Ask people if they want universal affordable health care, and most people will discuss the issue. Ask people if they want Obamacare, and you instantly raise all sorts of issues that have nothing to do with health care.
Edit:
I agree with many of the responses here as well. The actual name, which I believe has ten titled parts [0], is a bit of marketing copy as well. But at least it's marketing copy that relates to the substance of the act.
Calling it Obamacare makes it personal, and this is about much more than Obama taking care of all of us.
I'd love to see a neutral name for the legislation itself. I am starting to call it "the current health care legislation".
ETA: "Obamacare" is used because it's a catchy name which is both quite descriptive (Obama pushed this healthcare law thru, so he owns it) and is not inherently insulting (like "Bushoppression" or "Obamasux" mentioned elsewhere in this thread). Use of this popular nickname causes a frenzy because of its subject, not its inherent phrasing - it is not an ad-hominem attack.
Facts:
Congressional majority voted in favor of it, then Obama signed it, turning it into the law of the land. All those individuals were voted into their jobs by the American people, by a majority of voters.
The Supreme Court then upheld it.
The same President who, as you said, pushed for it, and signed it into law, and who was the candidate of the very party which also comprised the overwhelming majority of the Congressional votes which turned it into law, was then chosen by a majority of voters to be re-elected as President for a second term.
Now, that law is starting to finally go fully into effect.
This is how government works. All the key players above were either elected directly (or put into place indirectly by the former) by a majority of American voters. Your side (I assume), lost. It happens. This is a democracy.
Using your logic, you shouldn't call Social Security Social Security you should call it FDR Forced Set Asides. Because you know, nobody likes being forced by the government to set aside their hard earned cash by some politician, and one who's personally and solely responsible for that happening. And which has absolutely no upside to it at all, of course. But wait, that wouldn't be true. So people don't do that. They call it Social Security. Because that is it's name, and is less loaded, and more politically neutral.
President Obama endorsed the nickname, saying, "I have no problem with people saying Obama cares. I do care."[2] Because of the number of "Obamacare" search engine queries, the Department of Health and Human Services purchased Google advertisements, triggered by the term, to direct people to the official HHS site.[3] In March 2012, the Obama reelection campaign embraced the term "Obamacare", urging Obama's supporters to post Twitter messages that begin, "I like #Obamacare because...".[4]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Protection_and_Affordab...
[2] http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20092578-503544.html
[3] http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/1210/HHS_buys_ObamaCa...
[4] http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/217893-obam...
Unsurprisingly, the ensuing decrease of supply and increase in demand is making health plans more expensive for a lot of people.
So, "Obamacare" might be more accurate.
If you really want to be both more accurate and more true to your critiques, try something like "ExpensiveCare" or "ConstrainedSupplyCare" or "BubbleDemandCare" or something like that. I could even see critics attempting something like "UnfairCare", referencing the fact that young healthy people with incomes are now paying for old/unhealthy/indigent people's healthcare in addition to their own.
But "Obamacare" is silly, non-descriptive, purely partisan, and universally detracts from any conversation about it.
Constraint-free purchase of health insurance would mean that I could sell you health insurance that would 'insure' that you could only be doctored by me, on my yoga mat, with a chainsaw. Someone less principled than me would have the same idea --- or one like it --- and sell a billion innocent souls a false comfort and a dangerous service. So someone would. Like someone has already sold those same people fake food that's killing them.
Do you like alive citizens, or dead ones? The utopia you seek may be for the machines and the undertakers. And the undertakertrons.
How does that follow?
Calling it Obamacare makes it personal, and this is about much more than Obama taking care of all of us.
I'd love to see a neutral name for the legislation itself. I am starting to call it "the current health care legislation".
[0] - http://www.hhs.gov/healthcare/rights/law/
Edit: copying this as an edit to my first post, but leaving this here in case anyone replies.
I'm not so sure about the affordable part. Maybe all I see is people posting letters about their rates going up though. What is the argument against that from people who still support this legislation? Is it denied that prices have gone up in general or accepted and justified because of increased benefits on the plans?
That what you see is not representative, because along with those I see plenty of people that could not get private insurance at any price (e.g., for whom the cost was infinite) due to preexisting conditions that can get health insurance because of the ACA.
> Is it denied that prices have gone up in general
For like benefits, costs have gone down since the ACA was introduced, in part because of parts of the ACA that went into effect earlier, like the limit on profits which required refunding excess premiums (because health insurance, even prior to the ACA, was not an ideal competitive market but an oligopolistic one in which rents were being extracted, and this was a limit on the rents that could be extracted.)
With the minimum benefit levels effective for non-grandfathered plans some low-cost, low-benefit plans are going away. This, on its own, would increase the minimum price of private insurance after this stage of implementation of the ACA above what it was prior to this stage of the implementation. In addition, changes to rules on what factors can be used in price setting have shifted costs so that, compared to what they would be without those rule changes, prices for plans for young, currently healthy individuals have gone up, while prices for everyone else have (again, considering only the effect of that rules change) gone down.
Expanding the size of risk pools as the mandate does should slightly reduce overall prices, but that may be a lagging effect since it can't be factored in fully without a clear picture of the magnitude and how many people will opt out in favor of paying the penalties for non-insurance.
Additionally, subsidies have been made available to people at the low end of the scale to which the individual mandate applies; this doesn't help with total costs (ignoring the effect that coverage vs. non-coverage has on total healthcare costs, which is significant in the long term, but not necessarily the short term) but does help with affordability.
Even moreso, except in states that opted out of it, Medicaid expansion means a lot of people are getting coverage with no out-of-pocket cost that could not afford any coverage before.
But, yes, the people that could afford insurance and who paid the least for the coverage they were getting because of youth and current health are often going to be paying more.
a data point:
I also see a lot of people talking about God and Jesus and how they have a personal relationship with them, etc, etc. Personally I've never seen them. I have a guess as to the status of things in those situations.
Also I see a lot of "people" saying how Justin Bieber is, "like, so cute. OMG. he's so hawt! and a genius! omg. like, amazing. omg. omg". So clearly, this must be factually true, correct?
It's a controversial topic on its substance; the name does not change that either way.
[0] - http://www.policymic.com/articles/65625/why-americans-are-ok...
America you so crazy.
― C.S. Lewis
Yes, classic American culture tends to take rights violations very seriously, to the point that it may baffle those used to living under tyranny. Yes, many of us have a problem with the government commandeering the healthcare of 100% of the population just to "help" 3% of the population. Would have been cheaper, and far less disruptive, to just buy that 3% health insurance outright.
Obamacare has problems, but being targeted to just 3% of the population is not none of them. Are you completely free from anything that an insurance company might call a pre-existing condition? Do you plan to never be unemployed? Of so then congratulations, you might not personally benefit from healthcare reform of this type. Most Americans are not in that boat. Certainly more than 3%.
If you're an open-source participant, you may have experienced the power of what I've heard called adhocracy or do-ocracy. In it, we're all equal individuals; power is used situationally, in a bottom-up fashion, by those who are currently accomplishing something for the common good. In those contexts, top-down exercise of power feels very interfering.
The US's history includes a strong dose of that, plus a strong sense of individual liberty. Our country was born in rebellion to some far-away people who wanted to boss us around. Almost everybody here is descended from somebody who said, "Fuck this country; I'm outta here," and moved to America. One of our central civic documents, the Bill of Rights, basically lists all the things the federal government can't do. A giant chunk of our national mythos is bound up in westward expansion, where in a thinly populated frontier, the cowboy-hero did what he wanted and bowed to no man. Never mind that the era was short and the story more complicated; it's the idea that lives on.
Most of us who live in cities have long ago accepted the need for modest civic organization and collective action. We live too close to one another to be able to pretend that every man is an island. But even here, we tend to jealously guard our independence. Much more so in the suburbs and in rural America, where interdependence is harder to see.
Given all that, a demand that you buy health insurance can easily seem like (or be made to seem like) a crazy imposition from a far-off bureaucracy. Most other tax in the US is based on income, assets, or expenditures; if you aren't making/owning/spending anything, you don't have to pay. To some this feels like being dragged into participation in a society that they never particularly wanted to be part of.
All of that is intensified by several factors. A big one is the Republican party's strong shift rightward [1]. There is also a large segment on the right that has decided that the black guy with the funny name is not an American [2], making anything he does seem more like an imposition. Plus, there's a long tradition [3] of painting this as "us" (that is, white people) paying for "them" (black and brown people), even though the federal government actually shifts a lot of money from liberal states to conservative ones [4]. There are also strong streaks of anti-intellectualism and fundamentalist religion that play into this.
All that said, I agree it's kinda crazy when you take the bigger picture into account. America's health care system is a mess, costing way more than anybody else's, and leaving millions with little or no service. Something has to be done. This solution was actually a conservative one [5], and it's not like the American right has proposed anything better. It's not the solution I would have picked on my own, but given current American politics, I think it was the most achievable option.
Ok. That's more than you every wanted to know about America. Thanks for making it this far.
[1] http://voteview.com/images/polar_house_means.png [2] e.g., http://www.ocregister.com/totalbuzz/obama-469434-http-href.h... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy [4] http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/08/americas-f... [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Protection_and_Affordab...
Thing is, the law has its issues, but the other side never gets near them, they just make shit up "death panels" and government interference and stuff. I, as an American, am super embarrassed by all this. It doesn't help that the health care companies wrote the fucking law, anyway... now they're fighting against it!
The sad truth is, unless we have a single-payer, socialized medical system, none of these changes will help much. Really, the biggest change the new law enacts is that it forces health care companies to cover people with pre-existing conditions like Diabetes and heart disease. Right now, they can tell you to go away, they won't cover that stuff. IN 2014, I hear they'll be forced to at least offer you a psychotically expensive plan if you have diabetes.... Ah, this country sucks ass.
"" Q: Will there be a limit as to how high a premium insurance companies can charge if you have a pre-existing condition?
A: Yes. As of 2014, insurers cannot charge consumers different rates for health insurance because of health status or gender.
You can be charged more for your age, however, with older people paying a higher premium than young people. But that increased charge is capped at no more than three times the standard rate"[1]
Edit: Actually "The law allows for differences of premiums based only on four criteria: age, location, family size, and smoking."[2], which seems like a good way to do racial profiling and increasing premiums on poor people(since they're probably less healthy), as expected in the u.s, but at least pre existing conditions couldn't be a basis for a rate difference.
I wonder thought how legal would be doing data mining with this information (an other free datatbases) , and how much deanonimization could be practically achieved ?
[1]http://www.webmd.com/health-insurance/health-reform-insuranc...
[2]http://ahip.org/Issues/January-1-2014-Provisions.aspx [1]http://www.webmd.com/health-insurance/health-reform-insuranc...
I believe we could fix health care costs by removing just one law.
Stop making health insurance a tax deductible employee benefit.
Think critically about the effect that small change would have and you'll see why our system is broken.
Then you poke fun at "American idiots", and then admit in your last sentence that you don't really even know how the law works yourself.
Bonus points for picking the two conditions, heart disease and diabetes, that mostly result from poor choices instead of random innocent victims.
Your whole post is like a parody of pseudo-intellectual liberalism.
In the meanwhile, I am perfectly healthy and will look both ways before crossing streets.
[citation needed]
They should have just gone with full-on socialized health care like the rest of the civilized world... Would have been better for every party involved (except perhaps the insurance companies).
Yes, we're not "like the rest of the civilized world": this country was founded on valuing individual rights above the whims of the majority.
I've always thought of ObamaCare as the first step in the right direction. Hopefully many more steps follow shortly.
That part is still very much open for debate.
The health care system was structured poorly before any of this got started. Basically, how health insurance worked in the US is that about 90% of people get health insurance through their employer. This happened for two reasons: during the wage freezes around World War II, companies started offering fringe benefits to get around it, and there is a standard tax deduction for companies to offer health insurance. Individuals cannot claim this deduction.
For the remaining 10%, about half of them buy insurance on the open market, which is really cheap and easy for people that are young and healthy, expensive for older people, and pretty much impossible if you have an existing condition.
The remaining 5% go uninsured either by choice or because they can't afford insurance at all. That doesn't mean they can't get health care, that just means they use free clinics and pay cash at places like urgent care centers.
The ACA made changes to the insurance market. Among the changes were new minimum requirements for what companies could sell as "health insurance". For example, even if you are a single 25-year-old male, you now have to pay for maternity coverage, mental health coverage, childhood mental health care, and other things that you're very unlikely to need. Further, health insurance is no longer allowed to have a cap on coverage, and companies are not allowed to charge old, sick people more than a small multiple of what they charge young and healthy people.
Mind you, a key campaign promise while passing the bill was that "if you like your health insurance you can keep it".
After the bill was passed in rules were promulgated, it turns out that if health insurance companies make any change at all in a plan (even changing the deductible by five dollars), then they are no longer able to offer the old plan and have to switch to a plan that qualifies.
This rule is resulting in millions of people having their health insurance canceled, and they are being forced to go on to the (nonworking) exchanges to buy health insurance that in most cases is much more expensive (if you're relatively healthy and young). New insurance results in you having to pick all new doctors, most likely, also.
So the main opposition comes from conservatives who oppose it on the grounds that government is interfering in the healthcare market, healthy people who are now being forced to pay sometimes more than twice as much, and young people who now get to subsidize the insurance of old people.
An additional philosophical objection comes from the individual mandate, which technically was upheld by the Supreme Court but many conservatives think that the Chief Justice had to contort himself into a pretzel to do it. Essentially, the ruling said that the government doesn't have the power to force you to buy something but they do have the ability, under the taxing power to tax you for not buying something. This was not written into the law, and the Supreme Court had to, in effect, change a clause in the law to make this work.
There is a populist opposition to the law because there are many large companies and labor unions (and Congress itself, including the president) that have been exempted from the law... And there are rumors that the president is going to further exempt certain well-connected labor unions from the tax on high-cost health plans.
There are legal objections to the law because the president decided to postpone a tax on employers that was written into the law. Many legal conservatives don't believe that the president has the power to rewrite portions of a law after it's been passed by Congress.
There are religious objections the law because it requires private companies run by very religious people to offer abortion and contraception coverage in the health insurance they offer their employees.
And finally, because the Democrats and the President decided to pass this law without any Republican votes (And using a questionable tactic called reconciliation that enabled them to pass it with 50 votes instead of 60 in the Senate), there is no political downside to opposing the law on the Republican side. Mostly, Republicans dislike the law and therefore their representatives in Congress get more kudos as their objections to the law get louder and louder.
And there is no end in sight.
How are they except? I am legitimately curious.
>There are religious objections the law because it requires private companies run by very religious people to offer abortion and contraception coverage in the health insurance they offer their employees.
It doesn't require health care plans to provide abortion services. States are allowed to offer plans that have abortion services, if there isn't a state law prohibiting it. However the "abortion" portion of the premium is collected separately, put in a separate account and is only allowed to be used for abortion services. Abortion coverage is completely "opt-in."
http://www.hhs.gov/asfr/of/finpollibrary/financialpolicies/s...
(1)(B) ABORTION SERVICES.—
(i) ABORTIONS FOR WHICH PUBLIC FUNDING IS PROHIBITED.—The services described in this clause are abortions for which the expenditure of Federal funds appropriated for the Department of Health and Human Services is not permitted, based on the law as in effect as of the date that is 6 months before the beginning of the plan year involved.
(i) collect from each enrollee in the plan (without regard to the enrollee’s age, sex, or family status) a separate payment for each of the following:
(I) an amount equal to the portion of the premium to be paid directly by the enrollee for coverage under the plan of services other than services described in paragraph (1)(B)(i) (after reduction for credits and cost-sharing reductions described in subparagraph (A)); and
(II) an amount equal to the actuarial value of the coverage of services described in paragraph (1)(B)(i), and
(ii) shall deposit all such separate payments into separate allocation accounts as provided in subparagraph (C). In the case of an enrollee whose premium for coverage under the plan is paid through employee payroll deposit, the separate payments required under this subparagraph shall each be paid by a separate deposit.
(C) SEGREGATION OF FUNDS.—
(i) IN GENERAL.—The issuer of a plan to which subparagraph (A) applies shall establish allocation accounts described in clause (ii) for enrollees receiving amounts described in subparagraph (A).
(ii) ALLOCATION ACCOUNTS.—The issuer of a plan to which subparagraph (A) applies shall deposit—
(I) all payments described in subparagraph (B)(i)(I) into a separate account that consists solely of such payments and that is used exclusively to pay for services other than services described in paragraph (1)(B)(i); and
(II) all payments described in subparagraph (B)(i)(II) into a separate account that consists solely of such payments and that is used exclusively to pay for services described in paragraph (1)(B)(i).
Every single State in the Union has restrictions on insurance plans that cover abortion and some outlaw it completely. Full list can be seen here:
https://www.aclu.org/maps/bans-insurance-coverage-abortion
As far as employer provided insurance, they mostly covered abortion before anyway...
It turns out, some Americans don't want that same evil, incompetent, corrupt government controlling their healthcare.
The relationship between your neighbors and you is a matter solely between them and you. The government should not interfere. So, if for example your neighbor were to choose to rob your house, or murder a loved one, clearly, the government should not get involved.
When you're driving, that's a matter between you, your car, and perhaps the road. And your relationship with other drivers or pedestrians is solely up to you and them. You should all be able to do whatever you want and/or work out any disputes between each other as they come up. Laws would be pesky and just be government interference.
And by the way, as to your point about disrupting your insurance for reasons not relevant to your treatment. That's a big whoosh that misses the point of the ACA. The whole core point of the ACA was in reaction to private insurance companies which would deny or drop people who were seriously sick. Thus, effectively denying treatment, or forcing them to rely on rush-to-emergency-room treatment, rather than cheaper and less stressful preventative care, or experience catastrophic costs, which then either bankrupt them and/or get passed on to all other taxpayers and customers, against those others parties wishes, anyway. Making sure more people get more and better treatment, more consistently, is the whole point of the ACA. It's not perfect, nobody claims that. But it has a heck of a lot of objectively good elements which are pro-health.
The site was built poorly and political foes are also trying to ddos it.
Personally I think it would be nice if we had stronger laws and actual enforcement against ddos.
Have you seen some of the discussions about the ACA? There are people out there who seem to genuinely believe that it will destroy America. I would expect a DDoS to be in the realm of things someone in that position would do.
I guess Ars just finds it newsworthy, from a social perspective, that someone bothered to create this software.
If you don't want healthcare then don't buy it and pay the fine (or refuse to pay the fine) just don't block others.
I mean just one example on a website that can be reviewed for accuracy, other than say fox.
Sorry, I don't buy that anyone would've written a custom application to DDoS a web site by slowly loading two relatively static pages on the site when there are a billion tools out there that will do the same thing far more effectively (see LOIC for just one popular example).
This almost seems like a false flag to make healthcare.gov into an innocent victim of a DDoS attack when as the original article says there is no evidence of an actual DDoS attack.
> Arbor researcher Marc Eisenbarth said there's no evidence
> Healthcare.gov has withstood any significant denial-of-service
> attacks since going live last month. He also said the
> limited request rate, the lack of significant
> distribution, and other features of the tool's underlying
> code made it unlikely that it could play a significant
> role in taking down the site.
It wouldn't surprise me if healthcare.gov was very vulnerable to DDOS attacks - we are talking about a 2013 site which is hosted in a single data-center.
Whoever wrote this was definitely older. Nobody under 35 knows Delphi ;)
Problem is not all of them are knowledgeable/interested enough to realise that what they're being taught is deprecated and not worth a lot.
It's only "not worth a lot" if the only thing they're being taught is the specifics of the language. If they're being taught to program, then that skill is trivially transferrable to other languages.
Not that I'm saying these DoS attacks are effective, or even a significant factor. I don't have enough data to know. But I have no doubt they were at least attempted.