Newbie here, just chiming in.
To start, I was raised a Republican, but over the last few years I've decided I'm pretty much center of the road - I'm tired of all the partisan back-biting. That said, there are a lot of misnomers about the health care law floating around - largely due to politicians twisting the truth to make things seem better or worse than what they are.
For those who are mad enough to leave the country over this, please remember that many other 1st world countries have government-run healthcare... Canada, England, much of Europe... so if you don't like this piece of legislation, do some research prior to packing up your house.
The cost of medical care for uninsured people (who can't afford to pay) is in the hundreds of millions each year. Through the trickle-down effect, that ends up swallowing up hundreds of millions in tax-payer dollars. Sure - it's easy to say a health 28-year-old should have the *freedom* to not have health insurance because he may not need much health care, but at any given moment, said healthy 28-year-old could be hit by a drunk driver and spend the next year in a hospital recovering from nasty internal injuries and a traumatic head injury. That head injury could require a life-time of follow-up care or even a nursing home. Since the healthy 28-year-old had no health insurance, all of those bills are passed on to the hard-working tax payers.
Now then, if all healthy 28-year-olds are mandated to have coverage, the insurance companies will be better able to afford to pay for continuing care for the few that are rendered incapacitated by drunk drivers, cycling accidents, simple stupidity or what ever. That takes a huge chunk OUT of what tax payers pay.
It's easy to look at the legislation and see it as having a freedom taken away, but you can also look at it and see that this legislation attempts to free you of paying for millions of other people who don't have insurance - regardless of their health. Yes - you have to pay for insurance, but you have to pay property taxes and taxes that help to educate the next generation and keep roads drivable... it's all part of the big picture.
Where am I coming from on this? Six years ago I had a mortgage on a nice house, two kids and both myself and my husband worked. We had "great" health insurance. Then I got pregnant again, and much to our dismay our youngest was born 10 weeks early weighing only 2 lbs 7 oz. There were complications. The CO-PAYs alone reached 1/4 a million dollars! (Yeah - that was quite a bit more than the house we were living in was worth.)
We...
Lost...
Everything!
You know what we did? In our 30's we were forced to move across country and into my parent's basement. We had to live there about 4 months until my husband could find work in VA. I couldn't go back to work because I was playing full-time nurse to a child with a feeding tube (can't just throw a kid with wires and tubes into daycare).
The new health care law would have made it so that we could have kept our house, our jobs and not lose everything. Some people say, "Oh, well your situation is rare."
Guess what? No it's not! People have accidents every day. People are diagnosed with cancer every day. Premature babies are born every day... Huge medical bills are the #1 reason people go bankrupt... and all those unpaid bills???
Yup - all us hard-working tax-payers pay them!
So no - I'm not a fan of Obama, but I think it's important for people to educate themselves through reliable sources on legislation like this before decrying it.
You can't learn all about it from me, or from your friends, from what you read in FaceBook posts or even from partisan politicians. You need to get your information from non-partisan, factual sites.
No - it's not perfect, but it does have some good points.
To start, I was raised a Republican, but over the last few years I've decided I'm pretty much center of the road - I'm tired of all the partisan back-biting. That said, there are a lot of misnomers about the health care law floating around - largely due to politicians twisting the truth to make things seem better or worse than what they are.
For those who are mad enough to leave the country over this, please remember that many other 1st world countries have government-run healthcare... Canada, England, much of Europe... so if you don't like this piece of legislation, do some research prior to packing up your house.
The cost of medical care for uninsured people (who can't afford to pay) is in the hundreds of millions each year. Through the trickle-down effect, that ends up swallowing up hundreds of millions in tax-payer dollars. Sure - it's easy to say a health 28-year-old should have the *freedom* to not have health insurance because he may not need much health care, but at any given moment, said healthy 28-year-old could be hit by a drunk driver and spend the next year in a hospital recovering from nasty internal injuries and a traumatic head injury. That head injury could require a life-time of follow-up care or even a nursing home. Since the healthy 28-year-old had no health insurance, all of those bills are passed on to the hard-working tax payers.
Now then, if all healthy 28-year-olds are mandated to have coverage, the insurance companies will be better able to afford to pay for continuing care for the few that are rendered incapacitated by drunk drivers, cycling accidents, simple stupidity or what ever. That takes a huge chunk OUT of what tax payers pay.
It's easy to look at the legislation and see it as having a freedom taken away, but you can also look at it and see that this legislation attempts to free you of paying for millions of other people who don't have insurance - regardless of their health. Yes - you have to pay for insurance, but you have to pay property taxes and taxes that help to educate the next generation and keep roads drivable... it's all part of the big picture.
Where am I coming from on this? Six years ago I had a mortgage on a nice house, two kids and both myself and my husband worked. We had "great" health insurance. Then I got pregnant again, and much to our dismay our youngest was born 10 weeks early weighing only 2 lbs 7 oz. There were complications. The CO-PAYs alone reached 1/4 a million dollars! (Yeah - that was quite a bit more than the house we were living in was worth.)
We...
Lost...
Everything!
You know what we did? In our 30's we were forced to move across country and into my parent's basement. We had to live there about 4 months until my husband could find work in VA. I couldn't go back to work because I was playing full-time nurse to a child with a feeding tube (can't just throw a kid with wires and tubes into daycare).
The new health care law would have made it so that we could have kept our house, our jobs and not lose everything. Some people say, "Oh, well your situation is rare."
Guess what? No it's not! People have accidents every day. People are diagnosed with cancer every day. Premature babies are born every day... Huge medical bills are the #1 reason people go bankrupt... and all those unpaid bills???
Yup - all us hard-working tax-payers pay them!
So no - I'm not a fan of Obama, but I think it's important for people to educate themselves through reliable sources on legislation like this before decrying it.
You can't learn all about it from me, or from your friends, from what you read in FaceBook posts or even from partisan politicians. You need to get your information from non-partisan, factual sites.
No - it's not perfect, but it does have some good points.
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