Let's see... who cheated? The DNC and the Clinton campaign. As proudly demonstrated in their own emails. As (despite lying about it repeatedly as they usually do), finally admitted to when it comes to things like slipping the Clinton campaign debate information from CNN ahead of time in collusion with their favorite network. What "cheating" are you referring to, exactly? You must have evidence that no law enforcement agency does - you should tell them!
And, Clinton's impeachment? No, he wasn't impeached for lying about a blow job. He was impeached for lying while his career-long habit of sexual harassment of government employees (and that's putting it mildly) was under the microscope. You'll recall he was also found in contempt by a federal judge, and disbarred.
As for your implication that Susan Rice, personally, is the analyst who would be pouring over communication intercepts and making decisions about when to unmask US citizens in the way of investigating conversations (almost all of which had exactly ZERO to do with Russia - she was was digging for political angles on the Trump team for months, making requests for names of US citizens at a rate far in excess of any of her predecessors and without any connection to even a hint of any illegality). Keep trying to excuse it away, but you know you're misrepresenting the situation. Which is why your're doing it as a coward.
And in our state, the governor proposed the use of a neutral, independent commission to set congressional districts... and the liberals in the Democrat-controlled legislature shut it down in order to preserve their heavily gerrymandered control of the state. Because Democrats.
There's a lot of noise about the likes of Flynn being outed, but strangely little outrage about what they were doing, at least from Republicans.
There isn't much talk about "what they were doing" because there wasn't much going on at all and that takes all the fun out of the story for the Democrats. There's a reason that even Obama's DNI said that despite having access to everything, he say no evidence of anything out of bounds. There's no there there. All the hype is just the ongoing Democrat theater designed to find some way, any way, to distract from their horrible choice of candidate and idiotic conduct during the election. And the fact that under Obama they lost nearly a thousand legislative seats, most of the governoships, both houses of congress, and now the White House and the Supreme Court. The whole ZOMG RUSSIANS! meme is getting downright hilarious. Meanwhile we have every indication that people in actual power at the time of the election and leading up to it were using intelligence resources for political research.
I can't think of any definition of "Libertarian" that matches Trump. What are you thinking there?
His instincts lean towards scrapping onerous, pointless regulations. Towards government more in its constitutionally described role, rather than as Nanny. He's no classical libertarian, of course. But on many topics he skews more that direction than most of his primary race counterparts, and certainly wildly more so than his Democrat opponent.
The people are so bought into the cycle of voting for the lesser evil that even with historically polarizing, horrible, and unliked candidates, 3rd parties still barely got 2.5% of the vote...
Well, it didn't help that the third party candidates were even worse. And not just by a little.
Never owned a business or cared what it takes to run one, I see. You're on the "gimme stuff" end of the spectrum. I get it. You were raised that way, and are still mad that Bernie Sanders isn't in office giving you more stuff that he makes eeeeeeevil productive people pay for. Get over it.
Granting a federal agency that kind of granular power, and worse... sounding all excited about them using it (let me guess, without any sort of due process - you'd have the Secondary Regional Equipment Anecdote Fairness Czar for your area make a decision on the fly, based on one side of story?)... well, that sort of instinct on your part, on display to the public, is one of the reasons the most recent election went the way it did. Please don't vote in the future. Thank you.
You're confused. It's the lack of these basic services that keep a lot of economic activity from happening in such areas. So this technology may speed that.
You don't really understand what "rural" means, do you? Say you want to own ten acres so you can keep goats to make hipster cheese and have a peaceful morning without the neighbor's kid blaring bad music in close proximity. So you move out to the edges of suburbia. You're still nowhere near Real Farms (the kind that are already starting to use automation, by the way) - but you've just fallen off of the broadband availability cliff. Within just miles. You understand this, right? No? Didn't think so.
So, Mr. Snarky City Guy, you really don't have any idea what you're talking about, do you? The problem isn't WiFi congestion in rural areas, it's the lack of any affordable infrastructure able to get broadband out to those areas in the first place. Having your WiFi busy on your property when your neighbor's WiFi is a quarter mile away is NOT a problem. But if neither of you can actually get those routers to connect to the internet because there's no there there, what's the point? There are millions of people who live where poor DSL, at best, is the broadband they can get - no matter what they're willing to pay. That, or laggy, expensive, very much capped satellite service with dial-up upload speeds. No cable, no fiber, no T-1 to your business... just dial-up, and perhaps some 3G mobile coverage if you're lucky.
This broadband desert starts happening just a few miles outside of most towns. You know, where the people who grow your food live.
If it's all but useless in the city, but can provide rural users with something better than satellite service or dial-up, it's still a big deal. And by "rural users," I mean... people who live 20 miles outside of places like Washington, DC. There are places even in the relatively close-in 'burbs where nobody's been willing or able to pull fiber, and the CO is too far away for DSL, and the metering hit on LTE if it's even there (or the too-slow-to-use-ness of 3G) is a show stopper. Not sure what deployment on this actually looks like, though, and there still has to be some sort of low-latency, reliable backhaul. But if it's easy enough to pop something shoebox-size on modest towers in the countryside, that's pretty compelling.
Previous "revolutions" have ended up creating jobs, But unlike this one, their purpose was not to destroy jobs.
Yes, things like farm machinery and freight trains absolutely were intended to destroy jobs. Likewise laundry machines. And don't forget all of the file clerks, paper industry employees, and sheet metal workers at file cabinet manufacturers out of work because of computer systems. Such things have been destroying jobs for many decades, even centuries, now.
The solution is: enough prosperity to bring about what it always does... fewer babies being had.
this is the first of Obama's executive orders that Trump or Congress HAVEN'T rescinded
Other than the fact that's just plainly, factually incorrect... why wonder if it's a joke? Even Obama took advice from a few people who knew what they were talking about and weren't blowing politically-motivated smoke, and he acted on such things as anyone in that office would do. Being able to drop the sanction hammer on obvious bad actors screwing around with things like massive DDoS attacks and the like is just sensible. Going around the legislature to do some of the things he (Obama) did with immigration or over-reaching via the EPA aren't the same thing.
By the sound of it this was a spur of the moment/rage thing.
You're right, he's a genius that should be free! Because his "spur of the moment rage thing" involved him, in the hour after he was fired, to invent a time machine that allowed him to go back and make a collection of his co-workers account/password information and set up his back doors. What kind of person who has just been fired has the presence of mind to invent time travel in only an hour? A frickin' GENIUS, that's what kind.
Oh, you didn't RTFA, did you. Nope.
He deliberately, and meticulously planned his crime. He obviously knew they'd fire him at some point. This was premeditated, and every bit as damaging to the company as setting one of their storage buildings on fire.
That was no "thank you," that was a disingenuous bit of smarm going through the motions of justifying why you think your family should get my family's hard-earned money, so that you can get healthcare that my family no longer can. It was utterly insincere, and you know it. Now, your fake bit of umbrage-taking and leaving in a huff is just a craven excuse for avoiding any effort to back up your claim that the ACA will cost my family less in the long term. Why skip out on explaining your assertion? Because you know it's completely baseless. A lie. I mentioned Obama's very similar lie as a bit of context. It doesn't matter whether or not the POTUS can cause somebody's premium to be some specific amount - the point is that he and the other leaders of his party deliberately, repeatedly lied about the ramifications of this disastrous law. He chose to lie in order to help sell it to the public, so they'd put pressure on their Democrat representatives into voting for what everyone knew was a lie.
Don't thank me for anything, because you don't mean it. But you could take the trouble to back up your platitudes about how I should like our new circumstance, what with it costing our famliy less over time (despite it costing our family far, far more with no end in sight). Hand-wavy assertions that you know to be false, meant to distract from the reality of the situation, aren't how you exhibit gratitude. Your lecturing me about how I deserve the current situation so that you can have stuff - there isn't a whiff of real thanks underpinning anything you've said. Don't add insult to the injury.
Because you're not being deprived of anything other than some finances.
Oh that's all, just some finances. Means nothing, I know. Except then you point out that finances are exactly what you want, for you and your family, where they DO matter, and you're happy to take them away from someone else so that OTHER family can't afford the services of a doctor. Are you even listening to yourself? YOU are the selfish one! "I want money to make my family comfortable, and it makes me happy that that money was taken from you, so that your family is no longer able to have that comfort." So, I don't deserve the comfort, but I should be obliged to buy that comfort for you.
As crappy as the ACA is, you'll be paying less over the long term.
How much less? President Obama looked you in the eye and said that the average family's insurance costs would go DOWN by about $2500 a year. And that monthly premiums would be about the same as a mobile phone bill. Remember that? And how I'd be able to keep my insurance and doctor, "period." By contrast, I lost my insurance, lost the services of the doctor we'd be using for 20 years, can no longer use the two good local hospitals, and have had our costs go up by over 400% - to the point where we can no longer spare the cash for simple visits to the doctor's office. But that's all going to have me paying less over time, you say. You mean that my rates will go below what they used to be? My deductible will return to what it was, or less? What sort of nonsense are you preaching? You sound exactly like Obama, who we know was deliberately, repeatedly lying about costs going down - something his own consultants have proudly confirmed as their deliberate strategy to get the 100% partisan law through.
Oh, I get it - you're saying that my TAXES will go down in some way that more than offsets the 400% increase in rates and the sky-high deductible. How do you figure? 47% percent of the population pays no income taxes - so any discretionary spending taken from that bucket will only go UP. And it's politically impossible to raise medicate taxes higher than they already are. So... specifically explain how my annual health care costs will go down to a small fraction of what they are now, to back up your assertion. Who is going to suddenly start paying way, WAY more than they're paying already so that my outlay will be so dramatically reduced? The eeeeevil 1%-ers?
You still don't get it. Want to use the road analogy? OK, that other person gets to use the road without paying for it, but I know have to pay four times as much in road taxes, but no longer get to use the road. How are you not clear on this?
Pointing out that one group of people carries the financial burden while another group gets the services isn't a comment on laziness or any of the other things you're projecting. This is structural. One family wakes up every morning a thousand dollars a month poorer, every single month, than they used to be. Another family wakes up every morning have access to a suite of services they're not paying for. Pending a change in the law, that relationship between those two families is a permanent one. The people receiving the services are NOT PARTICIPATING IN AN INSURANCE POLICY. They're getting something the government says they are entitled to, and another person is having to buy it for them.
Our state's insurance board are dyed-in-the-wool progressive liberal Democrats. They LIKE the fact that middle class people have had their rates quadrupled and their deductibles quintupled, because they get to participate in the grand re-allocation of that money towards a demographic that reliably votes for the party that appoints and retains those very same insurance board members. It's entirely about giving out candy to reliable Democrat voters.
You lecturing me about selfishness is hilarious. I know, I know, why should I want to be able to afford to go to the doctor, right? So selfish of me. I used to be able to, but now I'm a thousand dollars a month poorer, and looking at an even bigger financial hole before any sort of insurance even kicks in. So: I used to have enough cash for routine medical care, and a comfortable deductible in case of that ambulance ride and orthopedist visit. Now that cash is being used by someone else, and the hit for visiting the orthopedist for that broken bone is at least ten grand more out of pocket than it used to be. This, so that you can feel holier than thou about having socked it to me, so you can feel generous to someone else.
You LIKE the new arrangement, because YOU are the one that actually lacks empathy. You're delighted that people who used to be able to pay for medical services no longer can, and must consider how to alter their financial, business, employment and tax landscapes to somehow work an angle where they, too, can be more dependent on the government and beg for money that someone ELSE is paying. All so you can scold and enjoy your moment of condescension and nanny state patronizing.
You're the selfish one - you'd rather tear down someone else's ability to choose whether or not they need insurance for maternity so that you can take the resulting wasted expense and use it as a political treat for the Nancy Pelosi types of the world to wisely distribute. Minus a cut, of course, for their huge new bureaucracy, populated by employees in federal unions that are forced to pay dues that end up being used to provide campaign cash for people like Pelosi. I get it. At least be honest about it.
I live in the bluest of blue states, one which embraced the ACA fully and did everything Obama asked when it comes to playing along. The mandated coverage (things like maternity care for 70 year old women) are now so burdensome that the system is collapsing - we're down to two insurance companies left in the state, with one of them saying that they're losing hundreds of millions of dollars and will pull out next year.
Our situation IS typical - it's just that for most people, they're paying a large share of those huge premiums indirectly, by getting a smaller paycheck as their employer considers that whopping price tag to be part of their compensation. Everybody also pays indirectly as first-rate employers are now busy fleeing the state to set up in places that have lower costs. Or, those that are staying are negotiating other types of tax credits (on property, income, etc) in order to stay solvent if they want to keep participating in the state's economy. The ACA provides some medical financing for some people who previously wouldn't have had it, and it does so by breaking healthcare for the people being asked to actually pay for it.
It's falling apart here, in a state that is the prime example of one playing ball with what Pelosi, Reid, and Obama rammed through. Our state was willing to do the deal with the devil and expand Medicare, even knowing that in a few years when the your-first-hit-of-heroin-is-free federal subsidies for that would go away and all of those costs would fall on locally raised taxes. When you refer to the states that "tried to sabotage" this, what you're talking about are states that looked past the early pandering phase, and noticed that the ACA's state-level Medicare expansion would in short order come home to roost entirely on that state's budget - a huge new entitlement expense that would require such states to enormously raise taxes to pay for it. What it looks like to "expand Medicare" in the ACA's short term is completely pointless - it's like saying you have serious spending power because you have a credit card, and can put off paying it down for a little while.
What to do about it? The things the Democrats refused to do with their 100% partisan pandering law. Break down the 50 different state silos and allow people to shop across state lines for these financial services. Allow small employers and self employed people to join insurance-buying organizations so they can participate in far larger risk pools and greatly reduce costs for everyone involved. Pass tort reform, to actually get at some of main reasons that the actual practice of medicine is so absurdly high. These are all things the Republicans have been talking about for years. They had to leave them off of the currently-attempted bill for procedural reasons, since the Democrats say they'll block any attempt to pass the bill outside of the reconciliation channel.
The Democrats don't want a nation-wide market - that will cut down on some of their favorite campaign funding constituencies, which are bottled up in 50 redundant places. The Democrats don't want tort reform, because some of their biggest supporters are trial lawyers that get rich playing the frivolous malpractice suit lottery. Democrats don't want to allow small businesses to join larger market groups, because they prefer power to be invested in the government at every level, and consider larger pricate organizations that are oriented around market principles to be a threat to their more socialistic, nanny-state world view.
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Ah, liberals.
... who cheated? The DNC and the Clinton campaign. As proudly demonstrated in their own emails. As (despite lying about it repeatedly as they usually do), finally admitted to when it comes to things like slipping the Clinton campaign debate information from CNN ahead of time in collusion with their favorite network. What "cheating" are you referring to, exactly? You must have evidence that no law enforcement agency does - you should tell them!
Let's see
And, Clinton's impeachment? No, he wasn't impeached for lying about a blow job. He was impeached for lying while his career-long habit of sexual harassment of government employees (and that's putting it mildly) was under the microscope. You'll recall he was also found in contempt by a federal judge, and disbarred.
As for your implication that Susan Rice, personally, is the analyst who would be pouring over communication intercepts and making decisions about when to unmask US citizens in the way of investigating conversations (almost all of which had exactly ZERO to do with Russia - she was was digging for political angles on the Trump team for months, making requests for names of US citizens at a rate far in excess of any of her predecessors and without any connection to even a hint of any illegality). Keep trying to excuse it away, but you know you're misrepresenting the situation. Which is why your're doing it as a coward.
And in our state, the governor proposed the use of a neutral, independent commission to set congressional districts ... and the liberals in the Democrat-controlled legislature shut it down in order to preserve their heavily gerrymandered control of the state. Because Democrats.
And it's this sort of glib avoidance of just how bad the problem really is that explains why Democrats have been on such a losing streak lately.
There's a lot of noise about the likes of Flynn being outed, but strangely little outrage about what they were doing, at least from Republicans.
There isn't much talk about "what they were doing" because there wasn't much going on at all and that takes all the fun out of the story for the Democrats. There's a reason that even Obama's DNI said that despite having access to everything, he say no evidence of anything out of bounds. There's no there there. All the hype is just the ongoing Democrat theater designed to find some way, any way, to distract from their horrible choice of candidate and idiotic conduct during the election. And the fact that under Obama they lost nearly a thousand legislative seats, most of the governoships, both houses of congress, and now the White House and the Supreme Court. The whole ZOMG RUSSIANS! meme is getting downright hilarious. Meanwhile we have every indication that people in actual power at the time of the election and leading up to it were using intelligence resources for political research.
I can't think of any definition of "Libertarian" that matches Trump. What are you thinking there?
His instincts lean towards scrapping onerous, pointless regulations. Towards government more in its constitutionally described role, rather than as Nanny. He's no classical libertarian, of course. But on many topics he skews more that direction than most of his primary race counterparts, and certainly wildly more so than his Democrat opponent.
The people are so bought into the cycle of voting for the lesser evil that even with historically polarizing, horrible, and unliked candidates, 3rd parties still barely got 2.5% of the vote...
Well, it didn't help that the third party candidates were even worse. And not just by a little.
Venezuela is a real example of "broken" (because they put all their eggs in the oil basket).
No, they put all their eggs in the socialism basket.
Never owned a business or cared what it takes to run one, I see. You're on the "gimme stuff" end of the spectrum. I get it. You were raised that way, and are still mad that Bernie Sanders isn't in office giving you more stuff that he makes eeeeeeevil productive people pay for. Get over it.
Granting a federal agency that kind of granular power, and worse ... sounding all excited about them using it (let me guess, without any sort of due process - you'd have the Secondary Regional Equipment Anecdote Fairness Czar for your area make a decision on the fly, based on one side of story?) ... well, that sort of instinct on your part, on display to the public, is one of the reasons the most recent election went the way it did. Please don't vote in the future. Thank you.
Bees. To supply artisanal mustache wax to certain specific zip codes. And you know who you are.
Yes, you must. It's a legal thing.
You're confused. It's the lack of these basic services that keep a lot of economic activity from happening in such areas. So this technology may speed that.
You don't really understand what "rural" means, do you? Say you want to own ten acres so you can keep goats to make hipster cheese and have a peaceful morning without the neighbor's kid blaring bad music in close proximity. So you move out to the edges of suburbia. You're still nowhere near Real Farms (the kind that are already starting to use automation, by the way) - but you've just fallen off of the broadband availability cliff. Within just miles. You understand this, right? No? Didn't think so.
I'm sorry that you're a slow-witted anonymous coward.
Because rural WiFi crowding is such a problem...
So, Mr. Snarky City Guy, you really don't have any idea what you're talking about, do you? The problem isn't WiFi congestion in rural areas, it's the lack of any affordable infrastructure able to get broadband out to those areas in the first place. Having your WiFi busy on your property when your neighbor's WiFi is a quarter mile away is NOT a problem. But if neither of you can actually get those routers to connect to the internet because there's no there there, what's the point? There are millions of people who live where poor DSL, at best, is the broadband they can get - no matter what they're willing to pay. That, or laggy, expensive, very much capped satellite service with dial-up upload speeds. No cable, no fiber, no T-1 to your business ... just dial-up, and perhaps some 3G mobile coverage if you're lucky.
This broadband desert starts happening just a few miles outside of most towns. You know, where the people who grow your food live.
If it's all but useless in the city, but can provide rural users with something better than satellite service or dial-up, it's still a big deal. And by "rural users," I mean ... people who live 20 miles outside of places like Washington, DC. There are places even in the relatively close-in 'burbs where nobody's been willing or able to pull fiber, and the CO is too far away for DSL, and the metering hit on LTE if it's even there (or the too-slow-to-use-ness of 3G) is a show stopper. Not sure what deployment on this actually looks like, though, and there still has to be some sort of low-latency, reliable backhaul. But if it's easy enough to pop something shoebox-size on modest towers in the countryside, that's pretty compelling.
Previous "revolutions" have ended up creating jobs, But unlike this one, their purpose was not to destroy jobs.
Yes, things like farm machinery and freight trains absolutely were intended to destroy jobs. Likewise laundry machines. And don't forget all of the file clerks, paper industry employees, and sheet metal workers at file cabinet manufacturers out of work because of computer systems. Such things have been destroying jobs for many decades, even centuries, now.
... fewer babies being had.
The solution is: enough prosperity to bring about what it always does
Expensive destruction is expensive destruction. Physical assault on people is another matter. Swinging a bat at people? That's attempted murder.
this is the first of Obama's executive orders that Trump or Congress HAVEN'T rescinded
Other than the fact that's just plainly, factually incorrect ... why wonder if it's a joke? Even Obama took advice from a few people who knew what they were talking about and weren't blowing politically-motivated smoke, and he acted on such things as anyone in that office would do. Being able to drop the sanction hammer on obvious bad actors screwing around with things like massive DDoS attacks and the like is just sensible. Going around the legislature to do some of the things he (Obama) did with immigration or over-reaching via the EPA aren't the same thing.
By the sound of it this was a spur of the moment/rage thing.
You're right, he's a genius that should be free! Because his "spur of the moment rage thing" involved him, in the hour after he was fired, to invent a time machine that allowed him to go back and make a collection of his co-workers account/password information and set up his back doors. What kind of person who has just been fired has the presence of mind to invent time travel in only an hour? A frickin' GENIUS, that's what kind.
Oh, you didn't RTFA, did you. Nope.
He deliberately, and meticulously planned his crime. He obviously knew they'd fire him at some point. This was premeditated, and every bit as damaging to the company as setting one of their storage buildings on fire.
That was no "thank you," that was a disingenuous bit of smarm going through the motions of justifying why you think your family should get my family's hard-earned money, so that you can get healthcare that my family no longer can. It was utterly insincere, and you know it. Now, your fake bit of umbrage-taking and leaving in a huff is just a craven excuse for avoiding any effort to back up your claim that the ACA will cost my family less in the long term. Why skip out on explaining your assertion? Because you know it's completely baseless. A lie. I mentioned Obama's very similar lie as a bit of context. It doesn't matter whether or not the POTUS can cause somebody's premium to be some specific amount - the point is that he and the other leaders of his party deliberately, repeatedly lied about the ramifications of this disastrous law. He chose to lie in order to help sell it to the public, so they'd put pressure on their Democrat representatives into voting for what everyone knew was a lie.
Don't thank me for anything, because you don't mean it. But you could take the trouble to back up your platitudes about how I should like our new circumstance, what with it costing our famliy less over time (despite it costing our family far, far more with no end in sight). Hand-wavy assertions that you know to be false, meant to distract from the reality of the situation, aren't how you exhibit gratitude. Your lecturing me about how I deserve the current situation so that you can have stuff - there isn't a whiff of real thanks underpinning anything you've said. Don't add insult to the injury.
Because you're not being deprived of anything other than some finances.
Oh that's all, just some finances. Means nothing, I know. Except then you point out that finances are exactly what you want, for you and your family, where they DO matter, and you're happy to take them away from someone else so that OTHER family can't afford the services of a doctor. Are you even listening to yourself? YOU are the selfish one! "I want money to make my family comfortable, and it makes me happy that that money was taken from you, so that your family is no longer able to have that comfort." So, I don't deserve the comfort, but I should be obliged to buy that comfort for you.
As crappy as the ACA is, you'll be paying less over the long term.
How much less? President Obama looked you in the eye and said that the average family's insurance costs would go DOWN by about $2500 a year. And that monthly premiums would be about the same as a mobile phone bill. Remember that? And how I'd be able to keep my insurance and doctor, "period." By contrast, I lost my insurance, lost the services of the doctor we'd be using for 20 years, can no longer use the two good local hospitals, and have had our costs go up by over 400% - to the point where we can no longer spare the cash for simple visits to the doctor's office. But that's all going to have me paying less over time, you say. You mean that my rates will go below what they used to be? My deductible will return to what it was, or less? What sort of nonsense are you preaching? You sound exactly like Obama, who we know was deliberately, repeatedly lying about costs going down - something his own consultants have proudly confirmed as their deliberate strategy to get the 100% partisan law through.
Oh, I get it - you're saying that my TAXES will go down in some way that more than offsets the 400% increase in rates and the sky-high deductible. How do you figure? 47% percent of the population pays no income taxes - so any discretionary spending taken from that bucket will only go UP. And it's politically impossible to raise medicate taxes higher than they already are. So... specifically explain how my annual health care costs will go down to a small fraction of what they are now, to back up your assertion. Who is going to suddenly start paying way, WAY more than they're paying already so that my outlay will be so dramatically reduced? The eeeeevil 1%-ers?
You still don't get it. Want to use the road analogy? OK, that other person gets to use the road without paying for it, but I know have to pay four times as much in road taxes, but no longer get to use the road. How are you not clear on this?
Pointing out that one group of people carries the financial burden while another group gets the services isn't a comment on laziness or any of the other things you're projecting. This is structural. One family wakes up every morning a thousand dollars a month poorer, every single month, than they used to be. Another family wakes up every morning have access to a suite of services they're not paying for. Pending a change in the law, that relationship between those two families is a permanent one. The people receiving the services are NOT PARTICIPATING IN AN INSURANCE POLICY. They're getting something the government says they are entitled to, and another person is having to buy it for them.
Our state's insurance board are dyed-in-the-wool progressive liberal Democrats. They LIKE the fact that middle class people have had their rates quadrupled and their deductibles quintupled, because they get to participate in the grand re-allocation of that money towards a demographic that reliably votes for the party that appoints and retains those very same insurance board members. It's entirely about giving out candy to reliable Democrat voters.
You lecturing me about selfishness is hilarious. I know, I know, why should I want to be able to afford to go to the doctor, right? So selfish of me. I used to be able to, but now I'm a thousand dollars a month poorer, and looking at an even bigger financial hole before any sort of insurance even kicks in. So: I used to have enough cash for routine medical care, and a comfortable deductible in case of that ambulance ride and orthopedist visit. Now that cash is being used by someone else, and the hit for visiting the orthopedist for that broken bone is at least ten grand more out of pocket than it used to be. This, so that you can feel holier than thou about having socked it to me, so you can feel generous to someone else.
You LIKE the new arrangement, because YOU are the one that actually lacks empathy. You're delighted that people who used to be able to pay for medical services no longer can, and must consider how to alter their financial, business, employment and tax landscapes to somehow work an angle where they, too, can be more dependent on the government and beg for money that someone ELSE is paying. All so you can scold and enjoy your moment of condescension and nanny state patronizing.
You're the selfish one - you'd rather tear down someone else's ability to choose whether or not they need insurance for maternity so that you can take the resulting wasted expense and use it as a political treat for the Nancy Pelosi types of the world to wisely distribute. Minus a cut, of course, for their huge new bureaucracy, populated by employees in federal unions that are forced to pay dues that end up being used to provide campaign cash for people like Pelosi. I get it. At least be honest about it.
A few states have tried to sabotage it
I live in the bluest of blue states, one which embraced the ACA fully and did everything Obama asked when it comes to playing along. The mandated coverage (things like maternity care for 70 year old women) are now so burdensome that the system is collapsing - we're down to two insurance companies left in the state, with one of them saying that they're losing hundreds of millions of dollars and will pull out next year.
Our situation IS typical - it's just that for most people, they're paying a large share of those huge premiums indirectly, by getting a smaller paycheck as their employer considers that whopping price tag to be part of their compensation. Everybody also pays indirectly as first-rate employers are now busy fleeing the state to set up in places that have lower costs. Or, those that are staying are negotiating other types of tax credits (on property, income, etc) in order to stay solvent if they want to keep participating in the state's economy. The ACA provides some medical financing for some people who previously wouldn't have had it, and it does so by breaking healthcare for the people being asked to actually pay for it.
It's falling apart here, in a state that is the prime example of one playing ball with what Pelosi, Reid, and Obama rammed through. Our state was willing to do the deal with the devil and expand Medicare, even knowing that in a few years when the your-first-hit-of-heroin-is-free federal subsidies for that would go away and all of those costs would fall on locally raised taxes. When you refer to the states that "tried to sabotage" this, what you're talking about are states that looked past the early pandering phase, and noticed that the ACA's state-level Medicare expansion would in short order come home to roost entirely on that state's budget - a huge new entitlement expense that would require such states to enormously raise taxes to pay for it. What it looks like to "expand Medicare" in the ACA's short term is completely pointless - it's like saying you have serious spending power because you have a credit card, and can put off paying it down for a little while.
What to do about it? The things the Democrats refused to do with their 100% partisan pandering law. Break down the 50 different state silos and allow people to shop across state lines for these financial services. Allow small employers and self employed people to join insurance-buying organizations so they can participate in far larger risk pools and greatly reduce costs for everyone involved. Pass tort reform, to actually get at some of main reasons that the actual practice of medicine is so absurdly high. These are all things the Republicans have been talking about for years. They had to leave them off of the currently-attempted bill for procedural reasons, since the Democrats say they'll block any attempt to pass the bill outside of the reconciliation channel.
The Democrats don't want a nation-wide market - that will cut down on some of their favorite campaign funding constituencies, which are bottled up in 50 redundant places. The Democrats don't want tort reform, because some of their biggest supporters are trial lawyers that get rich playing the frivolous malpractice suit lottery. Democrats don't want to allow small businesses to join larger market groups, because they prefer power to be invested in the government at every level, and consider larger pricate organizations that are oriented around market principles to be a threat to their more socialistic, nanny-state world view.