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Aetna CEO Threatened Obamacare Pullout If Feds Opposed Humana Merger

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142 points helloworld | 4 comments | 17 Aug 16 17:52 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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seibelj ◴[17 Aug 16 18:06 UTC] No.12306806[source]▶
Can anyone succinctly explain the benefits of having a market for private health insurance companies, rather than a single provider of health insurance (government, aka "public option")? Can a capitalist case be made for their existence? Does the lack of a large private insurance market in countries with government-provided health insurance cause lots of inefficiencies and waste?
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VonGuard ◴[17 Aug 16 18:10 UTC] No.12306849[source]▶
There is no benefit. The benefit is for the legislatures who passed the law. There was no way that we'd get single payer here in the US because our Congress is very much in the pocket of the health care industry. As such, the markets were a compromise measure enacted by congress to make it easier for people to choose health care. Before Obamacare, it was sort of a black box where only HR people could figure out pricing structures and health care providers didn't really compete in any way with each other.

Obamacare did do some good things that needed to be done, but essentially, everything about it was a bandaid intended to kick this shitty system down the road to the next person who had to deal with it. But hey, at least health care companies can't just turn you down because you have Diabetes or are too fat anymore.

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eridius ◴[17 Aug 16 18:16 UTC] No.12306932[source]▶
There's no way that we'd get single payer here because the Republican party has convinced their base that single-payer health care is socialism and that socialism is evil, which leads to the situation where poor people who desperately need health care and can't afford it still oppose single-payer even though they stand to gain the most from it.
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im_down_w_otp ◴[17 Aug 16 18:45 UTC] No.12307235[source]▶
It wasn't Republicans that removed the "Public Option" or the Drug re-importation initiatives from the ACA. FWIW.
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SteveLAnderson ◴[17 Aug 16 21:51 UTC] No.12308767[source]▶
Well ... you're strictly right, but just like the idiotic provision that forced Congress to give up their employer sponsored insurance and use the exchange instead was forced by the GOP, so to were these provisions dropped due to GOP pressure.

You see, the GOP continually promised, on one hand, to tie the ACA up in legislative hurdles so it couldn't pass, or, on the other hand, vote for it if it met their requirements.

So, foolishly it turned out, the Democrats played ball with the GOP. In the end, the GOP still did everything they could to block it and voted against it en masse.

I think the error was that the Democrats believed the GOP would vote for the bill if they changed it enough. It was naive.

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1. im_down_w_otp ◴[17 Aug 16 22:34 UTC] No.12308993[source]▶
Um, no. Those provisions were the Democrats negotiating with themselves. At the time the Democrats had the votes to force the issue regardless of the Republican opposition.

It was people like Ben Nelson, Joe Lieberman, and Max Baucus that played a rotating merry-go-round of scapegoats that the Democratic Party used to trump up reasons why they couldn't support more progressive reforms in the healthcare legislation.

Also, it wasn't Republicans that put a WellPoint Executive Lobbyist (Elizabeth Fowler) in charge of writing large portions of the actual legislation and acting as the liaison between the White House and the Senate.

In the end we got a big pageant and self-aggrandizing back-patting session from the Democrats who called it the greatest Democratic legislative accomplishment since the Civil Rights Act... which is ironic considering that the ACA is almost the spitting image of Republican Bob Dole's Heritage Foundation sourced (and AHIP sponsored) reform plan from just a few election cycles prior.

So... the greatest Democratic policy achievement in at least a generation was to pass a Republican policy proposal. Well played Democrats. Well played.

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2. eridius ◴[17 Aug 16 23:57 UTC] No.12309459[source]▶
A Republican policy proposal that wasn't passed back when it was proposed. Just because the Republicans proposed this first doesn't mean it's a bad idea. We're all human beings and we all have a lot of common ground. Not everything a Republican proposes is automatically hated by Democrats, and not everything a Democrat proposes should be automatically hated by Republicans (I say "should be" because lately the Republican party does seem to reflexively hate everything Democrats propose, even if it was originally a Republican idea like the ACA).
3. SteveLAnderson ◴[18 Aug 16 00:30 UTC] No.12309615[source]▶
I agree with your assessment of the legislation.

It's true that Sen. Lieberman, in coordination with Sen. Snowe, threatened a filibuster. At the time, Sen. Lieberman was an independent, not a Democrat. So, it was an independent and a Republican.

I know that's splitting hairs, but these are valid hairs to split.

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4. im_down_w_otp ◴[18 Aug 16 02:03 UTC] No.12309948[source]▶
He caucused with the Democrats and was only an Independent because he got primaried out of his seat by Ned Lamont, so to stay on the general ticket he switched to being an Independent.

While we're splitting hairs.

Anyway, HN is a place I relish usually being devoid of pointless political conversation, so I'm just going to drop it now and go back to reading about Zippers in Erlang.