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Originally Posted by tiggertsi
when did other tax payers pay for uninsured people before obamacare? i'm pretty sure collection agencies and lawsuits were used to get payments on medical bills owed by uninsured americans. granted these tactics were not always successful and there exists legal recourse to deal with those issues, but ultimately it would be the healthcare provider that would lose money. and this "penalty" is a tax, you do remember that the supreme court ruled on this right? they had to rule it as a tax for it to be "constitutional". if any of you think that this government whom can't even deal with their own skyrocketing debt (one of numerous problems that this nation faces) and a president who has lied numerous times about obamacare, particularly when it was said you will be able to keep your current health care plan, are going to be able to pull this off and not hurt americans in the process are naive. all i can say is keep ignoring those whom are already getting fucked by obamacare and as it gets worse keep listening to lying politicians who continue to get their campaign contributions from the very corporate entities that get the greatest benefit from legislation like this.
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Other taxpayers didn't pay for poor people visiting the ER. I explained this earlier. Insurance premiums go up for the people who do pay (due to increased costs for the hospital) because most hospitals are required by law to treat patients who come to the ER. "The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) is a U.S. Act of Congress passed in 1986 as part of the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA). It requires hospitals to provide care to anyone needing emergency healthcare treatment regardless of citizenship, legal status or ability to pay."
I'm not advocating obamacare necessarily, as I think the single-payer healthcare that many other civilized nations have (canada and some european countries) is a better alternative. It would have also been cheaper.
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Originally Posted by 89s13steve
The Democrats actually did almost no compromising. They controlled the White House, Senate, and House in those years and took almost no Republican input. Also, the ACA is almost nothing like Romneycare. Romneycare was only a 75 page bill, the ACA is 11,000. The left loves to say how Romneycare was what the ACA was designed from, but it is simply not true.
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I don't think it's any secret that democrats preferred the single-payer system from the start. The ACA was most-definitely a compromise because there was such resistance to the idea of single-payer.
Romneycare and Obamacare are very similar. The differences are mainly due to medicare (which is not run by the state, and thus has nothing to do with the state of Massachusetts). Let me do a quick rundown of the similarities:
1. Both have individual mandates (or a "tax" for not holding insurance)
2. Romneycare requires businesses with over 11 employees to offer insurance, while Obamacare requires the same for businesses with over 50
3. Romneycare offers Medicaid to state residents earning under 150% of the federal poverty level, Obamacare for less than 133%
4. Obamacare allows young adults to stay on their parents' insurance plans until they are 26. Romneycare does too, but at a reduced benefit level.
What exactly are you claiming are the major differences between the two plans?