Comments on: Individual Mandate Survives

By: Social Butterfly

Social Butterfly — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 16:50:23 +0000

Robert,RT

Are we losing you, too?

/SB

By: Nora

Nora — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 15:57:58 +0000

I have only two things to add to the hyperventilating on the radical right: 1. the Act has not been fully implemented so its effects cannot be gauged, and 2. When, on when, has health care cost NOT gone up?

I cannot remember a single year when premiums either went down or stayed flat, so that argument is entirely bogus.

However, today insurance companies will be sending checks to individuals and small businesses that they overcharged in 2011. Why?

The Affordable Care Act mandates that they spend 80% of collected premiums directly on health care, and the companies sending out checks did not meet the standard.

Their overhead was excessive. BTW, Medicare’s administrative cost are in the vicinity of 3%. Yes, government does it more efficiently.

By: KK-1

KK-1 — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 15:55:18 +0000

It doesn’t matter to these racists. The law could give them $1 million a year and let them live forever and the Obama haters would want to repeal it. (It has nothing to do with facts. It’s because Obama is Black)

By: CiC

CiC — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 15:53:29 +0000

In 2009 the top 3 insurance companies posted RECORD BREAKING PROFITS and celebrated by raising their rates just like they do EVERY year.

By: Rb-1

Rb-1 — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 15:52:49 +0000

Why so much resistance from the right? How much in profits does the health insurance industry currently reap? What will this do to their control and long-term profit margins? They are the only true losers in this deal. And they are pulling out all the PR stops to try and turn back the clock.

With the instant echo-chamber of Astroturf marketing that corporatists can gin up at will, they are swarming all over the internet spreading their talking points and lies, hatched in the bowels of fake think tanks like Cato and Heartland, and spoon-fed by FOX, Rush and the rest of their propaganda machine.

How does a tired public combat this corporate propaganda? Exposure. Awareness. Education. Start by telling the ideologically-challenged that “free-market” is a marketing retread of an old failed policy of “laissez-fare” capitalism which led to the Great Depression.

That there is such a thing as the “public commons,” and that the philosophy of “rational self-interest” they claim is nothing more than infantile selfishness marketed to them by PR hacks to get authoritarian followers to vote for corporate interests over their own.