Magox

http://news.ehealthinsurance.com/news/average-individual-health-insurance-premiums-increased-99-since-2013-the-year-before-obamacare-family-premiums-increased-140-according-to-ehealth-com-shopping-data Premiums before Obamacare were $197 in 2013 with an average deductible of $3319 Premiums in 2014 first year was $271 with an average deductible of $4164 Premiums in 2017 was $393 with an average deductible of $4385 Of course this doesn't take into account subsidies or accepting many people with pre ex, which of course factor in greatly, but the underlying cost that the customer along with the customer has risen sharply. One other interesting note, Pre ACA 2008 premiums was $159 with an average deductible of a little over $2000. Pre ACA 2012 premiums was $190 with an average deductible of around $3000.

Not surprising you'd say this, you're a hardcore partisan. Strip away the listed R's and D's and your claim goes down the drain.

This was a big mistake on Mueller's part, when you have such an important investigation it is critically important that you conduct the process which includes the staffing in a way that protects the integrity of the investigation. If this had been an investigation on Obama and you had staffed a bunch of lawyers who had contributed solely to right wing politicians there is no doubt that people from the left would be up in and arms and the media without doubt would have made that the story. I am 99% convinced that would be the case. You would have thought the fact that he is friends with Comey that he would have tried to lessen the appearance that there was some sort of conflict of interest but he clearly decided that he didn't care. How hard would have it been for him to simply staff up with people who didn't financially support the last Democratic nominee or president? Would that have been so hard? From my perspective and I like to think that I try to see things from a balanced perspective that this investigation is already tainted. Because he has done it this way, it will cause not just Trump supporters but some people from the middle to believe that this investigation is largely going to be conducted as a fishing expedition.

Aaaaand we're done here.

Is requiring a photo ID to vote considered "Heavy voter ID laws" in your eyes?

Not surprising, at all. To be honest with you, I've been somewhat surprised at the constructive role that Cruz has been playing in all this. I still think it is largely self-serving but it's constructive none the less which is much better than what he had been doing his first years as a Senator. It appears that somehow these plans would also be thrown into the same risk pools as the QHP policies, which is something that I wasn't aware of. I'd still like to hear more how that would work but if that is the case then I suppose I could see how that works. That's a potential game changer, it will be interesting to see how the CBO scores it. This was scored by HHS which of course is led by Tom Price so there is valid reasoning for skepticism. Not to say that Tom Price is a shady or anything along those lines but he clearly is biased.

Good point. But that wasn't my presumption.

You didn't read the entire article, did you? Or at the very least you didn't understand what you were reading. If you went on to read the very following sentences you would have read this: You complained that you were paying five times more than what ALF or some other Medicare recipients were paying, you're not. Because presumably he paid into Medicare throughout much of his adult life. What you copied and pasted referred to people getting more back in benefits than what they paid into the program. That's a whole another argument.

Right, but that's not the entire true premium of how a Medicare plan has been priced because the recipient has been paying taxes on it for a number of years before they receive their first dollar in benefits. If one were to calculate the premium that recipient paid (which would be impossible to do until he/she passes away), you would have to calculate their entire life's worth of Medicare tax contributions, plus post 65 premiums plus whatever Advantage/supplement plan premiums they have and divide it by the number of months they lived after turning 65 or the inception of their Medicare enrollment. That would be the true premium that person paid. So when you say that premiums could fall 60% plus if we went to a Medicare-for-all plan, that could only be true on a per recipient means if the government decided to lower Medicare taxes, because that's where most of the "premiums" would come from, not from what you are paying after you become a Medicare enrollee. That's not how it works. Read above Read more here

That's all well and good, but that still has nothing to do with premiums.

That's not what I'm responding to. You said that premiums would go down under a Medicare-for-all approach and that's not how it works. Medicare pays for 80% which is the Lion's share of the claims. Medicare pays for the claims via a fixed tax rate based on your income. Taxes would essentially be the premiums in this case. Unless of course you were talking about Medicare Advantage or Supplements and even then Medicare Advantage still wouldn't apply, the only true premiums in this would be through Medicare supplements. But that only accounts for 20% of the claims. I guess what I'm saying is that your statement didn't make sense. That doesn't surprise me. It's the direction that the left wing is moving towards and my guess is that if the healthcare system in the U.S continues to flounder as it has pre and current ACA then we'll probably begin to see even independents move that direction.

That's not how that works

This is essentially what the media and democrats are doing, they find one non sequitur move to another then to another that have very little to do with the underlying charge. Which is why at this stage, unless there is an actual smoking gun it is all white noise, I've completely tuned out to anything relating to Russia.

He's impulsive to say the least. He pretty much says what he is feeling at that moment, with no to little regard to tact or facts. One of the worse white collar jobs in the world has to be being on his communication team.

The problem now is that they've lost any potential leverage for crafting a Bipartisan health bill, whatever they do now with Democrats would be largely written by Schumer and Pelosi

I don't disagree with that, my point was that the whole debacle didn't come from one or two sources like many people like to make it out to be, this was truly a perfect storm of events that occurred, a cocktail of corrosive forces led to this downturn.

That's fine and that is your opinion. I'm simply pointing out that for Trump's agenda and what I believe he should be doing that letting the ACA marketplaces simply just "fail" aren't in his or the people who will lose their health insurance best interest. I don't understand how you believe subsidies are unjust yet you are for Medicare-for-all health insurance which is single payer healthcare. How do you square those two beliefs that you hold?

That's not what I said. This is what I said: So even though in the Urban centers premiums have risen (although not as sharply as Rural America), the vast majority of those people that obtained health insurance (83%) are receiving subsidies to offset those increases. Meaning that even though the underlying price has risen somewhat sharply, 6 out of every 7 people who are buying those plans aren't really feeling that increase all that much. What are we talking about here? Let's not lose fact of that, which is that Trump says "Let it fail". Ok, the problem is that where most of the Democratic voters live are areas that are at less risk of the ACA marketplace collapsing than where most Trump voters live which is the more rural parts. It's not a viable solution and doesn't make sense and really isn't what the president of the country should be doing.

It's not delusional its factually correct. What is delusional is your opinion that healthcare is not more affordable in Urban America where the population centers are relative to Rural America. The reason why rural america tends to have higher premiums are because their risk pools consist of an older and unhealthier population whereas in cities people tend to be younger. Out of the 47 counties that have no Obamacare plans where the market collapsed in their areas, all but one voted for Trump. There is no death spiral in the vast majority of the population centers in the US, where the health markets that are at highest risk of "failing" as Trump would have you ignorantly believe are where his voters reside. That's not an opinion that is a fact.

I think this fairly encapsulates it almost perfectly.

The irony of this strategy is that all the places where people vote for Democrats the ACA is working ok. All the places where Trump wants to let it fail are the places that voted for him. Sounds like a sound strategy.

I was just about to make this point that this is just as much of an indictment on the media than anything else. Fox news wasn't created in a vacuum, it was created because large swaths of the country didn't feel that the media cover stories that were important to them. Now you have a visceral and often times ignorant reaction to what the media peddles, even though it could be true because they don't trust what the media says. I yearn for a news organization that just provides straight news, with no slant, no agenda, no opining just straight news.

I'm afraid Azalin, that is wishful thinking. Even though I do believe that Democrats should bear the brunt of the failures of the ACA moving forward, there are things that Trump is doing to undermine the law and cause premiums to go even higher such as threatening to take away the cost sharing provisions and uncertainty if there will even be a penalty for not having insurance. Both of these things from a substantive level are causing prices to go up even higher. Plus, most people don't like Trump so everything he touches automatically is soured upon from the American public. He and Republicans said they'd fix it and the American public are expecting him to do just that.

You really haven't made a substantive argument, at all. The only defense that you have aside from your insults is that what Assange did was illegal, therefore it is all invalid. That's not at the crux of the argument, the argument is the content and you have yet to challenge that in a meaningful way.