  Forcing people to buy health insurance from private companies or fining them.  That wasn't the main point of my post though.

[zarus tathra]

They never talk about building things, only about managing other people's lives. You know this is true. All those hundreds of billions of dollars, and all it does if fund class conflict.

Like I said, Wall Street is the exact same thing. It's another institution whose only purpose is to "redistribute" wealth.

Oh. Managing other people's lives. I see.

So. The people who wish to force women to carry out unwanted pregnancies and those who wish to prevent two consenting adults from marrying because they are the same sex. And the ones who want to cut assistance to people who can't earn enough money to support themselves. Those are liberals? I get it now.

Naw, I hate conservatives too, they're all fascists. Pretty much the only thing I like about them is their belief in the 2nd amendment.

There, I said it, the genteel veneer is done for.

We have to live in a society with each other. Like it or not we have to help each other out, and the same people that level criticisms of "liberals want to take everything we own" seem to at the same time have absolutely no understanding of the fact that liberal or not we must help each other out and contribute to our society or else everything goes to shit. It's easy to whine on the Internet about this stuff but when you actually get out into the real world life is not all peaches and roses, yes we have to work for things, but we also have to cooperate as well.

And what do people do when they cooperate? Oh yeah, they work. When everyone "cooperates" but a significant segment of the population (>15-20%) doesn't do any work, then we call that parasitism/slavery.

[Jason Harvestdancer]

I didn't have any problems at all. BTW the overall success rate is high given the obstruction by the repubs!

Those darn republican website editors screwing up the html.

[zarus tathra]

Pretty much the only things I like about liberalism are environmentalism and its (admittedly halfhearted) opposition to theocracy. Both the "left" and the "right" are enemies of reason. The "left" fights reason by promoting this idea that all people (and therefore ideas) are equal. The "right" fights reason by clinging to existing cultural dogma, which, admittedly, is generally more nuanced and interesting than blind ressentiment.