[quote=FlyerInHi]Haha, BG… I was right about Obama winning and winning again. In 2012, republicans were pretty convinced that Obama would be a 1 term president. Oh how wrong they were. But that’s besides the point.[/quote]
If you will recall, Obama won the Dem nomination in 2008 solely by successfully stealing (plucking off) “pledged” superdelegates from Hillary at the convention (the 11th hr) after winning the primaries by a razor-thin margin. This could most certainly happen to her again! Never say never, brian. Her campaign is currently embroiled in the same level of fierce competition for the nomination as they had against Barack Obama in 2008.
Stranger things have happened. CA millenials LOVE Bernie and they, as a group, now outnumber the boomers, cuz we’re slowly dying off. Not only are college and university campuses helping students process their voter registrations in droves, this is also being done on CA military bases, outside exchange and commissary shopping areas, which are FULL of millenial active duty members and their spouses.
[quote=FlyerInHi]The ACA is now covering so many people that it would be political suicide to repeal it. Even if republicans win the presidency and congress, they may call for repeal, but there will have to be a transistion to something else. There cannot be status quo ante.
Republican know that obamacare is their own plan from the 1990s when Hillary was working on health care. All they can do is tweak it and call it repeal.[/quote]Umm, brian, there aren’t that many people in the US who signed up for “obamacare” in the form of “private” healthplans. There are many more millions of Americans who signed up for Medicaid/Medi-cal (either willingly or force-placed into it) since the passage of the ACA.
Actually, just ~12.7M Americans (~4% of the US population) had a marketplace plan as of January 2016. Those who are keeping their premiums current (and have not since been involuntarily “bumped” into Medicaid/Medi-Cal) are representative of the 12.7M who signed up for a marketplace plan for 2016:
The ACA was actually designed to force as many people into Medicaid as possible as quickly as possible and 19 states have not agreed to participate in expanded Medicaid for this reason (and the cost, especially after the 93% Federal aid cutoff to the states in 2022).
All that had to be done was to expand Medicaid voluntarily so that those who couldn’t obtain policies under the pre-ACA health insurance climate could be covered (either because they couldn’t afford it or couldn’t get a policy due to pre-existing conditions . . . or both). OR, in the alternative, create state insurance pools where carriers rotated to take on members with pre-existing conditions as a cost of being permitted to do business in the state (much like state auto insurance pools and the CA Earthquake Authority). Instead, everyone got screwed in the form of doubled and tripled premiums (so far) and a very thin choice of carriers (just one PPO carrier offered in almost all regions) to choose from. My own 2016 obamacare premium was going to be 296% of my 2013 (pre-ACA) premium but I dropped a metal level last fall for 2016 and it is now a mere 231% of my 2013 premium :=0
If the rest of us hadn’t been screwed out of our existing policies and all the carriers hadn’t been compelled to jump ship out of state individual markets, there wouldn’t be many complaints about the ACA, IMO.
The Federal mandate as well as the gubment constantly in your business when you’ve never taken a dime of “welfare” in your life is why millions of Americans who had no choice but to sign up for coverage on the ACA exchanges are up in arms and beyond fed up over the “obamacare” debacle. And rightly so . . . who could blame them?
YOU (brian/FIH) are not affected by the ACA because you posted that YOU have employer-provided coverage. You are ostensibly partly self-employed and believe me, if you applied on your exchange and were granted a “subsidy” to help pay your now exorbitant premiums of your “marketplace” plan, you would ALSO be vociferously complaining here about being treated like a “second-class citizen!”
As such, you are not in a position to see the damage the ACA bureaucracy has done to so many millions of people. Even many enrolled tax preparers didn’t know how to handle the Form 1095’s issued to taxpayers by employers, the military, retirement associations and the marketplace for tax year 2015. No less than 4 (out of 7) people I helped sign up on the exchange brought me their infamous “12C letters” from the IRS after an enrolled agent prepared and filed their taxes for them and didn’t fill out their Form 8962 correctly! I had to refill these forms out for them with my tax software, filling in all the correct boxes and change the figures on the second page of their 1040 to correspond with the new Form 8962 and fax both documents back to the IRS to a special fax number set up for this purpose under their own cover sheet. All four eventually got their (correct) refunds. This second debacle, (another byproduct of the obamacare subsidy confusion) held up these individuals’ tax refunds for an additional 1-3 months.
[quote=FlyerInHi]Be careful with Trump. I believe that a Trump administration would turn America into more of a Randian, Darwinian society where winners win and losers lose, huge. Try to make sure you’re on the winning side.[/quote]I’m not worried about “Darwinism” or “Randism.” Not only is it not going to happen but I’m all but out of the workforce and now completely out of the stock market so am essentially immune from being affected by any of it. I’m not expecting our president to create conditions which will take care of me for life or change SS (OASDI) and Medicare in a significant enough manner to affect me in any way, shape or form. I have a nearly $400 mo Medicare Part B/D allowance for life and could avail myself of off-exchange (expensive) healthplans offered by my retirement assn if I wish to. I also have other lower-cost medical-coverage choices which involve relocation. It doesn’t even matter to me if Bernie gets in and manages to successfully push a single-payor system through.
