Why Trump will be reelected

Suddenly said:
Except for healthcare. All it takes is to know someone who has trouble getting insulin or who had to enter into mortal combat with their insurance while dealing with a dire medical issue to become somewhat radicalized as to that issue.
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Did I miss something? What did Trump do to health care?

I know he tried to repeal Obamacare completely, but he failed. I know that he got rid of the individual mandate, which I thought was a very bad idea (i.e. getting rid of it was the bad idea. Having it was a good idea.) However, even though I thought it repealing it was a bad idea, it was a popular idea. As far as I know, it had very little effect on most people's insurance.

I did use Obamacare plans for a few months this summer, and it was not a good thing, but I don't know if it was any worse than in 2015. I remember my brother in law ranting and raving abut how much more expensive his health care got when Obamacare went into effect, and that was why he was voting for Trump. (He was self employed, with a stay at home wife and one young child) Since I didn't use it prior to Trump's time in office, I couldn't tell you how it compares now to what it was then. I just know that this year, in 2019, it had high premiums and a high deductible, but it was good for it to be there, because with preexisting conditions, it would have been nearly impossible to obtain insurance otherwise.

So, count me in on Obamacare, but plenty of people disagree. The individual mandate seemed like a burden to people. It seems that a lot of young, healthy, people are willing to take chances on medical bankruptcy.
 
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Trump has done everything in his power to make the ACA unworkable, including nominating decidedly anti-ACA judges and refusing to go after people who didn't pay the fine for not joining (before Congress took that bit away).
Trump could have assured that the ACA continued to work, or he could have pulled a NAFTA and replaced it with the exact same thing by a new name.
He didn't m
 
Meadmaker said:
Did I miss something? What did Trump do to health care?

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What you missed is that this wasn't about Trump. Trump is only relevant in the sense that this problem exists and he has no credibility or for that matter interest in doing anything about it. More about inaction than action.

People not affording insulin is the sort of thing that makes people want to look for solutions, not blame.
 
The individual mandate was just one of several ways Trump (anti-Constitutionally) sabotaged ACA. (A President doesn't get to just decide not to enforce or follow a properly passed & signed law, but a Dictator does.) But it was the biggest and most important one. Without that part, its costs are mostly unfunded. It's like having Medicare For All in place, and not repealing it, but also getting rid of the tax that came with it. They've successfully forced several million people who had health insurance out of it. Winning!
 
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Suddenly said:
What you missed is that this wasn't about Trump. Trump is only relevant in the sense that this problem exists and he has no credibility or for that matter interest in doing anything about it. More about inaction than action.

People not affording insulin is the sort of thing that makes people want to look for solutions, not blame.
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Well ok, but this thread is about Trump getting re-elected.

All my life, Democrats have argued for more government involvement in health care. Republicans for less. Trump carries on that trend. The thing is, the steps he has taken are pretty popular, and haven't been devastating, except possibly to people who chose not to be insured. In terms of Trump's reelection, I don't see a big event that will turn a lot of voters against him.

More people have jobs that provide insurance. That's a pretty good argument for staying the course. Or, more accurately, it's a pretty persuasive argument, which is not necessarily the same thing. Of course, health care will be a big issue for the Democratic candidate, and it will be persuasive to many, but I don't see a reason why it would be more persuasive than last time.
 
Meadmaker said:
Well ok, but this thread is about Trump getting re-elected.

All my life, Democrats have argued for more government involvement in health care. Republicans for less. Trump carries on that trend. The thing is, the steps he has taken are pretty popular, and haven't been devastating, except possibly to people who chose not to be insured. In terms of Trump's reelection, I don't see a big event that will turn a lot of voters against him.

More people have jobs that provide insurance. That's a pretty good argument for staying the course. Or, more accurately, it's a pretty persuasive argument, which is not necessarily the same thing. Of course, health care will be a big issue for the Democratic candidate, and it will be persuasive to many, but I don't see a reason why it would be more persuasive than last time.
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Tell that to the people whose hospitals have closed:

The Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion drove down the uninsured rate in the United States.

Now a new study suggests that the expansion boosted the financial health of many hospitals that serve a high number of the uninsured, especially in rural areas.

Researchers found that hospitals in the 32 states and District of Columbia that expanded Medicaid were more than 6 times less likely to close than hospitals in the 18 states that said no to the expansion.
Some areas were helped more than others by the Medicaid expansion.

“The effect, in terms of the closure rates between expansion and non-expansion states, seems to be especially strong for rural hospitals,” said study author Gregory Tung, PhD, an assistant professor in the Colorado School of Public Health at the University of Colorado.
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Before 2012, there were similar rates of hospital closures in Medicaid expansion and non-expansion states.

The two groups started to diverge in 2012, after the Supreme Court decided that the Medicaid expansion should be optional for states.

After this time, closure rates declined in expansion states, while they remained high in non-expansion states.
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https://www.healthline.com/health-news/obamacare-helped-keep-rural-hospitals-open#1
 
Stacyhs said:
Tell that to the people whose hospitals have closed:




https://www.healthline.com/health-news/obamacare-helped-keep-rural-hospitals-open#1
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I'm still missing something.

In a thread about Trump getting re-elected, you just posted links from an article that included, "since 2012...…"






The Democratic candidate can certainly try to make a case that government should provide or be involved more in health care, and I have no doubt he will do so.

But they did last time, too, and they did to one extent or another in every election I can remember. Sometimes it was a stronger message, sometimes weaker, but this issue has a long history. The point is that there's no great talking point of "Because Trump got elected, something very bad happened."

There's a "we need to do more than Trump is doing" argument, but that's not nearly as powerful, and in fact is looked upon skeptically by an awful lot of Americans.

ETA: Whether or not it should be. This thread is about politics, i.e. how people vote, not necessarily how people ought to vote if they knew what was good for them.
 
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The reason why even those Republicans who despise Trump will vote for him is this:
they are horrified of a Democrat using the precedent Trump has set for Abuse of Power and Obstruction of Justice.
 
Wow. After last night's debate, I don't think any of the candidates are going to have much of a turnout. None of them are Obama or Bill Clinton, able to pull center votes in huge numbers.
 
Drewbot said:
Wow. After last night's debate, I don't think any of the candidates are going to have much of a turnout. None of them are Obama or Bill Clinton, able to pull center votes in huge numbers.
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The Bernie Bros have forced to abandon, in fact full on reject and demonize, the center in the vague hopes of some massive demographic of Far Left in America that for all of our sakes I hope really does exist.
 
JoeMorgue said:
The Bernie Bros have forced to abandon, in fact full on reject and demonize, the center in the vague hopes of some massive demographic of Far Left in America that for all of our sakes I hope really does exist.
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Actually, I've seen more demonization of Bernie and his supporters than the other way around.
 
The Great Zaganza said:
The reason why even those Republicans who despise Trump will vote for him is this:
they are horrified of a Democrat using the precedent Trump has set for Abuse of Power and Obstruction of Justice.
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I've said it before I and got crap for it.

How Trump is "Presidenting" is not going unnoticed and we'd be fools to think that even the noblest and purest of heart people aren't looking at how much of his... self he's been able to force into the Presidency by just ignoring the rules, playing the "I can do anything I want unless somebody stops me" and... gears are turning in their heads.

I guarantee you there is at least some teeny, tiny voice in the head of every person on stage at the Democratic Election saying some variation on the "Oh you see... all we have to do is get a good person in that position and everything is going to be okay... and aren't you just that person?"

Now, to be clear, even the worst person on queue for the Dems is a 1,000x better then Trump and that little voice is going to be largely overshadowed in most of their cases by varying levels of base competence and general human decency that Trump doesn't have, but the voice is there.

The whole "Wholly crap, all you have to do is just ignore a bunch of unspoken rules or just do stuff and wait for someone to stop you and you can't get a lot of crap done, or at least create a lot of drama and attention" is not a genie we are going to be able to stuff back into the bottle.
 
Cabbage said:
Actually, I've seen more demonization of Bernie and his supporters than the other way around.
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When Bernie wins he can make toil in the Health Care and Student Loan Relief mines to pay for my sins. I'll be too happy Trump didn't win to care.
 
Meadmaker said:
I'm still missing something.

In a thread about Trump getting re-elected, you just posted links from an article that included, "since 2012...…"
>snip<

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You stated that
The thing is, the steps he has taken are pretty popular, and haven't been devastating, except possibly to people who chose not to be insured. In terms of Trump's reelection, I don't see a big event that will turn a lot of voters against him.
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(#126)

The quotes I provided show how hospitals, particularly rural hospitals, have been negatively affected in states that did not expand Medicaid under the ACA.

President Trump has made clear that his goal remains to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA), including its expansion of Medicaid to low-income adults, and to impose rigid caps on the federal government’s Medicaid spending. While Congress considered and rejected a series of proposals to cut Medicaid and repeal the ACA in 2017, the Administration has continued to pursue the overarching policy goals of those bills through its budget proposals, litigation seeking to overturn the entire ACA, and administrative actions. Restrictions it has put in place administratively have already cost many thousands of people their health coverage and access to care and could harm millions more.
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The Trump Administration proposed a rule in November 2019 that would make it harder for states to pay for their share of Medicaid costs. If finalized, the rule could require many states to change how they finance their Medicaid programs — eliminating some financing options that have long been available to states. These changes would dramatically affect state budgets and could lead to significant cuts to benefits, coverage, and provider payments.
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https://www.cbpp.org/research/health/trump-administrations-harmful-changes-to-medicaid

The hospitals depend on being paid by those covered by Medicaid. When the number of people on Medicaid goes down, the hospitals still provide care, but are not reimbursed for the cost. That is why the rate of hospital closure in non-Medicaid expanded states is 6X higher than those in states that expanded it.
 
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Sideroxylon said:
“Toxic Bernie Bro culture” is narrative propagated by political opponents that provides many a non
Sequitur justification for suspicion of the candidate.
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I would just like to point out that the biggest Bernie Bro on these forums last time around voted for Trump and was a huge supporter of Trump.

May our large canine rest in peace.


Segnosaur said:
True, you can have privately owned hospitals in a publicly funded system.

Does bring up a few issues though:

- Does BernieCare allow for that? Its all well and good to come up with ur own ideas about what health care should be like, but if the politicians are pushing something else, our own plans are irrelevant

- Who decides what the fees are? Does the government force all hospitals to accept the same payment? Or do they offer certain fees and the hospital can take it or leave it? And if the fees offered are less than the cost to run the hospital (or are less profitable than other uses of the real estate), are you prepared to see a reduction in hospital beds (with the possibility of wait lists)?
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I thought that medicare had most of this worked out to some degree. Isn't that why he is calling for M4A instead of starting from scratch?
 
Dr. Keith said:
True, you can have privately owned hospitals in a publicly funded system.

Does bring up a few issues though:

- Does BernieCare allow for that? Its all well and good to come up with ur own ideas about what health care should be like, but if the politicians are pushing something else, our own plans are irrelevant

- Who decides what the fees are? Does the government force all hospitals to accept the same payment? Or do they offer certain fees and the hospital can take it or leave it? And if the fees offered are less than the cost to run the hospital (or are less profitable than other uses of the real estate), are you prepared to see a reduction in hospital beds (with the possibility of wait lists)?
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I thought that medicare had most of this worked out to some degree. Isn't that why he is calling for M4A instead of starting from scratch?
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From what I understand, not all doctors/hospitals accept medicare. And supposedly the costs reimbursed by medicare can actually be less than the cost of treatment.

From: https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/18/politics/medicare-for-all-doctors-hospitals/index.html
Medicare payments only covered 87% of costs... "Hospitals are already paid far less than the cost of caring for Medicare patients, and more patients with Medicare would strain hospitals even more, and could threaten hospitals' survival," wrote Rick Pollack, chief executive of the association.

(Note that the figures come from a group called the American Hospital Association, which is a private group, but the figures seem to fit in with other numbers I've seen.)

So, if Medicare-for-all is expanded:
- Doctors who previously rejected Medicare patients will have to change their practices. How do you do that?
- Some medical facilities may end up losing money (and end up going out of business) if the reimbursement by Medicare is not enough to cover the costs. What happens then?

Now, there are some claims about how it will ultimately save doctors/hospitals money by making things more efficient. I remain skeptical (since often medicare payments are late, which may cause a cashflow problem with medical facilities.)
 
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