usmbguest5318
Gold Member
No. O-care, for all it's ills is not a single-payer insurance system. "Single-payer" insurance systems discard and drive out of business for-profit health insurance policies and replaces them with a public, universal plan.
Medicare is the closest thing we have to that; however, it works in concert with insurance coverage offered by for-profit companies. Indeed, it's not at all driven such companies out of business, not even close seeing as the health insurance industry continues to see capital growth year after year; thus one cannot credibly assert even that Medicare poses a threat in the guise of an O-care "Trojan horse" that portends the demise of the health insurance industry in the U.S.
And this is the problem. ObamaCare works just fine in the big cities. Its' the rural areas where there aren't enough young people signing up that the insurance companies don't want to be bothered with if the government doesn't subsidize them.
This is why when they realized that the rural areas would be hurt the worst by an ACA repeal, the Republicans did this...
Well, that seems plausible.
The thing is that if circumstances are such that one must choose between living in whatever rural locale one lives and having health insurance (affordable), one confronts several choices:
- Move
- Obtain for a individual-mandate hardship waiver
- Quit crying and choose an O-care health insurance offering
- Change jobs
I realize that politically, one might advocate and lobby for a different set of options; however, before doing so, one must ask oneself whether a new paradigm that improves one's situation but worsens that of millions of other is in fact any better for the nation. Thinking rationally about that quandary, it's hard to conclude that one set of millions of uninsured citizens is inherently better than having any other set of uninsured citizens. Whichever model yields the smaller quantity of uninsured people is probably the better of two suboptimal alternatives. That may change if and when elected officials enact a solution that produces a lower quantity of uninsured and inadequately insured people overall -- and we see the GOP's inability to devise and pass such a thing -- but until that time arrives, little other than a utilitarian approach makes sense.