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Forums - Politics Discussion - The Coming Obamacare Shock for 170 Million Americans

Mr Puggsly on 06 April 2014
Mr Khan said:
Mr Puggsly said:

Nope, there are plenty of jobs not being filled.

Anyone who is healthy and can't find a job is doing something wrong. I was recently offered three jobs because I make an effort and try to develop skils employers want.

If you're a healthy person capable of working, there is little excuse to be in poverity. Most poverty is a result of bad choices.

It's a macro game. There are about 4 million open jobs in this country right now http://www.epi.org/publication/jobs-60-percent-job-seekers/, and about 10.2 million job-seekers (and that's just *job seekers*, not those who have given up on job-seeking due to the poor economy, the ones uncounted in the unemployment rate). This means that if we eliminated things like geographical problems (many of those seekers might not live where the jobs are), there would still be about 6.2 million people who are shit out of luck because there are simply not enough jobs for everyone.

Or have you polled 10.2 million job seekers to cover your little anecdote there?

I call bullshit, I don't think they can actually determine how many opportunities are available.

Anyhow, lets wait for those 4 million jobs to be filled before we piss and moan about no jobs being available.



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thranx on 06 April 2014
Mr Khan said:
thismeintiel said:
Kasz216 said:
Augen said:
I can only speak anecdotally, but my insurance went up 30% and my coverage became significantly worse to point it is pointless in 99% of scenarios. The main issue with healthcare here is it is so expensive so many people I know self medicate. Had seven stitches a few years back and it was $3000, $1700 after my old insurance paid $1300. How does that make any sense? Of course under new plan I would pay all of it so if I get cut I just get a scar now. It is easily the big thing we do far worse than so many other comparable countries.

I had a similar expierence.


My healthcare premium went up over 300% with no added benefits.

That said, i ended up on medicaid.  Not actually happy about it.

I'd rather pay for healthcare... but i'm not paying > 1 paycheck for it... and subsidies have a price floor... for whatever reason.

 

They may as well just go full out health coverage.   Rather then making it so tons of people have to pay more, just so a very small few can get cheaper health insurance that's probably still below the level they need.

 

 

 

 

Well, that seems to be the problem with a lot of the policies of this administration (other administrations, as well.)  They say they are doing this or that for the poorest of citizens, but in the end it barely helps them, and instead hurts the middle class.  Same goes for the large hike in minimum wage to ~$10 they want, as well.  Sure, the minimum wage going up seems great for those just starting, or those poor people who make only a little above minimum wage.  But, what happens is the cost of doing business goes up, so businesses have to raise prices on everything.  Eventually, the poor people realize they are barely able to afford more than what they previously did.  So, again, it hurts the middle class who are 100% not getting the same ~$3 raise the minimum wage folks got, so they can actually afford less.

Businesses won't have to raise prices on everything. Compare McDonald's prices from the US to, say, Australia, where cost-of-living is about the same but minimum wage is higher. Actual prices don't go up that much.

The price rises will be minimal compared to the real money in people's pockets, especially poor people who actually spend their money rather than just shunt it into some hedge fund like the rich. The net effect would be quite beneficial, but for the bitching of businesses who only see the short-term shock to their bottom lien.


people will loose jobs when min wage goes up. its just not cost effective to pay people 10 an hour for easy work that little training is needed for. After every min wage hike operators will switch to less labor intensive options, such as automation. which just cuts out the employee completely. I know at my pizza place after the next min wage increase it will be cheaper for us to doughball and portion by machine than by people, so we will be cutting hours of current workers. I know chilis has already done this on a massive scale too. So what good is raising the min wage? all it really does is hurt the people will the least skills as they are no longer worth employing. it means everyone i employ must be worth $10 an hour or they loose their job.

http://beta.fool.com/ultimatespinach/2013/05/10/what-restaurant-chain-will-be-next-to-deploy-the-k/34052/

 

Edit: I should add over time it will decrease compition among businesses as it will increase start up costs for business. It costs more intitially to get all the equiptment than to train employees, but if that is not cost effective than people will have to come up with more start up money, which is harder, so it will be done less and less compition will be there to bring prices down.



cusman on 06 April 2014

Obamacare will cost you the higher of

$95/month per adult and something less than that per child
OR
1% of your yearly gross income

If you are an uninsured healthy individual, this is going to suck for you. In my case, since I want multi-state coverage, it is going to cost $700 / month for my family of 4. The lowest cost I could get was around $550 / month but that didn't cover anything outside of my home state and I do travel.

...
If you are low income with that scale determined by number of family members but generally
One benefit/cost of Obamacare is that your health insurance premium cost is based on your income level, and not your health level.

Second benefit of Obamacare is that you are now being sold Insurance as part of a "big" group, so your overall cost is lower. Basically if you were in small company and had small group size and therefore higher premiums, now it should all equalize into a larger group so you would have the lower premium costs like what large companies were used to getting.

The group size thing is all about how a single employer/account gets risk spread between the insured. If you have ten employees and one of them gets cancer, then you become unprofitable on that account immediately even while charging higher premiums (and they would raise the rates at that point in case a 2nd employee gets cancer). However, if you have 4000 employees and 10 of them get cancer at a time, you are probably still profitable even with lower premiums.

Insurance is all about spreading the risk where the healthy essentially pay for the unhealthy. The main issue health insurance companies have with Obamacare isn't the mandating of everyone to get coverage. It is that they are not allowed to deny or charge higher premiums for the coverage based on individual risk factors.

In principal Insurance companies shouldn't care, because once a large enough pool of uninsured (including healthy) get insured, then the risk will be appropriately spread. Their big concern now is the early adopters to Obamacare are people that are probably at risk and actually need insurance while the others choosing to pay the fine over the actual coverage costs are the healthy ones that would spread that risk and make it all financially viable before premium rates (or fines to increase adoption) would have to be increased.



Kasz216 on 06 April 2014
outlawauron said:
Kasz216 said:
Mr Khan said:

Everyone pays their share in taxes, which is a much more equitable burden since a 1% can far more easily afford to lose a million dollars than a bottom 10% can afford to lose $50.


I mean... you do realize that Europe has more regressive taxes then the US by like... a lot right.

The Rich pay more in taxes in Europe then the US.... but everyone else pays a WHOLE lot more then the US does.

The only way to actually pay for more "soclialist" programs like universal healthcare is to tax the hell out of the poor to the point of tax regressiveness.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/09/19/other-countries-dont-have-a-47/

I'm having some major deja vu with this discussion between the two of you. I suppose this is one of the eternally debated topics.


could of been someone else too.  It's just a fun stat that nobody really pays attention to.

Big progressive government programs pratically need regressive tax systems.



Mr Khan on 06 April 2014
thranx said:
Mr Khan said:

Businesses won't have to raise prices on everything. Compare McDonald's prices from the US to, say, Australia, where cost-of-living is about the same but minimum wage is higher. Actual prices don't go up that much.

The price rises will be minimal compared to the real money in people's pockets, especially poor people who actually spend their money rather than just shunt it into some hedge fund like the rich. The net effect would be quite beneficial, but for the bitching of businesses who only see the short-term shock to their bottom lien.


people will loose jobs when min wage goes up. its just not cost effective to pay people 10 an hour for easy work that little training is needed for. After every min wage hike operators will switch to less labor intensive options, such as automation. which just cuts out the employee completely. I know at my pizza place after the next min wage increase it will be cheaper for us to doughball and portion by machine than by people, so we will be cutting hours of current workers. I know chilis has already done this on a massive scale too. So what good is raising the min wage? all it really does is hurt the people will the least skills as they are no longer worth employing. it means everyone i employ must be worth $10 an hour or they loose their job.

http://beta.fool.com/ultimatespinach/2013/05/10/what-restaurant-chain-will-be-next-to-deploy-the-k/34052/

 

Edit: I should add over time it will decrease compition among businesses as it will increase start up costs for business. It costs more intitially to get all the equiptment than to train employees, but if that is not cost effective than people will have to come up with more start up money, which is harder, so it will be done less and less compition will be there to bring prices down.

But people also have more money in their pockets to spend on goods and services. Why do we always neglect that part of the equation? You can't just assume that inflation is going to zero all of it out, especially since we've been in a *very* low inflation environment (QE is the only thing keeping deflation from happening. The market right now wants deflation to happen. Inflation is a boogeyman in Western societies)

Automation is going to happen anyway. That's just an inevitability, because businesses will always root around to try to figure out how to minimize labor costs, just as they'll root around to figure out how to minimize costs of all their other inputs (even I as an advocate for labor will admit that it's not some conspiracy against the working man, but neither is it a process that is kept at bay only because of low minimum wages). Companies will always be working to figure out what the bare minimum number of employees is to get the job done, and guess what: if they have to pay more, they still can't get rid of people without making the quality of the work suffer, because they've likely already cut back to only what is needed.

Note that the chili's article talked more about improving speed of service through automation, rather than about labor costs. That's why you automate.



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Mr Khan on 06 April 2014
Mr Puggsly said:
Mr Khan said:
Mr Puggsly said:

Nope, there are plenty of jobs not being filled.

Anyone who is healthy and can't find a job is doing something wrong. I was recently offered three jobs because I make an effort and try to develop skils employers want.

If you're a healthy person capable of working, there is little excuse to be in poverity. Most poverty is a result of bad choices.

It's a macro game. There are about 4 million open jobs in this country right now http://www.epi.org/publication/jobs-60-percent-job-seekers/, and about 10.2 million job-seekers (and that's just *job seekers*, not those who have given up on job-seeking due to the poor economy, the ones uncounted in the unemployment rate). This means that if we eliminated things like geographical problems (many of those seekers might not live where the jobs are), there would still be about 6.2 million people who are shit out of luck because there are simply not enough jobs for everyone.

Or have you polled 10.2 million job seekers to cover your little anecdote there?

I call bullshit, I don't think they can actually determine how many opportunities are available.

Anyhow, lets wait for those 4 million jobs to be filled before we piss and moan about no jobs being available.

"I don't like the real numbers so I will just ignore them."

Secondly, there are always going to be job openings. Structural unemployment is a thing, due to many companies being quite willing to wait for the "perfect candidate" even if it means leaving a position unfilled for years. Also, there could be a thousand jobs in your field in Seattle, but none in Memphis, but you don't want to leave Memphis because your girlfriend does have a good job there, so you keep looking in Memphis instead of just picking up and going to where it could easily be found.

The zero lower bound for unemployment is realistically around 3-4% for that reason. However, in a "full employment" situation, there are fewer seekers than openings, or at least close to a 1:1 ratio.

You're really not interested in having a fair argument about this, are you?



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Justagamer on 06 April 2014
Mr Khan said:
Justagamer said:
the2real4mafol said:
Mr Puggsly said:
the2real4mafol said:
Should of just funded the healthcare with taxes like the UK. You lot are only paying for a bloated army right now, a couple wars and some fascist mass spying organisations. Good priority of American government with so many in poverty!


American Poverty = Living in better conditions than most of the world with an opportunity to get out of poverty

Tell that to the poor in places like Detroit, Chicago or LA or any big city. If you're born poor you are likely to stay poor unless very lucky. Being poor is a bit of a disadvantage to doing well in the current system. And if American federal government ensured just two things, they would make things alot better for people. $15 minimum wage and a tax funded health service. Hell the money saved from eliminating the free market from core parts of healthcare would save alot of money for all.

Why else does the US spend 17% of GDP on health while European countries with a NHS style system or a mixed public/ private healthcare system spend around 8 to 10% of GDP. It certaintly adds up and its nice to known I can get treatment if I needed it without worrying about the cost.  


I find it funny when people think raising the minimum wage is the answer... What do you think happens when minimum wage goes up? The price of everything goes up too... So they'll make a little more, and spend a little more, but wind up in the same place: broke. I have a friend who manages a local Walgreens store... As soon as it was known that minimum wage was going up, prices went up on many products... One week later, he showed me a list of items, hundreds of them, that were already raised, or will soon be going up... Just by the news of minimum wage going up.... Getting a better job, not raising minimum wage, is the answer to making more money....

And how do we get these magical better jobs if there's no money in the economy because wealth is being hoarded at the top?

Redistribution is needed to kickstart real consumer demand and real growth, and one of the best ways to do that in a permanent way is to hike the minimum wage. Prices may go up, but not as much to justify the minimum wage change, especially they can't go up that quickly because it doesn't change demand for their products in the short run. Hence sticky prices, as a highly reactive price change is only going to hurt your bottom line as fewer people then buy your products.

Plus it's just a social thing. All taxpayers are subsidizing these low minimum-wage earners through social services (because they're TOO POOR), so you are paying for them one way or another. Better for the economy that they earn that money themselves, spend it themselves, and better contribute to wealth movement that way (especially if it means the dimunition of corporate profits, which just get hoarded nowadays)

I'm not here for an argument, but, how do you find these magical better jobs?..... Ok. It's through education. Minimum wage earners aren't educated. Tons of them haven't even finished highschool. Not all, but quite a few. There's ways to get this magical education, to find these mysterious, magical better jobs... Trade schools, traditional university, and there is funding for those that want to actually try. What if there isn't a good job in your area? Look and apply in surrounding cities, states. Most people who are "stuck" in dead end jobs, are stuck there by their own accord. Never be fox holed anywhere. Never be tied down to a city, just because you"grew up" there. Where there's a will, thee is a way. Minimum wage hikes are paid for through price increases. Not too hard to see that. Nothing is free.... You have to earn it, work hard for it... I work 60 hour weeks... I earn every penny of my pay.



Mr Khan on 06 April 2014
Justagamer said:
Mr Khan said:

And how do we get these magical better jobs if there's no money in the economy because wealth is being hoarded at the top?

Redistribution is needed to kickstart real consumer demand and real growth, and one of the best ways to do that in a permanent way is to hike the minimum wage. Prices may go up, but not as much to justify the minimum wage change, especially they can't go up that quickly because it doesn't change demand for their products in the short run. Hence sticky prices, as a highly reactive price change is only going to hurt your bottom line as fewer people then buy your products.

Plus it's just a social thing. All taxpayers are subsidizing these low minimum-wage earners through social services (because they're TOO POOR), so you are paying for them one way or another. Better for the economy that they earn that money themselves, spend it themselves, and better contribute to wealth movement that way (especially if it means the dimunition of corporate profits, which just get hoarded nowadays)

I'm not here for an argument, but, how do you find these magical better jobs?..... Ok. It's through education. Minimum wage earners aren't educated. Tons of them haven't even finished highschool. Not all, but quite a few. There's ways to get this magical education, to find these mysterious, magical better jobs... Trade schools, traditional university, and there is funding for those that want to actually try. What if there isn't a good job in your area? Look and apply in surrounding cities, states. Most people who are "stuck" in dead end jobs, are stuck there by their own accord. Never be fox holed anywhere. Never be tied down to a city, just because you"grew up" there. Where there's a will, thee is a way. Minimum wage hikes are paid for through price increases. Not too hard to see that. Nothing is free.... You have to earn it, work hard for it... I work 60 hour weeks... I earn every penny of my pay.

Read the link i cited in my discussion with Mr Puggsly. There are too few jobs even if everyone were able to fill those jobs (which, again, not going to happen)

Never getting stuck to a city is also easy for some people, harder for others. What if you're a caretaker for an elderly or disabled relative (in an informal, unpaid capacity), have a skillset that would land you a job in a second in another city, but don't want to abandon the relative? There are many reasons why you are "stuck" in a certain geographic location, absent the ability to move.

An individual, or many individuals, will succeed using the processes you outlined. However it is functionally impossible for the economy to meet needs of all unemployed, let alone those who are employed in a minimum wage job and want to move on.

The link between minimum wage hikes and inflation is very unclear (again, the economy is currently trying to deflate itself, with the Fed's QE policy being the only thing propping everything up), and is certainly insufficient to make a minimum wage hike moot http://www.wisegeek.com/does-raising-the-minimum-wage-cause-inflation.htm



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Mr Puggsly on 06 April 2014
Mr Khan said:
Mr Puggsly said:

I call bullshit, I don't think they can actually determine how many opportunities are available.

Anyhow, lets wait for those 4 million jobs to be filled before we piss and moan about no jobs being available.

"I don't like the real numbers so I will just ignore them."

There isn't a finite number of jobs, so there are no "real numbers."

All we know for certain is there are millions of jobs currently available waiting to be filled. It would be nice if millions of unemployed people tried filling those first.



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ICStats on 06 April 2014
enditall727 said:
Figgycal said:
enditall727 said:

I have been living under a rock and haven't really cared to come out to take a peak at this.

@Spurge so basically.. what is this? Like what exactly are we supposed to do?

We are supposed to sign up for obama care for what? And how exactly do we do it?

.. And how is it going to affect our paychecks? Is it supposed to take like 10$ out of each paycheck or something?

 

Edit: i don't feel like looking it up on my own. 

Are you an adult?

I'm an infant

 

Lol

 

Yes i am and this is the part where you or somebody else says " how could you not know about this? You live in America and don't know about Obamacare?" Yada yada yada

 

I've been avoiding this Obamacare thing ever since the 1st time i attempted to look into it.

 

I know that the longer you wait, the more you will need to pay for healthcare each year or something like that. I just avoided it ever since then.

 

So just tell me how much obamacare asks you to pay each month

It's not like $10 a paycheck.  Medical insurance can be thousands a year per individual, so it's important to educate yourself about this.  If you have a low income then you can get government subsidies that pay some or all of the insurance for you.

Health insurance is now mandatory.  If you don't get insured you will have to pay fees, like 1% of your income.




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