I just got in what turned out to be a yelling match with a family member about Obamacare.
Basically what my understanding of Obamacare is - you have to have insurance. You can buy insurance through whichever company you want, or use the company your employer uses. You must use the health care facilities and providers that your chosen insurance company approves. All of which, coincidentally, is the way things have always been as long as I've been alive. The only major difference is that if you don't buy some kind of insurance from somebody, you now have to pay a penalty. The government has also put certain caps on how much companies can charge you, and have eliminated disqualification for pre-existing conditions.
This is not my family member's understanding of Obamacare at all. According to her, you have no choice of private insurance companies at all. People have to sign up not for insurance, but for "Obamacare", which is basically the government as insurer, and that people will not be allowed to have their own private insurance, neither are they allowed to use whichever doctor they want (which evidently private insurance companies let you do before now). According to her, doctors and even whole hospitals have also basically been quitting en masse, refusing to "accept Obamacare", leading to what is now a shortage of doctors. She also says that from now on, no hospitals in the US are allowed to operate as "charity hospitals". She further says that "Obamacare exchanges" are federal government agencies, not private agencies or companies, and that the purpose of the Republican-led government shutdown was to defund them and stop them from opening (she said this immediately after reporting having watched the NBC nightly news, which I know for a fact had a big story about how the exchanges opened today). She also said that the Obamacare signup websites which crashed today under heavy user load, were crashed due to an effort which she says she witnessed being organized over Twitter and Facebook of American citizens who wanted to deliberately crash the site as a protest of Obamacare, and not due to 8 million people using the site to buy insurance as the news reports claim. Also, only 2% of Americans support Obamacare, according to "real" non-skewed polls.
She says she knows all this because she actually reads all the non-mainstream media and all the actual government legislation and bills, while I obviously haven't.
Is she closer to the truth than I am? If not, do her views represent the majority of conservative constituents' idea of what Obamacare is? No wonder they're against it, quite frankly. I would be too.
