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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

To pick your brains on why people oppose obamacare?

31 replies

FayKorgasm · 26/11/2014 07:57

Am I right in thinking it would be similar to the NHS as in universal health care for all? The healthier the population the better it bodes for the country. Is it insurance companies and doctors opposing or the general population?

I have no idea why I amthinking about it but I am.

OP posts:
SelfconfessedSpoonyFucker · 26/11/2014 18:02

It isn't all bad though, there have been some very good things come of this. No longer having lifetime limits has been a massive blessing for some people. Previously uninsurable people now have insurance like a friend of mine who had breast cancer four times. I have family friends who worked but couldn't get insurance through their employer who now do.

BackOnlyBriefly · 26/11/2014 18:16

It may not be ideal, but the thing to do I suppose is to ask its opponents what alternative they are offering or are they content with poor people not having medical treatment at all.

maggiethemagpie · 26/11/2014 18:17

I have a diabetes related eye condition that can lead to blindness if untreated. I had a pretty bad time on the nhs and elected to go private, paying around £6k. However I had the choice. I heard of an American lady with this condition, on a forum, who had a retinal bleed and was on the way to the hospital when they called on her mobile to say don't bother - you're not covered. She was a student.

So in situations where someone would actually go blind does it still make sense to have the American system.

This was a young person, her life ahead of her. Now she will be disabled forever.

cheesecakemom · 26/11/2014 18:41

This reply has been withdrawn

This has been withdrawn by MNHQ at the poster's request.

Bulbasaur · 26/11/2014 19:03

It isn't all bad though, there have been some very good things come of this. No longer having lifetime limits has been a massive blessing for some people. Previously uninsurable people now have insurance like a friend of mine who had breast cancer four times. I have family friends who worked but couldn't get insurance through their employer who now do.

Yes. There is good. Insurance companies can no longer have a cut off point to which they insure you. They can no longer drop you for frivolous reasons, as per PP with the car crash. There are lots of horror stories of people getting dropped because insurance would find a loop hole. If you didn't like your insurance you couldn't switch and get covered due to "pre-existing conditions", you were stuck with the one you had or letting your own problem fester for 6 months to a year before they covered it.

Our insurance system does need a massive overhaul, and insurances needed to be cracked down on for corrupt practices. But the way this has been implemented isn't necessarily the way it should have been done.

The silver lining is that it's in now, and no matter what party is put into office, they can only refine from there. No one that doesn't want to commit career suicide is going to yank away insurance that people already have.

Our system is a mess, we're in over our heads in a debt crisis to fund what we need, and we're not fully out of a recession quite yet. It's going to be painful while we figure out how to take care of 316 million people, a good chunk of whom are elderly, and not to be insensitive but they're not putting back into the system to keep the money freshly circulating to sustain this. We have a massive baby boomer population that is just dying. From a moral stand point we absolutely need to take care of them. From a financial stand point they're a money suck, and they are the biggest generation of old people our country has seen so far.

BackOnlyBriefly · 26/11/2014 19:21

But the NHS isn't free either. We all pay for it eventually in taxes. If anything a service that is paid for with taxes ought to be cheaper to run since you don't need an army of people collecting payments.

Now I know that's not how it works out, but I think that's about how we organise things and it doesn't have to be that way. The missed appointments thing could be prevented easily enough.

If you take any public service - let's say gas supply - and privatise it then people say "ah now it will be more efficient" but why? The guy reading your meter is the same guy. The people laying pipes are the same.

Sometimes 'more efficiently' means that the people on the bottom rung get their wages slashed. That certainly looks better on paper, but in the UK that means they get benefits/credits from taxes anyway so it's an illusion and tax payers are in effect subsidising the company

Other times it's because the private company will sack people who are not doing their job, but we ought to do that anyway.

In the case of trains it seems to be more efficient by taking less passengers, not doing any maintenance and charging passengers twice as much. We could nationalise them and do that if that's what we wanted. So again it's an illusion of efficiency.

It should be possible to run not a free service, but a service you pay for through taxes in exactly the same way a private service is.

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