First off, Joph, "not needing it" and "choosing not to buy it" are not mutually aligned concepts. Very few people, if asked "do you need health insurance" would say no. But a much larger number of people (like say, most single people between the ages of 18 and 30), if given the choice to purchase health insurance will choose not to because they'd rather spend their money on other things. Those are not reflected in the statistics you cited.
Friar Bijou wrote:
If you don't make enough to get health care at all, that's a loss of freedom, too.
No, it's not. Not without radically changing the meaning of the word "freedom". Freedom doesn't mean you get stuff. Freedom means others have less power to tell you what to do. Whether you have health insurance or not has *nothing* to do with freedom. On the other hand, being forced to purchase health insurance does infringe your freedom (cause, it's someone else telling you what to do).
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And if the corporation you work for could either pay you more or give you a health care package and don't?...it's a theft of freedom.
Huh? No, it's not. It's the corporation paying you whatever the fair market value of your labor is. What that buys you is an entirely different issue. And again, neither of them have anything at all to do with freedom. It's just strange to me how so many people have come to believe that freedom means someone else giving you something. That's just bizarre. Where the hell do you get this idea?
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gbaji wrote:
The overwhelming majority of employees do earn enough to obtain health insurance if they want to. .
Cite, plz.
Really? Joph's cite says 47 million uninsured Americans. The BLS says that there are 156 million people employed in the US. Ergo, basic math tells us that the majority of employed people earn enough to obtain health insurance. Even if we assume that 100% off the uninsured people are employed (um... certainly not close to true), there are over twice as many employed people with insurance than without (which may or may not qualify as "overwhelming", but this is the worse case scenario). Assuming we agree that most of the 47 million uninsured are also unemployed (btw, there are around 90 million people who are not participating in the labor market, just to put the numbers in perspective), then my use of the phrase "overwhelming majority" is pretty darn accurate.
There's a lot of bait and switch language that floats around the ACA stats. But the reality is that the actual number of people who did not have health insurance prior to the passage of the ACA because they simply could not afford it is likely lower than the number of people who could afford it, but choose not to buy it but are now forced to do so by the same law. And when we add in all the people now forced to purchase insurance that covers a wider assortment of things than before (increasing the cost of their premiums), the ratio of people negatively impacted by the law relative to those benefited by it grows even greater.
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You are also ignoring the bit about ACA disallowing refusal of coverage based on pre-existing conditions.
I'm not ignoring this at all. It's just not super relevant to the discussion at hand. Except perhaps to the point that this is yet one more thing that increases the cost to everyone actually paying into the system. A side issue, I suppose.