r/SelfAwarewolves • u/mixingmemory • 13d ago
The privatized, for-profit health care system is NOT capitalism.
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u/Jan_Asra 13d ago
As soon as they said "Obamacare" I knew we were in for some crazy.
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13d ago
I've never seen an intelligent person complain about obamacare, unless they were trying to trick an idiot into hating the ACA.
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u/LordSwedish 13d ago
A lot of intelligent people complain about how it's not even in sight of what's needed. It's a band-aid on a gunshot wound where the bullet is still inside and covered in poison, yes I would prefer not to lose more blood but it doesn't even cover the bare minimum.
A lot of intelligent people are also pissed at how terribly it was handled, Obama was compromising before he got to the negotiation table with the Democrats, let alone the Republicans.
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u/FadeIntoReal 12d ago edited 11d ago
The system it was modeled after included prices controls. The GOP managed to eliminate the price controls and somehow it still got passed. The result? Many more people actually got health care but the prices rose dramatically because the patients didn’t know. The net result was a massive increase in profits for health care companies but not most providers.
edit: typo
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u/cbph 11d ago
it still got passed
It got passed because it was decided it had to get passed to get Obama a signature/legacy achievement, because of Nancy Pelosi saying ridiculous crap like "We have to pass it to find out what's in it," and using procedural shenanigans to "deem that it passed".
Now over a decade later, health insurance is somehow the only product all Americans are forced to buy, yet somehow it's deemed a tax and not a purchase.
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12d ago edited 12d ago
All I'm really reading from this is that you aren't very familiar with what the Congressional makeup was during that brief window they had to pass the bill.
One of the 60 people that they absolutely needed was threatening to filibuster it unless certain things got watered down, and there was no way to fight them on that in the time they had to avoid that. You can thank Joe Lieberman for that, and he wasn't even the only opposition from within the 60 votes that he needed from his own party. As much as people like to think he could have just commanded everybody in his party to vote for it, that was never the case. That super majority had a pretty solid chunk of purple in it
It was either this or literally nothing, and we shouldn't really let perfect be the enemy of good and ignore that the bill still did very good things for millions of people.
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u/LA-Matt 12d ago
It should also be noted that because of the passing of Teddy Kennedy, and the delay in seating Franken, due to the lawsuits in MN, the filibuster-proof majority was held by Democrats for 72 working days. I can’t tell you how many times I hear people say “they had two years to do _____,” when that was not the case.
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u/particle409 12d ago
The fight for 60 votes is well documented. Obama compromised because it was the only way to pass it. He wasn't exactly courting any Republican votes, they were never going to vote for any version of it. It was always about how to get Blue Dog Democrats on board.
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u/LordSwedish 12d ago
And it's also well documented how he started with a republican plan to appease everyone, in other words he started the fight by showing his belly and hoping they'd take mercy on him.
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u/particle409 11d ago
It was the plan he could get Blue Dog Democrats to vote for.
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u/LordSwedish 11d ago
But he didn't, right? He still had to negotiate with them, make deals, change things up, right?
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u/particle409 11d ago
I'd imagine he didn't plan on Ted Kennedy dying, or Al Franken not getting seated right away. It still needed 60 votes to pass. He needed Lieberman to vote for it, which meant killing the public option.
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13d ago
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13d ago edited 13d ago
Your plan isn't more expensive because the ACA exists. Your plan is more expensive because of greed. You're comparing your insurance from 10+ years ago to today. You're looking at 16 years of enshitification and price gouging by your insurance and attributing it to the ACA rather than the insurance company squeezing you for profit.
For reference, you can look at average insurance costs year to year. There wasn't any sudden jump from the ACA or anything of the sort. Its been a constant steady increase for decades.
Are you aware of the actual things the ACA did? What is your knowledge base for the legislation?
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13d ago
What year was that specifically? If they did, it wasn't because of the ACA.
We have statistics on average health insurance costs year to year. There was NEVER a sudden sharp jump from the ACA going into effect. The costs have been rising at a steady and consistent rate for decades.
Again, what do you know that the legislation actually did? What is your knowledge base on the ACA?
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13d ago
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13d ago edited 13d ago
Okay, prove it.
If the ACA suddenly caused the cost of insurance to double for people, why is there no massive Spike visible in the average cost of insurance year to year when it went into effect?
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/071415/did-obamacare-make-premiums-go.asp
If it caused insurance to double for people, why were these marketplaces tracking increases between 2 to 6% year to year right after it took effect? Isn't that a pretty big gap between premiums doubling?
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u/Kommye 13d ago
That's not how averages (in year to year comparisons) work.
If you are tracking the average price of insurance, price spikes will affect the resulting average. If you raise the low end, the average will be, naturally, higher.
If the average for X year is 100, jumps to 140 for Y year and stabilizes in 146 for year X due to inflation, it will show as a spike for year Y in a graph.
But year to year insurance average price graphs don't have that spike.
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u/saltyourhash 13d ago
Just so you're aware, implementation of the ACA was at state level. So it doesn't where you live how your state implemented it.
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u/Saturngirl2021 12d ago
Rate increases for private policies have nothing to do with the ACA. Actually the insurance companies want to faze out those policies and increasing your premiums is a way to do that.
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u/imforsurenotadog 13d ago
When you say pre-Obamacare, are you talking about pre-2012? If not, ignore me, but if that's the case it's been almost 13 years. Of course the prices have risen. Trying to obtain healthcare outside the public market has become prohibitively expensive where I live, but I get a fair plan on the market. Could be a lot better, obviously.
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13d ago
They have to be talking about some point before 2014, so at least 10 years ago at a minimum.
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u/saltyourhash 13d ago
"I'm not right leaning, but I'm leaning right..."
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u/Hamster-Food 12d ago
It seems they are centrist in the American political sense. So to the right of the Democrats, who are centre-right by international standards.
They are right wing and leaning further right.
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u/saltyourhash 12d ago
Yeah, definitely. Just saying "I'd have voted for any Republican but Trump" is not very "not right leaning", if they are describing the Republican party as not right, may be that's an accurate description of the Overton window these days.
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u/badcatjack 12d ago
What plan has the right ever put forward? Supposedly they now have a concept of a plan.
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u/Saturngirl2021 12d ago
You are assuming that your premium would have not increased in 14 years if there wasn’t ACA. Most private policies were priced way above the ACA market by so much that we switched most of our clients to ACA because the premiums were lower by 2019.
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u/basherella 12d ago
No no the prices on literally everything in the past 14 years have only increased because of Obamacare silly.
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u/basherella 12d ago
Meanwhile my mom and sister who work in the medical field have been heaped with more and more work
Or, you know, more and more people have been able to access medical care instead of just dying like the good old days.
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u/badcatjack 11d ago
The words they throw out the words “Obamacare” or “woke” you immediately know you are interacting with an idiot.
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u/SophiaofPrussia 12d ago
They are wrong. The anti-consumer “protected cronyism” market they describe is the normal and expected result of unfettered capitalism driven only by greed. Cronyism is capitalism.
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u/DeliberatelyDrifting 12d ago
People conflate capitalism and the free market. Rarely realizing how lucky they are that we don't have truly free markets. Or that free markets naturally become captive markets without outside intervention. Or that "capitalism" is just a fancy way of saying rich people know better than everyone else.
Our system is absolutely fucked and it doesn't fall into any neat economic model. Our system is the result of letting capitalists regulate a market with the unspoken agreement that some lives are more valuable than others.
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u/dweezil22 13d ago
noun Capitalism: an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit.
Crony capitalism is capitalism. Monopolistic capitalism is capitalism. Well regulated capitalism is capitalism (even though right-wing folks try to call it socialism). Literally anything that allows private owners to make profit is capitalism. This shit is really very simple and people still manage to get it so completely wrong.
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u/pverflow 13d ago
people are so capitalism brained you cant explain to them that its not in their best interest.
maybe that's why they are so much into matrix metaphors. just doing some 4k projection.56
u/Hamster-Food 12d ago
That isn't an accident. The US is the most propagandised nation to ever exist. That propaganda is primarily focused on nationalism.and capitalism/anti-socialism.
They've made it so people don't know what capitalism is or what socialism is. They just know that the US is capitalist and are the best at everything, so obviously capitalism is also the best.
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u/Hamster-Food 12d ago
Cronyism is a feature of capitalism.
Monopoly is a feature of capitalism.
Regulation can be an attempt to control capitalism, but more often than not is a feature of capitalism which allows capitalists to pull the ladder up after themselves.
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u/Pickledpeper 13d ago
Let's be honest, they're manipulated to think it's wrong whole accepting that a large part of our system is socialist oriented.
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u/BooneSalvo2 12d ago
Yeah, the system isn't CONSUMER DRIVEN capitalism. That's the form many regular people think the weird means in the USA.
It isn't.
There no consumer power in the US healthcare system.
Tho personally, I didn't think it's capitalism, either. It's extortion and fraud.
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u/idontgiveafuqqq 12d ago
So, anything besides 100% worker control of means of production is capitalism...?
Is this not exactly what morons do to say socialism is when the government does things?
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u/unosami 12d ago
Worker owned or public owned, yeah. Non-profits lie somewhere else in the spectrum. It’s pretty simple. If an industry has a private owner and is for-profit then it’s capitalism.
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u/idontgiveafuqqq 12d ago
So... there has never been a single non-capitalist system in the last 200 years?
What is the point of a label if it just includes everything?
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u/unosami 12d ago
Have you considered it only includes everything you’re familiar with and that other systems do exist?
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u/idontgiveafuqqq 12d ago
I've looked into other systems, but I don't think they'd fit your strict definition. But ofc i can't consider something I'm not aware of.
Am I missing a good example?
Certainly not the USSR/Cuba/Vietnam/Laos
Or even some more obscure examples like the Zapatistas or Rojava.
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u/Drakesyn 12d ago
It's an economic model, not a system of government. The only thing you do when you ask for countries that have "successfully not done capitalism" is show your complete ignorance of the subject matter.
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u/idontgiveafuqqq 12d ago
It's an economic model, not a system of government.
So is capitalism, but op had no problem identifying capitalist countries.
Idk. It feels like you just want to exist in the space where you critique capitalism for its flaws but provide nothing of substance that anyone can ever test.
Which is dumb given all the positive examples you could give of greater socialization of wealth.
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u/Alon945 13d ago edited 12d ago
Jesus Christ.
Healthcare has inelastic demand. You either need the care or you don’t.
It should not be privatized.
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u/thehomiemoth 12d ago
I agree with that but the OP isn’t actually wrong. A fully privatized healthcare system would be different than what we have now.
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u/ivanchowashere 12d ago
Sure, it would be worse. A fully privatized healthcare system would have no incentive to treat poor people, snake oil treatments would be rampant and people would die from all kinds of preventable things. All capitalism becomes crony capitalism, because first it creates a bunch of negative externalities (kills a bunch of people) for profit, then we regulate it, then it corrupts and captures the regulatory body
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u/BitOBear 13d ago
Correct. Private health care is murder for hire. You just don't know who's going to be killed when you pay the ticket. And not having health care at all is suicide. So what are the choices?
Our economic and social system needs a string of very careful adjustments to get us all back on track.
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u/mixingmemory 13d ago
Yeah, it's still capitalism though. In fact, I'd argue the current private health care system in the US is the epitome of "late stage capitalism" as describe 100-ish years ago.
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u/BitOBear 12d ago
Yes. That's kind of part of what I was saying. Capitalism should have no place in the delivery of medicine.
We have a population that believes that the word socialism is defined as when the government does anything to help anybody. They also believe socialism is bad because they don't understand the politics of 1930s germany. And they also don't know the difference between an economic system such as socialism versus capitalism and a political system such as democracy versus communism versus fascism versus all the other verses two paragraph
The core of actual economic socialism is the idea that the employee should have a say in the management of their employer. An ownership stake as it were. Every co-op and employee owned business is a socialist practice. If you look at Stewart's in the northeastern United States you will find an employee-owned business where the person scooping ice cream is in fact worth a million dollars because they have an ownership stake and they've been there long enough to earn a big enough ownership stake.
The idea that the government should own every business is unworkable communism. And it never actually gets there. Every attempt to in place communism has failed. But socialist countries were working pretty well until the US steps in every time to kill that government.
Capitalism as an economic system is terrible. Socialism allows for profit and success and failure in all those things it just refuses to allow the money to concentrate. To be part of the Enterprise you must work at the Enterprise and if you work at the Enterprise you get to rise and fall with the Enterprise in general.
So I drifted off point a little bit haha.
At the point where the practice and materials of medicine touches the patient absolutely no money should change hands between the patient and the provider.
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u/jackfaire 13d ago
Those idiots always call Socialism Capitalism and vice versa.
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u/mixingmemory 13d ago
Yeah, I was surprised he didn't flat-out say "Obamacare is socialism" but he walked right up to the edge of that.
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u/Fine-Funny6956 13d ago
Sooooo Obama care was the compromise when they said we couldn’t have universal healthcare
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u/mixingmemory 13d ago
Yes. And while I have plenty of issues with "Obamacare," I think it was a big improvement over the system (or total lack of a system, more realistically), the US had before 2010, when it was even more of a capitalist free-market shit-show.
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u/ashabanapal 13d ago
Close. ACA was a Democrat plan to make Mitt Romney's Massachusetts healthcare law federal because surely they'd get Republican votes for Republican legislation! Then that didn't happen because Republicans don't do that and Joe Lieberman withheld his now crucial Democrat vote until they removed the public option plan from the bill and they said "oh, ok then" because it's what their donors really wanted anyway. They could truthfully claim they increased "access to the healthcare system" while leaving providers and insurance companies in their status quo with no path to single-payer healthcare. Then the only reason it wasn't repealed was John McCain voting against his party as he watched it be consumed by proto-maga tea party insanity. The ACA is the story of both parties failing in their stated goals while claiming victory as the human beings they are all sworn to serve go broke, suffer and die.
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u/BiggestShep 13d ago
Man, they love that word 'crony'/cronyism to think about anything other than the fact that this is the natural outcome of capitalism and is, in fact, the goal.
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u/FadeIntoReal 13d ago
The death panels are real. They’re corporate boardrooms. The deciders play golf all afternoon and eat $300 lunches paid for by stealing healthcare dollars that would save lives.
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u/Seguefare 13d ago
It is unconscionable for any emergency room to be "out of network". I'd even be ok with limiting that to a list of certain conditions, such as true or suspected: heart attack, stroke, seizure, broken bone, high fever, sudden confusion or change in behavior, bleeding requiring stiches, MVA or GSW, etc.
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u/gelfin 13d ago
How young are these idiots who don’t remember what insurance was like before the ACA? You know, back when people who didn’t work for an employer that offered health benefits generally just didn’t have any coverage at all. When I was in college anything that couldn’t be treated by the school’s resident NP just didn’t get treated. I had to wait for coverage at my first real job to kick in before I could get my wisdom teeth out. And even then if you used your insurance for anything that might require ongoing care (like we all do as we get older), you could not quit or lose your job under any circumstances because you’d become uninsurable for that care and that was just… how it was.
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u/basherella 12d ago
I had to declare bankruptcy because of medical debt from before the ACA, and I had insurance then.
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u/Socialimbad1991 12d ago
Obamacare didn't make things any worse, it just didn't make things very noticeably better either.
Way too many people have somehow "forgotten" what it was like before Obamacare
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u/mayhem6 12d ago
The ACA made it possible for millions of folks to get insurance who never had it before so in that way it’s better.
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u/Socialimbad1991 12d ago
It's also better in that e.g. it removed the ability to deny coverage to preexisting conditions and other things like that. Don't get me wrong, it was very much needed - it just wasn't enough.
I was a young adult when it rolled out and working a very low wage job. I was now required to put a not-insignificant portion of my wages toward health insurance that was still mostly useless to me, due to the high deductible I never would have been able to afford. If I had actually needed serious healthcare during that time, I likely would have been up to my eyeballs in medical debt with or without it. I can only imagine if/to what extent it helped people in worse situations than mine.
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u/mrpopenfresh 12d ago
It doesn't happen often, but when you see a "this isn't true capitalism", I get a bit of a laugh since it's so common in online communism discussions.
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u/jenjijlo 13d ago
Tell me you have zero clue without telling me. My new marketplace plan is through Aetna/CVS. It seems to be a decent enough plan and relatively affordable. Certainly no more expensive than what we've been paying through my spouse's company, who just kicked spouses off their policy.
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u/whiterac00n 13d ago
Oh but the “free market” means that somehow a new company will suddenly appear and compete with significant lower rates because “capitalism is awesome!”. I mean never mind the enormous effort to make such a company just so you can make less money. These idiots apply the basic economic concept of a food stall selling corn to major conglomerate companies and then proceed to pat themselves on the back with how clever they think they are.
The entire MAGA era is of village idiots who suddenly believe they are the most intelligent and everyone else is the idiot. We’re headed into another dark age and soon enough we’re going to see people holding snakes and a stick thinking they can cure cancer and “gayness”.
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u/ZefSoFresh 12d ago edited 12d ago
#1 price #42 quality = failure by any other standard. Would we accept the 42nd best military after spending the most in the world?
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u/Picards-Flute 13d ago
Honestly wether or not they think it's "true" capitalism is kinda beside the point for me (bty it definitely is)
At least they recognize that it's fucked up, and we all agree it needs to be changed
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u/tetrarchangel 13d ago
I love how they can't address the #42 in results and how much money the US gov pays for healthcare per person without it even being for everyone
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u/Quxzimodo 12d ago
"We can't do worse than the governmental taxes paying for healthcare" is an ignorant take. The age of information has proved that there really are two kinds of people, the people that know what facts and truth look like on a basis of component and logic, and the ones who can't tell the difference between naive assumption that scares people into fearing the opposite and deductive conclusions to be considered and weighed appropriately.
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u/ron_spanky 12d ago
Under the ACA, don’t you go to a market place and pick from a variety insurance offering from multiple companies? Yes the offering have mandated components but that simplifies the buyers purchasing. Sounds like capitalism to me.
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u/mixingmemory 12d ago
That's the basic concept, yes. But the actual process is infinitely more complex, confusing, and frustrating. This is a fantastic explainer for anyone in the US who relies on the system, and for anyone outside the US curious about how absolutely fucked things are here: https://youtu.be/-wpHszfnJns
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u/Diestormlie 12d ago
Medical results are secondary
Duhh. You don't go into the Private Healthcare business to help people- you do it to make money. Now, maybe you believe you can do one by means of the other- but the two goals are in tension, and you will constantly have to choose.
The most obvious one: Reducing prices will help people. But you'll make less money!
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u/LegendOfKhaos 12d ago
I missed the "not" in "not capitalism" the first time around and wondered what everyone was disagreeing with.
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u/karankshah 12d ago
First off, he's wrong at a very basic level. There's not a doctor that would turn you away if you paid in cash up front. You can always choose to pay cash to see the doctors you want!
His point - in the sense that insurance markets are not "free and open" - is noteworthy, but not accurate particularly as Obamacare did actually enhance consumer choice compared to being fully reliant on employer defined choices.
I would - and I have - make the argument that single-payer is actually better for "free market" absolutists. All doctors falling under one insurance means better doctors that get great outcomes will have a deeper patient bench, and patients not happy with their treatment could easily go to another doc.
There's literally no reason to pay into an insurer that isn't legally mandated and enforced to operate as a non-profit.
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u/PlatinumAltaria 6d ago
Capitalism is where everyone has enough, not like those greedy socialists who hoard money and own everything!
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u/Uberpastamancer 13d ago
Wasn't the ACA original proposed by Nixon?
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u/mixingmemory 13d ago
No, very common misconception. This is a good explainer: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/07/150713095143.htm
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u/KamaIsLife 12d ago
Good enough for our Representatives and military, not good enough for everyone else.
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u/mangeiri 12d ago
“Military”? You obviously haven’t been paying attention to what Tricare health insurance has been doing lately? Retroactively clawing back claims for virtual appointments during the pandemic, for example?
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u/Friendly_King_1546 11d ago
Ok none of that original statement is true. HHS tracks and fines hospitals if a patient is admitted with the same issue within two weeks. It is only regulation of private organizations inviting competition. Why are Americans just so damn stupid? Like woefully dumb?
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