Coming to a stock market near you..

[admin]

Admin,

I wasn't trying to convince you, I am just merely pointing out why a fair amount of people are resisting. While I do not wish to kick the political football around I can tell you this with some certainty. The major reason for the situation we are currently in lives one simple truth. One side of the political spectrum made this the law of the land without any input from the other side. Regardless of the law that has been passed, when this happens the other side is going to push back. Negociate on the front end or negociate on the back end, either way both sides need to respect the other and not force feed something to what amounts to approx half of the population of the USA. I don't buy the usual Fox/Limbaugh rant, that's just standard strawman material. The truth lies with this, political parties need to work together taking input from the minority party and giving them some skin in the game. That is not what happened with O-care.

Lib, I don't know whether this has or hasn't been forced on half the US population against their will. However, the core of Obamacare actually originated in.. the Heritage Foundation, and it was then grosso modo implemented in Massachusets by a former GOP presidential candidate.

Obamacare is loosely based on a health reform in Massachusetts, signed into law in 2006 by the state’s then governor, Mitt Romney [The Economist]

The bitterest objection of the critics seems to be with the individual mandate, but read Forbes on that, as it was exactly that element that originated at Heritage. An individual mandate is of course unavoidable once you'll oblige insurance companies to accept people with pre-existing conditions.

Here is the Economist again:

One of the biggest problems with America’s system is that insurers have long charged punishing rates to the sick, or refused to cover them at all. Beginning in January, this practice will be banned. Since insurers would soon go bankrupt if they sold only cheap plans to ailing patients needing expensive treatment, Obamacare pushes the young and fit to buy coverage, too. An “individual mandate” will require all Americans to have insurance or pay a penalty. This will give insurers revenue from cheap, healthy patients to offset the cost of insuring sick ones.

The whole idea of insurance is:

1. Pool risk to reduce the size of premiums (see here for an excellent explanation of the economics of that)
2. A redistribution from the low to the high risk bearers.

Have you any idea how this looks abroad? Here is The Economist (hardly a left-wing rag) again:

The furore over Obamacare is baffling to the rest of the world. Most rich countries have universal coverage; developing countries are trying to introduce it. Yet in America, home to the world’s biggest health system, the fight over insurance is vicious enough to bring government to a halt.

In the world’s biggest economy nearly 50m people, or one in seven, are uninsured. America spends 18% of GDP on health care. The people of Britain, Norway and Sweden, to name a few, spend half as much but live longer.

I really don't want to have a go at you but I'm simply one of those baffled foreigners, and increasingly concerned as people seem to be playing poker with the world economy for a cause which I have a hard time understanding. Usually, even when I disagree, I can at least see some merit or logic in opposite views, but I have a hard time understanding the attempts at outright sabotage of a law, however imperfect, that has been passed and upheld by the supreme court and that has at its main objective to insure people who have a hard time insuring themselves under the present system, let alone hold the world economy to ransom.