MAKE THE PIE HIGHER
By George W. Bush

(emphasis mine)

I'm not a neuroscientist. As far as I know, injecting bone marrow stem cells (and retinal pigment) or even embryonic stem cells into the eyeballs of people with macular degeneration seems to have a positive effect on their condition. Are the nerves in the eye more likely to respond to such therapy than nerves in the spine? If so, why?

Don't you mean christians and muslims? Or christianists and islamists? Why the inconsistency?

I was thinking more along the lines of Super Sonic Car (along the same lines as the Concorde SST being a Super Sonic Transport).

But I guess we'll never know.

And couldn't you actually post what it stands for instead of linking to some other site?!

If you aired ALF on your network you'd crush your competition! Or you'd be craving cat.

This is the best long thread I've had the pleasure of participating in on slashdot. So civil! So reasonable! Usually things would devolve to ad hominem attacks at this point. Instead, you treat me to "you're certainly entitled to your opinion." Refreshing!

In any case, I concede that this "if you like your plan" quote is misleading at best. Deliberately so, if I had to guess. Perhaps the context in which I heard it made me more willing to overlook the bullshit quotient that characterizes it. At the time Obama made this statement, the national dialog consisted in part of "death panel" alarmism and allegations of a federal takeover of healthcare services. I took Obama's words to be little more than a reassurance that while yes, things would be changing, no, people's worst fears were unfounded. In that context, under such an interpretation, his lie was a small one. However, it's not fair of me to assume that everyone interpreted his statement the same way I did. My sympathies go out to those that put their faith in Obama and took his words at face value only to be surprised by the very real disappearance of their insurance policies.

Conversely, the policy offered to me by my employer was also discontinued (due to the ACA, I was told). However, it was replaced by one that's virtually indistinguishable. If my experience isn't unique, and many policies were similarly discontinued (due to the ACA) but replaced by nearly-identical ones, that would mean that Obama's words were technically false. However, if that were the extent of the negative impact of the ACA (and I'm not suggesting that it is, merely pointing out how it could be perceived as such), would it really be worth all this commotion? Perhaps people that find themselves in a position similar to mine dismiss this entire dialog outright because they don't believe that people are actually losing coverage in any meaningful sense. I can at least speak for myself and say that I don't know how many people have truly been impacted by this legislation. There's a lot of contradictory and extreme claims coming from both sides of the debate, many of which are literally incredible. It's not even easy to trust "pure" statistics in such an environment. After all, even if everyone's insurance had been affected exactly the same way as mine (technically discontinued, but actually replaced by an indistinguishable one), statistics could be produced to suggest a 100% total elimination of the pre-ACA health insurance regime. In a climate where both sides are more interested in winning the debate more than arriving at a well-informed comprimise, is it any surprise that independent-minded people are hesitant to buy into any of this shit?

In any case, I grant that I'm too willing to forgive Obama on this point. I suppose that it's in large part because I've found his other failures to be so egregious that I feel that I can't be troubled to get worked up about what (to me) amounts to a molehill in comparison.

You can't possibly think that's what I mean, since I myself openly stated that I think the ACA is shitty. There's countless reasons to disagree with the ACA. If the "if you like your plan, you can keep your plan" quote is your biggest problem with this legislation, then you're not looking too closely.

News flash -- All politicians running for national office, both Democrat and Republican, do nothing but lie to gain or retain office. I never said Obama was an honest man, or that he kept his campaign promises. I merely pointed out that of all the things to point out as lies, the particular quote you're hung up on is relatively excusable. It's at least true in spirit to a large extent, since "if you like your plan [and your plan is not worthless, and your plan does not cripple risk pooling, and your plan continues to be profitable for your insurer, and your insurer remains solvent], you can keep your plan" would have actually been true (but too much of a mouthful to be a convenient sound byte). To get hung up that Obama didn't spell out the implied fine print regarding the ACA while overlooking his other failures and lies (say, his claims of heading the most transparent administration in American history while at the same time continuing to expand the opaque NSA surveillance apparatus) suggests you have no perspective regarding the magnitude of a lie.

Also, I caution you to be wary of your Republican friends as well. Your tone betrays your critical stance regarding Democrats, which is healthy only if balanced. I hope that you don't cheerlead for their primary opposition with the best of intentions only to find yourself supporting what amounts to be the other side of the same coin. There were those independent voters who were so disgruntled with Bush's Republicans that they eventually became supporters of Obama's Democrats. It wasn't long before many of them realized that they had been fooled again.

I know maternity coverage for men sounds crazy, much like AIDS coverage for celibate individuals who don't share needles, or transfusion coverage for Jehovah's Witnesses. Apparently you're new to the ideas of risk and risk pooling, and I'm afraid that an explanation of those is beyond the scope of a slashdot thread. Let's just say that the requirement for maternity coverage cannot alone explain the termination of any healthcare plans, since there's no prohibition against adding maternity coverage to plans that previously didn't offer any.

Score:+1, Offtopic

Your idea of "perfectly good" is at odds with reality. Just because you think a plan that allows the insurer to drop the covered with no notice is "perfectly good" doesn't mean that it is. People covered by such plans (and then dropped by such plans) put significant strain on the healthcare industry, much like other uninsured or underinsured individuals. The ACA outlaws such plans and forces people to get "real" health insurance, insurance that will actually cover them when they need it. There are other shitty plans that the ACA outlaws as well that are just as objectively shitty as these. The ACA doesn't outlaw "perfectly good" plans. I eagerly await any counterexample to my claim. Show me one of these "perfectly good" policies that was outlawed by ACA, along with the specific provision of the ACA that outlaws it, and I will in turn show you the reasoning behind said provision, and consequently why said policy is (or was) shit.

That being said, the ACA is retarded. It forces Americans to give their money to for-profit companies. Any mandatory insurance should be nationalized, be it healthcare, auto liability, etc.

You know, I'm no fan of Obama. He's been found to be full of shit on countless occasions. He's failed to keep his promises more often than not. He sucks as much as any other Democrat or Republican president before him.

That being said, I'm inclined to give him a free pass on the point you bring up. Honestly, I don't think it was unreasonable for him to believe that people covered by really shitty healthcare plans didn't actually like those plans. In hindsight, I suppose that was a stupid belief to have; of course people liked those plans, simply because those were the plans they had. That those plans would drop coverage the minute they actually needed it is irrelevant. People are not rational, they're stupid. That's the only thing Obama was guilty of when it comes to the quote you mention: forgetting the sheer number of imbeciles in this country.

He should've said "If you like your health care plan and your healthcare plan isn't totally worthless, you can keep it."

Sorry, did I post to slashdot.jp by accident?

*sigh*. You're right, we're living in an era of unparalleled cooperation between the two dominant political parties. The Republicans in the legislature haven't been obstinate for the sake of obstruction at all, no. *sigh*

And so this is your rationale for claiming that it was pushed down Americans' throats? That for the most part a minority of Americans were opposed to it? I suppose you're similarly opposed to any other legislation that falls short of unanimous support?

Sadly, it's unlikely that anything interesting will happen this year. I don't see the Democrat/Republican control over our government weakening any time soon. If you expect any meaningful change to come from either side of the same coin, you haven't been paying attention.

Not one Republican in Congress has voted for any bill supported by Obama. That's more an indication of hyperpartisanship than merit of the legislation itself. The ACA was pushed down Republicans' throats, for sure. Americans in general, however, supported it to various extents. I myself supported it, despite thinking it's shitty, because it's still less shitty than the alternative. Despite being a part of the "hates the ACA" statistic, I still supported its passage, and I wouldn't say it was pushed down my throat any more than our previous shitty healthcare system was pushed down my throat.