OK, I am just trying to clear up what is being claimed. I found it to be a bit misleading to say "The rate of X is high enough for Y to be true", only to find out that what was actually being claimed is that Y would be true regardless of the rate of X (or at least as long as X isn't a very large negative number).

It's *true* that if you like your doctor you can keep him. What you are not allowed to do is keep a scam insurance policy.

The people who really want to keep bad insurance policies are outliers.

He claimed lots of things, mostly to combat the ridiculous claims made by republicans (e.g. death panels, government telling you who your doctor will be, etc). People are naturally afraid of big changes. ACA was a big change. It is important that people realize that it will not involve the government forcing you to get a different doctor, and deciding when it is your time to die and killing you.

"If you like your doctor you can keep him" is basically true except for the following scenarios:
1. Your doctor doesn't want to be your doctor anymore (retirement, etc).
2. You currently had an inadequate insurance plan and are completely unwilling to pay more money for an adequate plan that includes your preferred doctor.
3. Your doctor decides to stop taking insurance.
4. Your company decides to switch insurence policies to one your doctor doesn't take.

These are things that would have prevented you from keeping your doctor even if the ACA had not become law, and they continue to be that way even after the ACA.

The only exception is that you are no longer allowed to buy inadequate insurance, which is a good thing, seeing what a serious problem it is. I'm sorry if you have to pay more money, but that's what a non-scam plan costs. For most people who already bought insurance their insurance is actually cheaper. For people with no insurance (or people with inadequate insurance), it will be more expensive.

I don't think anyone tried to hide that information.

She gives reasons as to why the comparison is not appropriate. Are these reasons bad? Which ones are bad, and why are they bad?

I think you've been watching too much Fox News.

I don't think that includes efforts to make it better. There is a justified assumption that any changes to the ACA being offered by republicans are obvious attempts to kill it.

If republicans actually decided to try to make it better, and Obama worked with them to make it happen, you'd probably call him a liar again for lying about vetoing any attempts to change the law.

Wouldn't this still be true even if 0 coal was being replenished?

So you *could* keep your doctor in your hypothetical example if not for the fact that you can't afford it.

I will say that doctors will decide to stop accepting certain kinds of insurance even before the ACA. This is not a new thing that only existed after the ACA, and I don't think there is anyway to prevent doctors from changing what kind of insurance they accept even if the ACA were not passed.

Actually it says you as a healthy 18 year old must subsidize sick old people.

Forcing people to switch to a new plan, does not count as taking health care away from people. Furthermore, even if you have no plan now, the fact that insurance companies can not refuse to cover you due to per-existing conditions, means that you will not be stuck uninsured. The worst that can happen is that you are forced to pay a fine for not buying insurance, and this fine is actually less than what it costs to buy insurance.

The supreme court says otherwise. This is what I am talking about when I say the detractors want the bill to be worse in an effort to turn public opinion against it, even if it means people not getting healthcare they need.

So let me ask you this. If Obama is a liar. Who is not a liar?

It seems like she does understand this, but is saying that the comparison of collision rates to hardware failures is not appropriate.

On page 4 she says:

I have never heard of Val Henson before just right now, so I don't have any dog in this fight, but it seems like your characterization of what she doesn't understand is over-simplified.

I think we can all agree that the world that the world that shitty people want reflects their personality. I think feminism and political correctness can often go overboard, but you just seem like a total shithead. As much as I hate the political correctness movement, if it gets rid of people like you (or just shuts you the fuck up), it's worth it.

Hillary Clinton killed the ambassador? I guess Bush must have killed all the people on 9/11 then.

I fucking hate Hillary. I think she is a despicable person. But that doesn't mean everything is her fault. The desperate attempt by republicans to pin something from benghazi on her, just seems pathetic. As someone who would love to see Hillary go down, I wish republicans weren't so dumb.

What I am saying is that unless the doctor doesn't take *any* kind of insurance, then you should be able to get the kind of insurance that the doctor accepts, and get the doctor you want. The fact that insurance companies can no longer deny coverage should make this even easier to do than before.

I don't like what he stands for and preaches ideologically, which is why I didn't vote for him. What I don't understand is why people hate him so much. I can disagree with someone without hating them. I actually like lots of people I disagree with and dislike lots of people I do agree with. Despite my ideological disagreement with Obama, he (unlike most other politicians, seems very reasonable, unlike the people who seem to be opposing him just for the sake of opposing him.

I don't like the nanny state either. What I like even less is people dying because they have no insurance and can't afford treatment. I am willing to let people deal with the consequences of their decisions for just about everything as long as that consequence is not their premature death.

I am fine with forcing people to plan for their own healthcare. They are not responsible enough to be trusted to do it themselves. For every other thing, I think the best way to shape behavior is to let people make mistakes and let the consequences be the deterrent for making those mistakes again. But it is because I want people to thrive, not because I want to keep my own money for myself, which is why I treat healthcare differently.

And yes government healthcare is a disaster. The only thing worse is private healthcare. We are paying more for healthcare in the US (even with insurance), than other countries are paying (without insurance), and getting worse care. We don;t have the best healthcare in the world, we only have the most expensive healthcare.

It seemed like the majority was in favor of it at the time, and even more people are in favor of it now. The people who are not in favor of it are basically people who hate Obama and everything he wants to do, regardless of what it is.

I actually didn't support the bill because I thought it could be done better (i.e. in a way that better decreases the costs of healthcare, and doesn't let insurance companies get away with all the BS they still get away with now).

That said, it seemed like other people hated the bill because of who was behind it. And they actually worked (and to a large degree succeeded) in making it worse in order to try to kill it. This is something I don't understand. Why not try to make it better rather than worse?

And yet those same people seem to have no problem with other politicians lying to them for selfish reasons, and I can't understand the double standard.

All the nit picky things they point out in Obama they ignore much worse in other politicians.

Obama's "lies" got lots of people healthcare they wouldn't otherwise have. Bush's lies got thousands of American soldiers killed for nothing (not to mention Iraqi civilian lives and trillions of dollars). But Obama is the bad guy. As someone who actually voted for republicans in the last 2 elections, I just don't get the effort spent to find evil in Obama and ignore it in other people.

I don't have "faith" in markets be perfect. In fact I think I said " We don't ever get that perfect market, but we should be striving for that."

I don't claim that a a solution to this problem exists. All I am claiming is that the economic problems are not hard, and economists on either side of the left/right keynes/austrian divide could probably agree on solutions that are better than what we have.

The solution I can see to regulatory capture is a more informed electorate, although I don't see how we get to that. But I don't see any solution that doesn't involve a more informed electorate.

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.

When the government is too lazy or incompetent to find the person who killed your father, they can just give you permission to find the killer and bring whatever justice seems fair. I don't see how anything bad that can come of this, nor its cyberspace analogue.

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"