How the Repeal of Obamacare Will Further Weaken the Quality of US Healthcare

Repealing the ACA would shrink the customer base for insurance companies, which would respond by investing less in their product, says Donna Smith of the Progressive Democrats of America

[jonnyh]

Beyond cuts and broken bones, the US healthcare system is all about making big money without your best interests in mind! Quite frankly it sucks!

[normankoerner]

Nice Job Ms. Brown and a great guest too. Way to go The REAL NEWS!

[Gkuljian]

America needs to make up it's mind: does it care about people, or money. Is it a country, or a company. Taxation without real representation, is what this feels like.

[phil]

Healthcare in the U.S. sucks. Blame it on Obamacare if you like, but it sucked long before the existence of Obamacare. I just hope people smarten and realize the system still sucks when Obamacare is gone.

[ellak]

Obamacare was practically written by the insurance lobby, i.e. the further privatization of care for profit. The public option was taken off the table almost immediately - so, yes Obamacare is a failure and should be repealed. The individual mandate forces people into policies which do not even provide basic healthcare without paying huge deductibles and co-pays, while at the same time allowing big corporate entities to shift their employer based contributions towards employees, via increased deductions from their paychecks. The entire scheme was based on increased profits for insurance companies, who themselves are part of the banking sector, which offloads its risks in the form of derivatives to this very day, which in turn drives up the stock market for fewer and fewer shareholders. In other words, the first objective was to destroy public funding for any type of program whatsoever, and then, due to the lack of funds, blame the public sector for failing, and reducing taxation of the wealthiest shareholders even further. In other words, privatize all profits and socialize all losses.
Nobody should be defending Obamacare - a neoliberal privatization scheme if there ever was one !

[garyphillips]

Donna looks like such a successful person I would believe anything she said. lol

[kenbobcorn]

"Repealing the ACA would shrink the customer base for insurance companies, which would respond by investing less in their product"

This statement is disinformation at best; the ACA has an individual mandate (9010) that requires individuals to buy insurance or pay the monthly penalty. As of right now Obamacare has the maximum enrollment possible as the mandate enrolls those people that wouldn't have otherwise paid the premium if it there weren't a fee associated otherwise. By saying insurance companies would "respond by investing less in their product", you can say that about any public sector program. Would you grant the same consideration to education? If that were the case we should make all the schools public sector and eliminate all private and charter schools, even though though private sector schools outperform public schools in every metric.

[simondisawari]

Its an easy fix really. Just model your health care system on single funder system from taxation. Just expand medicade/Medicare to be universal and accessable by all Americans. There are examples of this system working in many countries. It works, sometimes its a bit creaky, but healthcare funded by taxation, is just an accepted part of their lives. Its not socialism its just that people have organised their societies in a more humane way that is socially responsible. In many countries where there is single funder healthcare from taxation those people just cant understand why Americans believe their healthcare funding is so good and for princiably ideological reasons are frightened of the change needed to correct the insurance based system that is failing many millions of Americans and getting worse as fewer people are able to afford the rising premiums.