How much has Obamacare saved the American people?

Oneuli said:
It slowed the rate of growth and that saved money relative to what would have spent without the change. Obviously.

Think!
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Once again, the American taxpayer hasn't saved anything no matter how many strawman claims you continue to construct scarecrow. When you add in the massive cost of subsidies the taxpayers have to come up with, they are in far worse shape than had NOTHING been done.

I would ask you to THINK, but you lack sufficient grey matter to comprehend the OBVIOUS. :laugh:
 
Oneuli said:
It rose briefly and then fell dramatically.
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It rose to $1.4 trillion, then $1.294 trillion, then $1.299 trillion, $1.087 trillion. There is nothing dramatic about it except for the massiveness of the numbers you willful idiot. Obama has the distinction of having amassed more deficit than the previous three Presidents combined.

Oneuli said:
By comparison, it's now rising rapidly with no sign there will be any reversal.
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Defenders of Obama's massive trillion dollar deficits have no room to whine about any Presidents spending......EVER. Unless, of course, you want to look like a brain dead, dishonest, clueless partisan hack moron on steroids. Right now you have that distinction.
 
Passing the Affordable Care Act was always much more about extending coverage than cutting costs. Still, as the landmark law faces one challenge after another, new data are giving a better picture of how the law has played out. That includes a new study that looks at how Obamacare affected household medical spending.

The short answer: On average, Obamacare did not affect household medical spending very much.

The study was looking for how Obamacare was affecting medical spending. As with everything with Obamacare, it's complicated. But here we go: In a nationally representative sample of over 80,000 adults, overall, in the first couple of years after Obamacare really kicked in — 2014 and '15 — out-of-pocket payments dropped by an average of $74.

Meanwhile, the insurance premiums that households paid rose by an average of $232. So it's a funny little coincidental parallel — out-of-pocket payments dropped by 12 percent, but premium payments rose by 12 percent.

The good news is that out-of-pocket, high-burden spending fell by 20 percent overall — and it especially dropped for poor people. The not-so-good news is that among middle-income households, there was a 28 percent increase in high-burden spending on premiums.

In the study's conclusions the authors write that without the individual mandate, the numbers of people without insurance will go back up again, as will out-of-pocket costs, and premiums will likely rise, too, because healthier people won't be buying insurance.

https://www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2018/01/23/obamacare-household-spending
 
Truth Detector said:
It rose to $1.4 trillion, then $1.294 trillion, then $1.299 trillion, $1.087 trillion. There is nothing dramatic about it except for the massiveness of the numbers you willful idiot. Obama has the distinction of having amassed more deficit than the previous three Presidents combined. Defenders of Obama's massive trillion dollar deficits have no room to whine about any Presidents spending......EVER. Unless, of course, you want to look like a brain dead, dishonest, clueless partisan hack moron on steroids. Right now you have that distinction.
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Oneuli said:
I decide which possibilities seem the most likely based on the available evidence, and I form my opinions around those.
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She decides which possibilities seem the most likely based on the available evidence, and she forms her opinions around those. :rofl2:
 
Althea said:
As one who has been in the individual market for almost 40 years, I've seen the various changes to health insurance laws. Before ACA, you had to be covered for pre existing conditions, PROVIDED that you didn't have a lapse in coverage of more than 30 days.


BUT...employers were firing employees who suddenly became gravely ill, and started skewing their group plan rates.

So yes...the pre existing condition clause saved many lives.
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When you add up Obamcare, Medicare, and Medicaid, it would probably be astonishing to estimate the number of lives saved by these great liberal programs.
 
Oneuli said:
Yes. This is not a question of opinion. It's right there, in the Congressional record. Now, that doesn't mean it was 100% phased in the moment it became law. Few laws work that way. But it became law as soon as Obama affixed his signature to it. Some of the provisions kicked in immediately, some a few weeks or months later, and some a few years later. But it was law from day one.
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to be fair.....your level of sanity is a question of opinion........the provisions which impacted costs went into effect for self-employed people such as myself in 2014.....they went into effect for people who's employers paid their insurance in 2015........your posing is not successful........
 
Oneuli said:
I agree that we should continue to judge presidents the farther we get from their time, as we gain more perspective. I think Clinton's time looks better and better from that perspective. As of 2000, one might have wrongly concluded that the great run we'd enjoyed on his watch was the "new normal" -- that whatever caused the long dark age of high violent crime, low income growth, rising poverty, and permanent deficits, from the early 1970s through the early 1990s, had worked its way out of the system and it would be smooth sailing now, for reasons unrelated to Clinton's leadership.

And I think a lot of people believed that. Look how Bush ran in 2000 -- like we could keep the great surpluses going even as we reversed the Clinton tax hikes that made them possible. Like we could keep enjoying the Great Prosperity, but with the improvement of having an amiable dunce as the figurehead, rather than a philandering technocrat. I think it's only with the benefit of decades of history since then that it's become clear just how wrong that was. We haven't seen another surplus since Clinton left, and we're heading fast in the wrong direction. We got essentially a lost decade, after Clinton, when pretty much every measure of social and economic performance got worse. At best, we now seem to be able to choose between fiscally sound economic doldrums, or debt-finance economic orgies that will give us a deadly hangover. The farther we get from the Clinton years, the clearer it becomes just what an unusually good time they were for America.

As for your assertion that the dotcom bubble bursting in March 2000 caused the recession that started a full year later, that's a hypothesis, not a fact. And it's not at all clear we should believe it. We've had other stock bubbles of roughly the same size deflate without causing a recession. So, why was that one unavoidable? Keep in mind, as of inauguration day, stocks were only down around 13% compared to their high point in late March 2000. A 13% decline isn't exactly earth shattering. By comparison, the stock market is down 13% just since late September. Does that mean we're doomed to imminent recession?

Or, to take an historic example, between 4/29/2011 and 10/3/2011, the S&P 500 dropped from 1363.61 to 1099.23. Did that mean we were bound to go into recession in early 2012? That's a 19.4% drop.... much larger than the market drop over the same time period after March 2000. Yet, as you know, we didn't go into recession in 2012, or 2013, or any time since. So, why treat a smaller stock decline as if it made recession inevitable?
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So you choose to ignore the explosive economic growth we had in the '80's because you don't like the letter of the party next to the President's name.

And you continue to spin the dot com bubble as if it is a figment of people's imagination and the Nasdaq crashing was as well.

And surpluses were projections. You understand what projections are right? The were projections if the bubble kept going, which it never was. I'll continue to repeat myself. You are creating a false economic narrative to match the political narrative you want to tell.
 
Oneuli said:
If your kids already had insurance at a group rate (e.g., through an employer) .
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they did not.......if you had bothered to read my post you would have already known that I was paying for it......and as I have already told you the price was exactly the same you're obviously an idiot for pretending it would have gone down.......as for my insurance.....when Obamacare went into effect for self-employed people in 2014, my premiums doubled......
 
Oneuli said:
It rose briefly and then fell dramatically. By comparison, it's now rising rapidly with no sign there will be any reversal.
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.....the national debt went UP eight times in the eight years of Obama's presidency for a combined total of an amount greater than every single president that ever served this country combined INCLUDING George Bush........there is no way you can even pretend he did anything good for the deficit without looking like an idiot.......
 
PostmodernProphet said:
the national debt doubled
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I provided an analogy above for thinking about it. Picture speeding away from your home in a car. Regardless of how quickly and hard you hit the brakes, you're going to wind up farther from your home than you were before you started hitting them, because of the momentum. Similarly, Obama inherited an economy with record high deficits (and a severe deficit addiction, thanks to year after year of rising deficits under Bush). No matter how fast and hard he worked to reduce those deficits, debt was going to end up higher than before he started reducing them, because of that momentum. And the reduction of deficits on his watch was extraordinary. You won't find another period of that length when the country's budget balance moved towards the black as rapidly as it did in the Obama years, in dollar terms. Not even close. In fact, the deficit reduction was so swift that many top economists attacked Obama for it -- Nobel Prize-winning economists like Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman argued that we needed more deficit stimulus, and for longer, if we wanted something other than an extremely muted recovery. They criticized the Obama-era austerity (which included the longest period without real per capita total government spending growth in American history). I'm inclined to agree with them, that Obama was too willing to cooperate with the faux deficit hawks. So, it's funny to hear Obama attacked from the other direction, by those claiming his historic reduction of deficits was too little.
 
PostmodernProphet said:
to be fair.....your level of sanity is a question of opinion........the provisions which impacted costs went into effect for self-employed people such as myself in 2014.....they went into effect for people who's employers paid their insurance in 2015........your posing is not successful........
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There are many provisions that impacted costs, some of which went into effect the moment it was signed and others weeks or months later. See the link further up in this thread providing the full timeline.
 
Oneuli said:
There are many provisions that impacted costs, some of which went into effect the moment it was signed and others weeks or months later. See the link further up in this thread providing the full timeline.
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OMG, 23 pages of facts to refute, and you are still defending Obamcare,
look

When you are able to convince yourself that the health care costs are up, a lot since Obamacare, and deductibles for the ACA plans themselves are up, a lot.
AND that the overhead costs to run the thing are up, a lot. Then maybe someone can have a conversation with you on how we could fix the thing.
REpublicans have offered many ideas to do just that.
AND
that not only are my costs up, but I am subsidizing others health care premiums now too.

Does any of this make any sense to you? really girl. get a grip

Oneuli said:
In fact, the deficit reduction was so swift that many top economists attacked Obama for it -- Nobel Prize-winning economists like Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman argued that we needed more deficit stimulus, and for longer, if we wanted
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do you even know what "stimulus" is?

It's printing fake money, it's like when you play monopoly, you own Boardwalk and Park Place, congratulations
 
cawacko said:
So you choose to ignore the explosive economic growth we had in the '80's
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What "explosive economic growth"? Here's what fascinates me about conservatives: if you repeat a talking point to them often enough, they just accept it as true, even if it's the exact opposite of the truth, and they never once think to check for themselves. See here:

https://www.thebalance.com/us-gdp-by-year-3305543
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPC1

Here's real GDP growth by decade, in the 20th century, best to worst:

1940s 72.4%
1960s 54.3%
1950s 52.4%
1990s 42.4%
1970s 37.9%
1980s 35.8%
1930s 10.2%

The 80s were the second-worst decade of the 20th century for economic growth (at least starting with the 30s) -- only managing to beat out the decade of the Great Depression.

And you continue to spin the dot com bubble as if it is a figment of people's imagination and the Nasdaq crashing was as well
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What would make you imagine I'm trying to treat it as a figment of the imagination? If you try to locate what part of what I said tried to spin it that way, and reread that, you should realize you're mistaken, and I did no such thing. There was a dotcom bubble, to be certain, and a big devaluation of the NASDAQ index. I've never denied that.

And surpluses were projections.
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Incorrect. The surpluses were based on then-current accounting. Yes, they also projected future surpluses (before Bush's catastrophic upper-class tax cuts changed the math), but we ran actual deficits for several years at the end of the Clinton presidency.

Anyway, now that you know that the 1980s didn't have 'explosive economic growth,' has this changed any of your political opinions? I'm betting not, and I'll tell you why: I'm betting that your political opinions have absolutely nothing to do with the evidence, and thus finding out you were mistaken about the evidence will have no impact on those opinions. My experience with conservatives is that they come at these things from the opposite direction as me. In my case, I read up on the evidence, and then I form my opinions around what I discover. With conservatives, they start out with an immutable opinion, and then they assert the existence of evidence to support that opinion. As such, when they find out that the real world stubbornly refuses to line up with their assertions, they simply assert new "evidence," rather than reexamining their opinions.
 
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