This is exactly what they do. Watch fox news. It makes it even worse.

obamacare will vaguely effect me, might pay a little more in premiums...the government shutdown really fucks me up, because i dont get paid at all l0l

good job repubs, or more specifically good job boehner for not even allowing the house to vote on the clean cr passed by the senate

If that were the case it would be a lot less embarrassing.

No, they had an agreed upon budget, however the republican controlled house tacked on language that would defund the Affordable Care Act (obamacare) despite the fact that it jumped through all the legislative hoops and became a law. It is essentially entirely unrelated to the budget, however the republicans refused to agree to pass the budget if the parts defunding obamacare were removed. It was never even brought to a vote (not that it would have mattered).

Obviously the democrat controlled senate refused it, and since it's supposed to be about funding the government, not the ACA, they are wholly in the right.

I think this will be the straw that breaks the camels back. From what I can tell republican actions are being almost universally criticized, even from within their own party.

regardless of how you feel about obamacare, after 45(?) failed votes to repeal it and a supreme court case that ruled in constitutional, it was a horrbily stupid idea to attach it to a government shutdown fight

this congress hasn't accomplished anything, and I don't think it's a coincidence that the house has done nothing but fight obamacare. At some point you have to do your job

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsnx6v7h8iw

wake up liberal sheeple u cant hide from the truth 4ever

i dont love anything more than a mix of politics and games

wooooooo canadian parliament off time

8)

I know it's kinda late on in the discussion.

But a few things (I have a degree in History AND ANOTHER equally useless degree in economics if you need trust factor).

1. Bloodsire, almost no company ever is having to reduce employment or stop hiring because of obamacare - it's simply not that large of a concern. However, companies haven't been hiring as much, and have been generally cutting back on hours, since 2008 - a continued trend that we see exhibited here. Having to pay an extra 30$ a month so some dude you hire can have health insurance is a drop in the bucket for most businesses - unless they already have other problems (thus not hiring and reducing hours - again, a general trend since 2008). It's an absurdity to suggest that the extra fees now associated with full time employees would dissuade somebody from hiring, unless they were already not going to hire anybody. While I do agree with you that part-time union employees kinda got unnecessarily fucked. Right now the fine is only 95$, which, if you don't need insurance isn't such a big deal, furthermore if you're only a part time employee you'll likely be able to enroll (being over 26 like myself) in the open enrollment period if you're afraid of that 95$ fine.

The only way insurance in this country isn't totally broken is if they get young people like you and myself enrolled in it early so that we can diffuse the cost of old people needing a lot more care. I personally don't like the system and would much rather have a modern healthcare system like ANY OTHER industrialized nation or even Cuba, but such things are forbidden to us because health insurance companies, and big pharma, are far too strong in this country and generally enjoy the fact that Americans over pay for care dramatically (I'm talking whereas somebody pays 7$ for a drug in the UK we pay 147$ for it).

A government shutdown basically shuts down everything that hasn't already been paid for.

So, for example, the military (day to day actual military personnel) are already paid for because the defense spending bill has already been passed for this year. But civilian contractors whose contracts haven't yet been funded - well, will be laid off. Depending on the length of the shut down the economy will not be greatly effected (although any shut down WILL hurt). Because the government is a pretty important factor in the economy and anybody who had a job yesterday, yet has had to clean their office out today, will no longer be spending money on things, thus shrinking the economy for everybody. The longer it goes on the more harmful it is. We were still doing just dandy when this happened in the 90's under Clinton, the economy didn't even tank it's just a little blip on an otherwise upward trend - since the economy is already crap right now it may be a bit worse now - since government spending accounts for a slightly larger proportion of our GDP now that it did in the 90's when private industry was growing as opposed to contracting.

On the Republicans and Democrats: generally, congressionally speaking, the old GOP/Republican coalition is breaking apart and has been breaking apart since President GW Bush kinda went down in flames near the end of his presidency.

Prior to 2007-8 the GOP was primarily made up of 3 large umbrella groups: Traditional Conservatives (Nixon types, war-Hawks, power players, and pragmatic foreign policy types), Religious Conservatives, and Fiscal Conservatives who were strongly influenced by Milton Friedman. None of these three groups really have anything in common, but the latter two coalitions tacked themselves onto the GOP after the religious revival of the late 80's, and Reagan successfully courted fiscal conservatives.

I'm reasonably sure that this coalition is busted now - the GOP can't even get its whips to get a singular vote on any particular project or legislation. So we may actually see the birth of the tea-party as an independent entity, since tensions between the traditional conservatives who actually run the GOP and the younger, louder Tea-Party-esc types have reached the point of being a full breach. Not to mention that religious issues played a MUCH smaller factor in the previous two presidential election cycles because people tend not to care as much about abortion when they're having trouble finding work and the gay marriage boogeyman tends to be MUCH less effective than it used to be.

Thank you marxist, I was about to post and I'm sure no one wanted to see that happen

I do what I can :(

blood
your post infuriates me
affect is a verb
effect is a noun
its is possessive
it's means it is

h8 u

But seriously, regarding obamacare--

Working in the healthcare industry, I'm already seeing lots of cases where it negatively impacts people. In addition to some companies dropping FTEs for part-timers, companies who want to keep their FTEs are frequently just not giving them healthcare. With obamacare, this results in the company getting fined, but the fine is substantially less than what they'd be paying for the healthcare, so they take it in stride. The onus is on the employee to obtain their own healthcare which costs out of pocket and doesn't cover much of anything.

I don't necessarily agree with how the Republicans have gone about trying to get past this, but I agree with the fact that they're at least trying.

Just a few reasons it sucks:

The $90 tax Bloodsire mentions is $95 or 1% of income, whichever is higher. That tax raises to $325/2% in 2015 and $695/2.5% in 2016.

Obamacare applies a lot of negative pressure to physicians with their own practices--it's essentially trying to dissolve family practices and the like and force those physicians to work in hospitals as employees, so many physicians are retiring, which is causing/will cause a shortage of physicians in the near future. The physicians who don't make the move are met with additional pressure to reduce costs and take on more patients, which means worse overall patient care.

Obamacare forces religious organizations (and other companies) to provide contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs to their employees even in cases where it is strongly against that religious organization's beliefs.

Obamacare cuts medicare payments down to the point that physicians are frequently losing money by seeing medicare patients.

Obamacare raises the per-household cost of healthcare, despite being called the 'affordable care act'.

Obamacare gives the government control over decisions about your health that were previously made by physicians. This is not being terribly exploited at the moment, but expect to see things like smokers not being eligible for lung transplants, overweight people not eligible for heart surgery, etc.

There are thousands of pages to the obamacare bill and this is only the surface. There are pros as well--more people will have some type of coverage than ever before, but the negatives are overpowering by comparison and the entire act is just phase one of a government trying to shift healthcare into its complete control.

Wow, I can't believe I was ever jealous of Americans and America.

Y'all should move to sweden, it's awesome and we pretty much accept everyone.

Isn't there a lot of racism in Europe in general, though? When I went there 1.5 years ago it was...interesting to say the least. Never went to Sweden but I've heard plenty about the racism there if you're not Swedish, basically (Asian ethnicity here). The one place where I faced the least weird glances was the Netherlands (out of the 7-8 countries I visited).

EDIT: Places where I think I was receiving racism
- Hamburg, Germany (WHILE I was with my native friend)
- France (subway trains I'd get SO many looks, only one time did a girl give me cute looks for the 5-6 days I was there)

Places where I pretty much wasn't
- England
- Netherlands
- Berlin, Germany (woo)
- Italy (too used to tourists I think)
- Belgium (only stayed there a night but I don't think people cared, one restaurant had a nice chat)

As someone is stuck with meds which cost more than the refrigerator used to store them, I've gotta say, this crash-course in American politics is horrifying.

Not true. As the son of an ex-IBM Senior Instructor, I know far beyond the shadow of a doubt that IBM is laying off THOUSANDS of people because of Obamacare. They told my father that they would be laying him and the other Instructors off and bringing them back as 'contractors' so that IBM would not have to pay the health-insurance penalty that is introduced by Obamacare. Not only IBM, but a lot of other Fortune 500 companies have been laying off people as well strictly due to the penalty that the companies have to pay for each person that works for them that is not on Obamacare.

Other family-members that were told the same thing from IBM = an aunt and two uncles and they are now contracted-employees for IBM (exception of my father who left)

And that $95 fee you are talking about is the penalty to the people that are not taking part in Obamacare, that is NOT the penalty that companies have to pay for having a full-time employee who is not on Obamacare. One last thing, that $95 is for the first year, then it goes to $325 in 2015 and then by 2016 it's going up to a $695 penalty. Have fun with that. I can only expect that the penalties for the companies with full-time employees will follow that trend of increasing with time.

I've had worse stares/looks given to me in downtown Indianapolis or Cincinnati than I ever had in Europe

I haven't had healthcare since I was around 10 years old, lol... it doesn't seem fair that I am never able to go to a doctor unless I am seriously sick and when I do, it ends up costing way too much. I am at the age now where I can get a job and get my own health insurance but growing up I really didn't have any options.

apparently 98% of NASA shutdown, the remaining 2% are the astronauts on the ISS and the few employees who are keeping them alive

probably because everyone in cinci is an asshole

and the french are tired of tourists

In case people are wondering on the strategy behind this whole maneuver:

The Republicans do not have the votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), they control the House (lower chamber) and send bills repealing it all they want over to the Senate (upper chamber) who will never take them up because the Democrats control it. Even if the Republicans had control of both houses they'd need 2/3rd majorities in both to overrule the inevitable Obama veto.

Another fun fact about American legislation is we don't fund bills right away, instead we pass those bills then we run an Appropriations bill through the system to budget out all the cash for the year. If a previously-passed law doesn't get any funds appropriated to it, it can't do anything, it'll just sit there on the books and look pretty (or ugly, depending on your perception of legalese).

So then, Republicans by in large are opposed to Obamacare. Whereas Democrats want to protect the President's Signature legislation. Republicans don't have the numbers to repeal the law, so what do they do?

Run the legislative equivalent of a Kritzkreig.

They know that if no funds are appropriated to the ACA, then it can't do anything the bill was set out to do and essentially ceases to exist. Which is what they want to begin with. So the result ends up being spending stops on everything that isn't required to keep the Government running, parks, NASA, all that stuff is "discretionary" spending.

tl;dr Republicans are using a legislative Kritzkrieg.

Fair enough, I've definitely had worse than in Europe.

Please stop the bad analogies right here and now.

And could someone please bother to organize a coherent post with reputable sources included about how Obamacare is destroying this nation instead of border-line conspiratorial conjecture, and reference to the negative effects of portions of the legislation that have not even come into effect yet.

1. I'm perfectly aware of how obamacare works in at least most of it's basic tenants. The I am likewise aware that the 95$ penalty is applied to individuals who DO NOT have insurance.

2. I stand by my statement that companies are not cutting jobs because of obamacare - if anything it's nothing more than a convenient excuse, furthermore the shifting of Full time employees to "contractors" has been going on for a LONG time as a method for A. breaking unions, B. renege on promised benefits of full time employment (which tech companies, such as IBM are known for having p-good benefits - it doesn't surprise me that they'd shift people around to renege on those promised benefits when times got tough).

If you look at employment trends you will see that the job market has more or less been looking this way since 2008 (which predates obamacare) and will continue to look this way for some time because of a whole slew of factors.

Saying - we're gonna have to put you on contact because of a law you don't understand is MUCH better than saying "hey remember those benefits we promised you when you hired on? Yeah sorry we want you to give those up" The same thing has been going on with the growth of "temp" jobs.

Now, let's talk about healthcare in the US - a few basic assumptions, I could provide citations if you REALLY want me to, but I'm hoping you'll just trust me on this:

A. care in the US is not significantly better than in other industrialized nations
B. important health indicators (infant mortality, maternal mortality, life expectancy at birth) are not significantly above other industrialized nations (and may actually be below them in many cases)
C. Healthcare in the US costs significantly more than in other industrialized nations.
D. The US government spends more on healthcare than all other industrialized nations - this includes countries where the state 100% covers all care.

Again, I can provide academically qualified citations of the above if you don't believe me but the above facts show clearly that the US healthcare system is inefficient and garbage tier in regards to all other industrialized nations and we pay MORE for it.

Why is this?

Well in every other advanced nation the government directly negotiates on behalf of consumers thus creating a monopsony (If you don't know what that is, it's a monopoly, but instead of 1 guy selling one thing, it's 1 consumer buying one thing). Thus since ONLY the state can buy healthcare, they have a tremendous amount of negotiating power. That is how medicare and medicaid function - because the US government is a much more effective negotiator than any particular individual or even insurance company (in general).

The only reason doctors would lose money on medicare/aid patients is because the WHOLE field and range of healthcare services is tremendously inflated.

Unfortunately, since most people fear state intervention in the economy, we'll likely always have a broken system unless people learn to read a book here and there or remember this simple Maxim:

"The government is really good at building rockets, educating its citizens, and equipping armies - it happens to be really bad at manufacturing type writers and alarm clocks"

I should also note that the ACA is ALREADY funded for the most part through this year - so this whole budget malarkey is just political brinksmanship - the government would never be shut down long enough to actually defund the ACA or we'd witness the complete ruination of modern society lol.

The free market is generally pretty bad at assigning values to treatment - because yes, there's the cost of producing those benefits, but there's also the mitigating factor of somebody saying to you "yeah so, you have to do this thing, or you'll die" - how do you put a price on that or reasonably assess the value of that particular thing - since you'll generally be willing to pay ANYTHING to get it. Unless you prefer death, or cooking meth.

Europe is the bastion of tolerance in comparison to the US.

Yup, I was supposed to go home at noon (NASA contractor) but at the last minute I was told not to leave and to report tomorrow. Not a clue why.

THEIR LIVES ARE IN YOUR HANDS NOW FRKN

Don't Kerbal it up...

will trade my unusual burning team capt for a new kidney msg me

People like to say that Sweden is a racist country because of the rise of a racist party in the past 5 or so years. It's been getting worse yes, but the racist part of Swedes are generally the ones sitting at home crying to their mom about there being too many immigrants about; we don't really see it in public. The majority of us are still very much against racism, which is why the "racist community" is kind of underground.

hmmm