Yes! And people who enter the health care field (like neurosurgeons, or emergency medicine specialists) should NOT be allowed to make any more money than absolutely necessary to live in a specific, government-approved lifestyle. Every geographic area of the country has different costs of living, so we'll need an elaborate new government bureaucracy to decide, week-to-week, what is the exact amount that an anesthesiologist should earn in order to exactly pay for rent on his one bedroom apartment and modest level of grocery buying. Just to be sure, we should probably also regulate the exact dollar amount of that rent, too, because many landlords have tenants who are nurses or otherwise employed in health care, and they also should not be allowed to profit, even indirectly, from the fact that someone who couldn't be bothered to trim his toenails ended up getting an infection. Only government control of that entire economic food chain can assure us of fairness and efficiency!

It's true. There are thousands of doctors, sitting around in their practices with their staff and equipment and highly regulated record-keeping systems that are just waiting for something to do. If everyone could just walk into any doctor's office any time they wanted without a care in the world because some minority of their fellow citizens can be counted on to pay the bill, that would absolutely have no impact on how many doctors and services there are available. Why, it would be even more attractive to get into healthcare, right? Oh, wait, but you're going to make sure that no doctor can profit from the long years of hard work and the ongoing expense required to start and run a medical practice, so that might actually make some of them reconsider participating in your utopia. Or, they'll all just get that same carefully decided-on-by-government income every year, but move to where the cost of living is lower. But that's not fair! We'll have to regulate the cost of living, too, to make sure it's all socially equal. So even if it does cost more to get food and electricity and supplies to Hawaii, we'll have to force everyone in that supply chain to lose money providing it, just to be fair to people who live in Wisconsin or New Jersey.

Of course they have only criticism. The law is terrible. Millions of people lost their coverage, with the only option to be the new purchase of much more expensive plans or penalties by the IRS. In January, that same thing is going to happen to ten times as many people when the employer mandate (which Obama illegally delayed for political reasons to get it in past this recent election - a lot of good it did him!) kicks in. Typical costs for people who aren't on the subsidy/dole will go up, along with huge new deductibles, just as has already happened to millions of self employed people already. This was predicted, and has happened. That's exactly the sort of criticism the Republicans had, and they were shouted down as being racists or the usual crap, because the left didn't want to face the music.

The ACA doesn't "solve the health care crisis" in any way. It just raises prices for health insurance on one group, and uses some of that money (the part that doesn't get burned in a bonfire of government bureaucracy) is handed to other people. It's a wealth transfer tax that does nothing to actually change what it costs an OB/GYN to get malpractice insurance, or how much a radiologist has to pay for a mortgage, or what it costs to run all of the unnecessary tests that are run to fend off capricious law suits. The health care crisis exists because what we now think of as health care includes hugely costly equipment, chemicals, and legal defense insurance, along with people getting hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical services during the two weeks that they're about to die, because otherwise some John Edwards-style lawyer will be suing a hospital for millions, in pursuit of his 30% cut of the action.

The GOP has been calling for cross-border competition, tort reform, and the reduction in scam-infested government involvement in medical billing for many years. You're just not paying attention because it takes the fun out of your narrative.

He doesn't have to be eager, but he should do his job. The point is that he doesn't go to congress at all, and has been using Harry Reid's control over the Senate's legislative agenda to shut down hundreds of bills that come from the congress (headed towards the president to sign, if Reid would allow something like a simple vote, which he doesn't). What you don't hear, at all, is Obama telling Reid to allow anything like the normal bicameral functionality of the legislative branch. That is Obama's strategy, and Pelosi (before she blew it with voters) and Reid (before he just did, too) were his eager (to use your word) helpers on that front. The voters got sick of it. Now the president will have to actually sign or veto things, rather than staying out of the process and making Harry do all the work of shutting down the opposition.

You're describing the Democrats, right? Because, in cases like immigration or the completely partisan ObamaCare ramming-through episode, it was 100% the Democrats who said "No!" to any participation by the other party, or consideration of any of the measures they put forward. You're pretending they're ready and willing to compromise their own positions, but they've said over and over again that they're not. Obama just spent over an hour in a press conference, right after his party took a major smack-down, telling reporters that he "heard the voices of the two-thirds of the population that didn't vote" as being obvious supporters of his policies, and so he's feeling no need to compromise on anything.

Yes, it did. But Harry Reid has made absolutely sure that no bill offered up by the congress even goes into conference in the interests of a vote in the Senate. He won't talk, ever, because he doesn't want to expose Obama to having to actually sign anything that involves compromise, or veto something that makes sense but wasn't a 100% from-the-Democrats fantasy (like the ACA).

Pure BS. You obviously didn't bother to even pay attention to the campaigns and candidates that just beat back the Democrats in congressional, senate, and gubernatorial races across the country. There are Republicans from across the conservative/moderate spectrum. Your "purity" meme is just as false as the Obama-wants-to-compromise meme.

Again, either willful ignorance of years of examples, or deliberate attempt to deceive. The Republicans (who weren't allowed by Pelosi and Reid to even participate in the writing of the ACA) shouted to the rooftops about how the lack of cross-state insurance shopping, the Dem's fear-of-the-trial-lawyer-constituency unwillingness to include tort reform, the insanity of putting the federal government in the middle of even more health care transactions, the brand new wave of taxes and deficit spending tied up in the law, and the guaranteed spike in personal monthly rates and huge deductibles would make the law a train wreck. They pointed out specific details and proposed changes. None were considered by Pelosi or tolerated by Reid, and as Nancy said, they just had to pass the law so everyone who wasn't directly involved in writing its thousands of pages could see what was in it.

No, they're trying to listen to and act on behalf of the more than half of the country that hates the new law. Just wait until January when the delayed (illegally, unilaterally by Obama, in direct contradiction with his own pet law's crystal clear language) employer benefit mandate kicks in. Just as happened to millions of self employed people, policies are going to be cancelled by the millions, and rates for new policies that meet the ACA's crazy new standards will go through the roof, along with sky-high new deductibles. Those "previously couldn't afford it" folks are about to be joined by millions more who will NEWLY no longer be able to afford it, but this time they get to be fined and pursued by the enforcement division of the IRS to have their wages garnished if they don't buy the expensive new policies, whether they want them or not.

No, if you don't realize that when you preach government hand outs and control of the food market you're exactly looking to keep people poor and dependent, then you really need to re-examine what you think you understand about cause and effect.

So your main objective is to make absolutely certain that poor people stay poor and that other people, under penalty of going to jail, spend part of every day caring for them like pets. Nice.

People driving around in cars is only a tiny part of it. You could stop everyone from driving a petroleum fueled car right now, and it would make little or no difference. Heavy industry, HVAC in homes and businesses - that's what does it. The solution is nukes or one form or another. Solar and wind can't put a dent in it, and China's not going to stop putting a new coal-fired power plant online EVERY WEEK any time soon. Cars have got almost nothing to do with it.

Nope. I only use the word when people with an obvious agenda throw around pure fiction hoping nobody will notice.

My judgement that the distortion was deliberate was based on the ready availability of the truth, and agenda-laden, cop-bashing tone of the falsity.

Sure you did. You deliberately asserted that what you had to say was more accurate than the information presented, and proceeded to do a classic slashdot bashing of the officer that busted the operators of the fishing boat for breaking the law, saying the cop made it up.

No, that's LESS accurately, because that's not what happened. A crew member testified to the fact that that captain had him chuck the evidence of their illegal fishing. The "outlandish" claim here is yours. Why lie about it? What's your point?

Sure there was. One party wanted to put into place a huge, sweeping new law that was significantly unpopular with more than half of the population and bitterly opposed by 100% of the congressional minority's party opponents. The law would never have been passed if a handful of Democrat politicians hadn't been persuaded to support it despite their vocal misgivings. That persuasion came in the form of their constituents being convinced that the law wasn't going to hurt them, and those few representatives giving in and echoing Pelosi's and Obama's repeated soothing words. Those words were a months-long, sustained, carefully orchestrated campaign of deliberate, repeated lies. That's the scam part: getting someone to act based on fraud.

The lies - the foundation for the scam that secured the votes under false pretenses - were in the form of the repeated assertions that:

1) Personal insurance costs would go down. That is not true, and everyone from the CBO to every insurance actuary in the country said as much, loudly, in advance. But there was the president saying it was so, and that health insurance would cost about as much as a monthly mobile phone bill. He knew that wasn't true, and that in fact for millions of people immediately, and many millions more shortly after, monthly costs would go substantially up. Exactly as has happened.

2) That if we wanted to keep our current insurance plans, we could. Again, this was something they knew was not true. Saying it over and over again was a deliberate lie.

3) That if we wanted to keep our current doctors, we could. Again, like the above, a conscious, deliberate lie meant to fool people into supporting representatives that needed to vote for a law their initial instincts told them not to - and of course some have already refused to tell reporters if they'd vote for it again.

4) That the law wouldn't impact the budget deficit and debt. Again, as above, a purposeful, knowing deception. The CBO made it clear that wasn't the case, and indeed, it's not the case.

5) That buying annual insurance would be as simple as booking airline tickets on Expedia. That glib assertion wasn't a mistake or a misunderstanding, it was another bald-faced, completely self-aware lie. Nobody at any level of the many institutions involved in planning this ever thought anything so absurd was going to be the case, and of course it's not. Saying so, over and over again, was part of a deliberate misrepresentation.

There's much more, of course. But the point is that the law was sold to hesitant lawmakers and voters under false claims. It was a confidence game. A scam.

Millions of people had their plans cancelled, and many millions more are about to. How are you not clear on this? Many of them have had to go out and buy something different, but what they had was killed off, and what's available to replace it is far more expensive. The first group of millions who lost their plans were the self-employed types who are especially wounded by the ACA-approved "affordable" options that cost much more. And for those that weren't insured before because they couldn't afford it, and now have scraped together the hundreds per month to buy it, how many of them have the cash to handle thousands and thousands annually for what they must pay out of pocket before their high deductibles are satisfied? Those aren't the people able to buy the gold plans with the low deductibles. And of course many who have pre-existing conditions now get coverage, but the law is silent on how much that must cost them - so of course their choices are still very expensive. Our own rates are jumping hugely next year because of the unexpectedly (hah!) high number of healthy young people who have decided they'd rather pay a cheap fine than spend thousands a year on insurance when they're healthy, and then just opt in to buying it if they get sick. Like nobody saw THAT coming, right?

No, I completely dislike them for lying their asses off in order to pass a transparently flawed BS bill that doesn't do the very things they swore it would do. If they were merely incompetent, and didn't realize that, it would be bad enough. But they knew it, and lied about it non-stop for months. You know that, I know that, and everyone else knows that. Which is one of the reasons their prospects are so poor in today's election. They got caught planning, executing, and lying about a huge scam.

What I support is the first amendment. I don't care if Soros or the Kochs, or Barbara Streisand spent millions of dollars to organize the groups they like and use some media buys to say what they want to say. Because the alternative is having the government tell you what you can say. The republicans area about to take over the senate. Imagine they also get the executive branch in a couple of years because nobody can possibly stand the idea of Hillary Clinton wagging her finger at them for four years. Do you want a one-party government empowered to tell you want you can say about the government, or where you can say it? I don't want any party telling me that, and neither did the people who wrote the first amendment.

If you don't like the effect of communication aimed at swaying people's opinions about candidates or issues, focus your efforts on getting parents to teach critical thinking skills to their kids, so that such advertising won't work later when they grow up. You don't find that such ads change your behavior, do you? Are you that weak-minded? I don't find that they change mine, though I respect your right to run such an ad if you want to.

No, I'm just the tip of the iceberg. If this new law were actually lowering the average person's annual health care costs, the administration wouldn't be issuing gag orders to the insurance companies preventing them from announcing their 2015 rates until after the election, with none of the traditional 60 day window that allows people to shop around with better information. Right now, you should be able to see numbers from employer-oriented programs, but you're not. Because they've been prevented from conducting normal "open season" operations, per the administration. It's 100% about the election.

Millions of new policy cancellations will kick in on Jan 1, as people who were buying what they could afford will now be forced to buy more than they can afford. I'm lucky. I can stop spending money in other areas (too bad, economy!) and instead pour thousands more every year into unusable (except for catastrophe) insurance. A lot of people who make less money cannot do that. But the plans that include being given some of other people's money in order to make them more affordable don't kick in until you make essentially poverty-grade income. So the middle class is being squeezed once again, entirely for political reasons. The law doesn't actually do anything that results in lower costs for buying the professional services and equipment overhead involved in getting an x-ray done, or make fewer people necessary during a surgery, or reduce the overhead in running medical practice (the opposite, actually). Doctors are no less obliged to conduct unspeakable numbers of pointless procedures and tests in order to pre-emptively fend off capricious law suits - OB-GYNs are still having to spend $500-$1000 a DAY on malpractice insurance, and I still can't shop across state lines for a more efficiently run plan.

The law - which only exists on the books because of shameless (and endlessly repeated) lies and 100% partisan maneuvering despite popular push-back that has only grown ever since - does only one thing. It raises prices and taxes on one group of people in order to transfer that to other people. It has nothing whatsoever to do with paying a doctor or a lab or a hospital less for their skills and the materials used. It's entirely about transferring money from one group to another. And it should have been introduced and debated on the merits of THAT, which is its actual purpose and effect. Instead, it was sold as resulting in health insurance that would cost people "about what your monthly mobile phone costs," which would allow people to keep their insurance and their doctors if they wanted to, which wouldn't impact the deficit, and which would get 30 million people magically insured without costing anything more. I would call that a BS fantasy, but it wasn't, since the authors of the law and the people who rammed it through under the power of only one political part KNEW that was all complete BS, and lied about it anyway.

You're suggesting that perhaps I "feel screwed." The question is, why don't you? Are you really in the whatever-means-to-an-end camp? Where do you draw that line? It's OK to scam the country about something impacting nearly a sixth of the economy, and which is about to cost another several million people their insurance, so that that one party can tell their slavishly predictable voting demographic that they've got them another subsidized goody? You were also screwed, whether you want to admit it or not.

What about them? They spend less than rich Democrats do, so the only reason you're mention only that name is because you've got some sort of fetish about it. I wonder why.

And I don't believe that. The rates in question are common knowledge. There are only three insurance providers allowed by the government to operate in our state. We went with the LEAST expensive option (CareFirst) - the other two providers were 15% and 32% more expensive, respectively, on the monthly rates, and about the same on the huge deductibles. The problem isn't that you don't believe it, it's that you're trying to wish it away.

And even as you say you don't believe it, you run down a list of things that would contribute to exactly what I described. The only reason you're not seeing this for millions and millions more people is because the employer mandate was illegally pushed back by Obama until after tomorrow's election. When that kicks in - a year later than it the law he signed said it must - there will a lot more people for you to not believe, not just us millions of self employed and small business types.

What's irrational about it? Obama and Pelosi stood there, time after time, and sold their new law by knowingly and deliberately lying about some of its key features. Lying, over and over again. Pelosi assured us we'd need to pass it to see what was in it, and echoed Obama in promising we'd be able to keep our insurance (a lie) and our doctor (another one).

And drug addicts? It's simple: neither my wife nor I are. If we were to become such, our previous insurance would have provided services along those lines, but we'd have had to include those expenses in our (much lower than now) deductible. Likewise, in the laws-of-physics-make-it-impossible scenario of us suddenly getting pregnant. Our previous insurance would have also helped there, but our deductible would have still been involved.

In both these cases, the new law mandates that the insurer provides these services (typically, $20,000+ for a normal birth, for example) without that being subject to the deductible. Because they have to pay all of the costs of their customers' decision to have a baby, the insurers do simple math and raise the rates that fund those payments. We have fancy new maternity coverage we don't need, but for which we are certainly paying a lot more because of the Affordable act. You say you "don't believe" this. Which simply can't be the case, because these are simple facts, right in front of you. Your condescending dismissal is pretty transparent.

Your fake sense of smell is about as honest as your fake tutt-tutting about the truth. I'm not a martyr, I'm just one of the very deliberate new beasts of burden baked right into the law on purpose as it seeks to dole out new entitlements to a demographic that typically votes for the party that unilaterally rammed the law through. Gee, what a surprise.

Right, and if I get a disease my insurance covers it, after we pay our $12,000 deductible. Last year, it would have been after we paid a $2,500 deductible. But if we get another expensive condition (pregnancy), no need to worry! It's all covered. Just ... pay that new $800/month rate, instead of the $250 you were paying, right?