Obamacare written to deceive the public.

[Aractus]

Your claim was that he's "giving money to insurance companies" - how? I've not seen you defend this at all, as far as I know about the policy it is legislative, not budgetary. It aims to improve market conditions, not to increase government spending (although the increased spending is, as I've mentioned several times now, unavoidable).

Suppose I am a producer of Vegimite. I lobby my government to pass a law that says every citizen must buy my Vegimite or pay a stiff tax. To help the poor, taxes will be raised to give poor people subsidies to buy Vegimite. Now did they do this because Vegimite is good for citizens or did they do it because they were bought off by me to do it?

The lefties have good intentions. The problem with the lefties is they alley themselves with people who want to use their good intentions to pass laws for personal gain. The rank and file lefties are too stupid to see it.

Health Insurance is not healthcare. If you want people to have access to affordable healthcare...the solution is to produce affordable healthcare. Subsidizing unaffordable health care does not solve the problem.

No, you would not "produce affordable healthcare" you would have to introduce universal healthcare. Tell me, how would a minimum wage earner in the USA ever be able to afford cancer treatment costing over $120,000 on average? And that's just an average - treatment of childhood leukaemia can cost up to $800,000 , as was one such claim mentioned in that link. How are you going to make $800,000 leukaemia treatment "affordable" for everyone?

Subsidising unaffordable costs is, of course, how governments ensure that essential services can be provided to as many people as possible. You don't seem to grasp that fact.

Your analogy is stupid - the US government already subsidises pharmaceuticals and other things.

Guaranteeing that no one can be denied access to health insurance is a step in the right direction.

Ultimately, the only way you're going to bring the cost of health care down is by much tighter regulation. And to provide ways of reducing wastage, or duplicated services, etc. By that, for instance, there's something in Australia called ehealth and it hasn't really worked yet, it needs to be mandated - Denmark has had something similar since the 90's - essentially once implemented properly, once doctors etc. are forced to use it for their patients it means that your records can more easily be accessed both by the patient and by doctors and pharmacists. Patients will have the power to delete old records, however if the records are there it means an old x-ray for instance will be stored and accessible without having to do a duplicate one. It also reduces the cost of data management substantially overall. So that's one way of reducing the wastage of duplicated or inefficient services.

The total cost of healthcare in Australia is somewhere around 20% of GDP (I don't have the exact figure in front of me). In plain English, every year 1/5th or so of the entire economy is spent on healthcare. If only the sick and those with permanent medical illnesses were paying for it then there's no possible way that everyone could afford it. It's just not possible.