UniSocAll wrote:Zanz wrote:Obama (first Presidential elections I could vote in... I went 3rd party) - ACA was a disaster that set real single payer back by a decade or more and helped the insurance companies. Syria, Libya, Yemen are all going to bite us in the ass for ages, Iraq and Afghanistan have gotten progressively worse, and this guy's hailed as a hero. Yuck.
The ACA was the best that could have been passed at that time, and it really doesn't seem like a disaster when 25 million more people are covered, and the increase rate is now steadier than before, so much so that it's not overly surpassing the inflation rate like it did before ACA. It's not perfect, but it's better than what was there before.
His foreign policy are a separate issue, considering that every American president's foreing policy except maybe Carter would be questionable. His inability or unwillingness to close down Guantanamo was also a huge disappointment.
I really hate this "It was the best we could do at the time" shtick. The best wasn't good enough - I will grant that 25 million are covered, and that's a good thing, but that could have been accomplished with something that didn't grant insurance monopolies what is, in effect, an enormous subsidy for covering people they should have been covering already. And "it's not overly surpassing inflation" isn't a win either - it's still surpassing inflation, wages aren't, and people are struggling.
To take a more personal tack - my father makes enough (through two jobs, one self-employed and the other part time) that he doesn't qualify for subsidies. He obviously doesn't have employer-provided options, so he's forced to go on the exchange (in Vermont, where there's only one company providing options), where for two enrollment periods in a row he's seen his premiums rise, and his deductible would bankrupt him if anything were really to go wrong. The subsidies should take into account debt, in my opinion (my dad's income is decent, about $60k before taxes, but he got slammed in a divorce from my mom and owes about $250k for the house he didn't want to lose). In effect he leads a quality of life like he made about $30k, but the ACA doesn't see that. It's a tremendously impersonal approach that just made my dad more and more frustrated.
But it's been "solved," we got "the best we could," if you ask the true believers. The best we could get isn't good enough. Yeah, my dad has coverage, but he'll still be bankrupted by the about $10k deductible if he has a heart attack or colon cancer (both likely in my family), and even if he doesn't, a great deal of any disposable income left to him now goes to premiums every month so that Anthem can write off risk and keep its share prices high (don't get me started on Anthem, who let hackers get my personal info in a data breach). It's disgusting.
Just a bunch of shit.