I understand that. Recall that I described the example of bad scam policies, and how I thought getting rid of those would be a good thing, even if the people who purchased them might think they want them.

I understand this too. I too as a younger person may not want insurance that covers hip replacements until I think I might need them. The good news is that the cost of insuring an 80 year old for maternity care is probably pretty cheap, just like insuring an 18 year old for a hip replacement is probably really cheap (since neither is very likely). What's nice about this arrangement is that a lot of confusion in terms of what is covered and what isn;t is simplified for not much more cost, and in rare cases when people get pregnant (when they thought they couldn't) or in the odd cases where a college kid actually needs a hip replacement is still covered.

I suppose you could choose to look at it this way if you want. The other way you could look at it is that your existing plan might have become more comprehensive and more expensive, if they happened not to be deemed comprehensive enough.

I don;t doubt there are some examples where it doesn't work well. I also know for sure that there are examples of people who basically had very cheap scam insurance that are angry that they are now forced to pay more for something rather than less for nothing. But I am constantly hearing about people getting what they think is affordable insurance only to find it covers nothing they need, and they are completely screwed. But given the nature of insurance, those people may not ever know how precarious their position was especially if they were forced to switch to a more comprehensive insurance before they ever tried to use their old one for something big.

So you are describing a scenario where your existing doctor no longer accepts insurance? I'm not sure why you can't get the insurance your preferred doctor accepts.

I realize this is not an all encompassing example. I merely mentioned it as an example of someone "not being able to keep their doctor", but not necessarily due to "Obama's lies".

The law doesn't force people to buy very expensive insurance nor does is force people to get a new provider. The law forces people to buy insurance that meets minimum government requirements (i.e. it removes the option to buy insurance that doesn't meet these guidelines).

Imagine this example:

The government passes a law saying all automobiles must have seatbelts. Obama comes out and says "Don't worry, you can still buy the same cars, they will just have seatbelts in them". One company decides it would rather close up shop than take orders from Obama and sell cars with seatbelts. Was Obama lying when he said you can buy the same cars? What if you wanted to specifically buy a car with no seatbelt, and not pay the extra cost of a car with a seatbelt?

This is how I basically look at it. Obama is saying "Don't worry there is still going to be Ford trucks with seatbelts, and toyota camrys with seatbelts, etc". Unfortunately if you really wanted to buy a car with no seatbelt, or if you really wanted to spend $200 less and risk driving without a seatbelt you are out of luck (and that was no doubt intentional). Was he lying? I guess technically. But why focus on that when there is a car company lying to cover up how many people die in accidents that seatbelts could prevent. To me the motivation for why someone is "lying" really matters.

Is it lying when a parent tells their child "this shot is going to be for your own good, and it will only hurt for a second", even though the parent knows that 0.1% kids have an allergic reaction to the shot and it will actually hurt a lot and be a bad thing?

If someone asked "What if someone likes their plan but it doesn;t meet the requirements, can they keep it?" I don't know, but I suspect Obama would have said "No, but you probably wouldn't want to.

And here is the thing. We can't even have nuanced conversations anymore in politics. Everything needs to be in 20 second sound bytes for the news to cover it. And if you don;t speak in 20 second sound bytes, the news will convert your speech into those snippets as they see fit.

So I see what Obama said as basically true, even if it wasn't technically true for every single person. And I think on the whole it probably has done a lot of good for society. I'm sorry if you were one of the people who got a raw deal.

As a person who can't stand 99% of politicians, democrats included, I just don't get the animosity directed toward Obama. One of the few politicians who seem like they legitimately care about helping people, and don't seem to be in it for their own benefit, and there are more people than ever saying he's a liar, and arrogant, and seem to just hate the guy.

I don't know if you fall into this category or not (I won;t presume to know), but a lot of people just don't want Obamacare to succeed because they don't like Obama. There were numerous cases of people claiming their insurance had gone up, but it turned out they didn't even really try to get better plans by going on the health care exchanges. They just gave up and decided Obamacare was broken and made a big stink. I remember one case where a reporter did some investigations into a particular case and found the person could actually get a better plan for less money on one of the exchanges and the person said they didn;t trust the exchanges if they were run by Obama or something to that effect.

I didn't vote for Obama. I didn't like the ACA enough to support it, but I feel like the vitriol against Obama and Obamacare is just ridiculous, especially considering all the things going on in Washington that are far more worthy to hate.

I know I certainly don't, which is why I wanted a citation.

I am not really on any extreme side of this debate, I just thought I saw a claim that contradicted my worldview (which happens frequently), and wanted a citation to determine for myself if it was credible.

As it turns out I think the statement was simply very misleading, even if *maybe* technically true.

I'm pretty open to differing points of view. I don't think there is much to be gained by attaching an ideology that you are bound to defend at all costs. When when I do decide to drink the kool-aid of an ideology, I am very careful about what it is (e.g. scientific method, rules of logic, etc)

I don't doubt this is the case. I suspect there are some doctors that retired simply to spite obamacare. My point is that I understood Obama's statement to mean "This law won't prevent you from keeping your doctor, should your doctor still want to be your doctor". I don't expect Obama to guarantee that everyone's doctor will still want to be their doctor.

1. Getting rid of insurance plans that don't offer enough protection is important (regardless of whether you agree with the specific rules defined in the ACA. My wife who works in the industry finds lots of people who think they are insured, only to find out they have been buying insurance that covers almost nothing they might actually want (i.e. they are scams) 2. Your insurance covers other people's maternity as well. You may not feel like that's fair, but they are covering your hip surgeries, etc.

So nobody being treated at the 2 nearest and best hospitals is insured? Or are they just paying more?

It sounds like you've just decided Obama is a liar and everything he says can only confirm that belief.

I'm not even going to bother to dispute this. I highly doubt Obama has never lied in a speech to the country.

I will offer a counterexample. My mother's insurance costs actually went down from the ACA. I suspect that despite many differing claims of insurance rates going up or down, what really needs to be considered is that levels of coverage have also been going up and down for those same people, and that difference isn't always as obvious as the dollar amount coming out of your paycheck.

From how I interpreted it, Obama didn't lie, especially relative the the level of lies I have come to expect from politicians. My company switched from bluecross to aetna after ACA passed. I had to switch my primary care doctor because of it. The fact that this happened *after* the ACA does not mean it was *because of* the ACA. It was my company that decided to switch insurance companies. Even if they did it because of the ACA for whatever reason, that switch is on them. They could have kept bluecross, but they decided to switch to aetna. And it's not the first time they switched. Even before the ACA, they switched from from a different one (can't even remember who) to bluecross.

I think it's true that Obama never intended to ensure that companies would be forced to keep the same insurance policies for their workers. I didn't think this counted as a "not being able to keep your doctor because of the ACA", I counted it as "not being able to keep your doctor because your company changed providers"

HornWumpus said that "[Coal is replenishing] fast enough that there is no chance of it running out."

If we have so much that we will not run out any time soon, fine. But if that is the case, then the rate of replenishment doesn't matter at all.

I was under the impression that coal was being used at orders of magnitude faster than it is being replenished, and I thought this was being disputed in this thread, but maybe it actually isn't.

Am I correct in saying that a replenishment rate of zero is still fast enough to keep up with demand?

OK, but even if the rate of replenishment were zero or even negative, there would be "no chance" of it running out in the "foreseeable future" if there were enough of it.

That's called shrinking the deficit to zero.

You are thinking of the debt which is >0 even if the deficit == 0

If we want to just kick over the table, there are numerous choices that aren't Donald Trump. We could just choose the president via random lottery and also give them $7 billion so they aren't in anyone's pocket. I think if we did that, we'd have a better outcome than a Trump presidency. At least with a random person there is a reasonably good chance that they will be a moral.

I'm all for not electing the same corrupt assholes we've been electing, but I'm not ready to flush the whole country down a classy gold plated toilet just yet.

I would trust the nations nuclear weapons with Kim Kardashian more than with Trump.

Or we develop a good way to store the energy. We could invest in better batteries, or we can pump water up a hill, or lift heavy things to high places, or spin things really fast in a vacuum, or use the energy to split water molecules, etc.

Maybe we would lose a lot of energy transferring it from one form to another, but it's better than just wasting it to heat immediately.

The price of pollution can be tied to the cost of reversing it. If you want to know the cost of putting a bunch of chemicals in the water, just use price of filtering them out again. If we can't actually "fix" the problem through direct action (e.g. hole in the ozone), then determine what level of CFC emission is acceptable and set the price of emission such that we ensure the actual emissions are below that threshold.

Economists are smart. There are very good and mostly objective ways of coming up with these price points.

Energy intensive == using more energy. The kid who needs power-hungry medical equipment is not any less "energy intensive" simply because he/she *needs* that machine, that would be a subjective assessment. An ambulance that gets 10MPG isn't any more fuel efficient than a moving truck that gets 10MPG, simply because it is used to save lives.

The economist answer is to have everyone pay the fair market price for energy (actually everything), and if some people need extra assistance in paying for goods (i.e. social welfare), then you give them vouchers or cash. You don't pervert the market and subsidize the goods to make them artificially cheaper for everyone.

If little sick Billy's electric bill is an additional $300 per month for his medical equipment, then you have (insert social program) reimburse Billy's family $300/month. This way there is still an incentive for Billy's family to try and use less electricity when it makes sense. If you just give Billy's family free electricity, then there is no incentive for them to spend $x on new weatherstripping, even if it would drastically cut their energy usage.

If you give out subsidies for solar panels, then lots of people may get them, even if it doesn't make economic sense for them, or the environment.

When you have a well running market, the choices of what makes sense economically translate into what is best from a resource management perspective. We don't ever get that perfect market, but we should be striving for that.