Back when Obama made it where you couldn't be evicted and bailed out the auto industry, I had a friend that drove a car hauler. He wasn't paying his house payment and lived for free for a year, and only had a job because of the bailout. He talked mad shit about the bailout and about people living and not paying their rent. This is republikkklown logic. I was blown away and said to him, he wouldn't have a job or a place to live if it wasn't for that. He said he'd live somewhere else and get a different job.
Since then, he lives with his wife and child in his mom's house with a shit job and complains about people being on welfare. They don't get it.
If there’s any way they can punch down instead of address their own issues they’ll take it. It’s why they resort to going after made up nonsense or the most vulnerable.
This is happening right now in Germany. In two of our 16 federal states, the fascist party got around 30% of votes through fear mongering and propaganda. In one of the states, all of the remaining parties would be needed to create a functionable government with a majority, containing the whole spectrum from left to right. I am not sure about the future of this state.
I literally knew a girl who said this. She truly had no idea that they were the same thing, but rattled on about wanting it gone while benefiting from it.
I also knew an older woman who hated Obama and said "he's arrogant for naming that after himself." She didn't believe me that her favorite channel was the one who named it after him unofficially and that its official name was ACA.
They truly just repeat bullshit until it sticks, and it usually works on the people who don't bother to diversify their information sources. It's so goddamn frustrating.
Ronald Reagan was cutting advertising telling people that Social Security was going to go bankrupt in a generation back in 1961.
Then he took office in 1980 (after he'd predicted bankruptcy) on the position and "fixed" SS by raising taxes on low income Americans and gutting their benefits. But the subsequent multi-trillion dollar trust fund didn't satisfy SS scalds. They still insisted it was going bankrupt, so Republicans raised taxes and gutted benefits again under Clinton and Gingrich, while introducing alternative privatized savings programs (401k, IRA, etc).
But that still didn't satisfy scalds. They tried to privatize the program in 2005 under Bush Jr. That failed, but we still got an earful about how SS was going to fail in the next 20 years if we didn't do something. So then Obama tried to pass another round of cuts and tax hikes in 2013, but Republicans killed that too. So then Trump claimed we were headed to a Fiscal Cliff in 2017, and tried to privatize SS, but Republicans refused to pass that either.
At this point, we've passed repeated deadlines under which SS was supposedly going to fail. The 1970s, the 1980s, the 2000s, the 2020s... We're still waiting on the Big Cliff in 2037, but since COVID killed several million people far sooner than expected, that's thrown the math of significantly.
I anticipate we will continue to hear people predicting the end of SS until Congress finally finds the majority they need to kill it.
That's not how tax brackets should work. But sadly for last year's state tax I came across it. [Example numbers] Previously I had 24,200 annual salary but zero tax as it was below 25,000. Even though personal deductions are 10,000, below 25 was considered too low to tax. This year, due to a mistake from employers I was paid for two weeks retroactively, now I have 25,300. Instead of taxing 300 above 25,000 the tax was for 15,300 after deduction. So I had to pay taxes which decreased the money below 25,000 which should not happen if income below 25,000 pays no tax.
And considering there might be things like not qualifying for financial assistance and other things when you cross 25,000 (again example numbers), the actual benefit of making slightly below that, is higher than making slightly above that..
So the system is putting a resistance to overcome poverty. Either you start making double of what you are making, or stay on your lane. Because trying to improve your situation by only a little is harmful.
Lots of people working the service sector are trained to hate one another. The assumption is always that the other guy isn't pulling their weight, never that the establishment is understaffed or the staff undertrained and overworked.
What they (Republicans, conservatives, libertarians, centrists) really want is emergency departments over run with patients who can't get care for chronic conditions and then they have an excuse to repeal EMTALA. At that point they'll be able to sink people deep into medical debt and when social security and Medicare/Medicaid fails to cover the costs then we can force medically disabled people into low wage jobs and take their assets to sell at pennies on the dollar to mega corps and further consolidate wealth in this country.
We should instead create a pipeline for that wealth to flow through the lower and middle class on it's way up to the top bringing the floor up and making sure basic infrastructure like medical care has the funding it needs.
I'm not American, but this happens a lot more than you'd think.
I live in Canada.
A relative of a friend actually voted for a party called "the People's party of Canada", and one of their goals as a party was to eliminate subsidized housing. That relative of my friend.... lived in subsidized housing and was not able to afford to have a home if not subsidized.
They literally voted for a party that, if they had won, would have made them homeless.
I don't think that the PPC won a single district (giving them no seats in government); much to their benefit and their disappointment.
But voting against it to remove its benefit to others is the hypocrisy. For instance, a cousin of mine was on her parents' insurance until the cutoff of 26 because of Obamacare and was all about getting rid of it. I would point out how she was only insured because of it (this was before her being 26 and booted off) and asked her what her next plan for being insured would be. Of course she didn't think that far ahead and just said she would be 26 by the time anything changed so it wouldn't matter.
That's a straw man here. The ACA didn't require individuals to buy insurance. They're getting it because they value it, not because their money was already taken.
Not sure how you can apply that principle here. If people don't want insurance at all, we get it, but this is all about people who could not get insurance before and now are paying for this 100% optional thing.
Of course they could be in favor of NHS or an equivalent. That's certainly possible. But I think you were not going that direction with your logic.
Sounds like my retiree father-in-law who insists that Social Security isn’t a social service and should be the one exception to absolute abolition of all government services because they’re “communist.”
In Kansas it's a hot issue to expand ACA benefits and has widely popular support. Yet we for some reason keep on voting in Republicans whose major issues are just removing tax brackets.
I supported the ACA (though would’ve preferred a public option), but the one time I actually needed to use it, was for my Dad when his private insurance from his job kicked him off after retirement, the rates and coverage seemed bad, like it was just such a hassle with no great benefits. It’s only when I realized my Dad could still get Tricare that I switched over to that and that was a million times better (even more reason for govt-funded healthcare). I have no idea why my Dad hadn’t been using it the whole time either, he probably wasted tens of thousands of dollars getting private insurance. I still think ACA is a step in the right direction, BUT public option still needs to happen, Fuck Joe Lieberman for blocking that.
It’s only when I realized my Dad could still get Tricare that I switched over to that and that was a million times better (even more reason for govt-funded healthcare).
One of the biggest flaws of the ACA is how it's engineered to be worse than employee sponsored care. Can't actually just open up Medicare For All or you'll make the private insurance system sad.
The ACA is good when you actually reach out to a patient care "assister" for support. You can get rates WAY lower than advertised if you work with someone who can help navigate it. I think the program is actually tremendous, but it's been made intentionally cumbersome and difficult to use by the folks trying to kill it. I've used it twice while out of work back in 2016 and again over the pandemic and had completely free plans that covered my "tier 3" prescriptions and specialist (rheumatology) appointments.
You can mathematically group the people in your life in such a way so that half of the people you know are stupider than the other half.
I swear to fuckin' god, man, politics make it real easy to tell who goes in which half. It's not a perfect method, but it works at least 85% of the goddamned time.
Nah. Relying on the ACA, and voting for people who want to abolish it is a leopards eating faces situation.
The guy in this meme is wrong because he's not paying attention to the wider pressures of society, and the needs of the people he's talking to, when those people just want a better system.
He disagrees with the woman demanding better ethical practices from Apple because she uses an Apple product, but the reality is that it is difficult to navigate modern society without a smartphone, and there's pretty much no brand that doesn't have some ethical failings in their supply chain. It's not hypocrisy to point out a systemic issue, and want to see it resolved, if your participation is unavoidable.
He disagrees with the man wanting seatbelts for his car, because he bought a car without them. Wanting greater safety features for the machinery you regularly operate is pragmatic, not hypocritical. Seeing a problem and offering a solution is a productive thing to do.
But relying on the ACA for access to healthcare, and then voting to have the ACA dismantled with absolutely no plan on how to replace it, essentially denying millions of Americans, including themselves, access to healthcare? That's just fucking insane. There's no call for a better system. There's no suggestion for how to do things differently. Just a call to tear down a system that people rely on for their health.
If you think that we ought to hear the Republicans out on their anti-Healthcare agenda, or that people who rely on the ACA aren't voting against their own interests when they vote Republican, you're not paying attention to what's at stake.
Th ACA screwed me over pretty badly. Granted my situation wasn't the target of the act (I had non-employer private insurance, and the price more than tripled due to ACA requirements).
I don't like trump at all, but I agree with scrapping this plan and creating something better.
You can dislike a policy and still be forced to live under it.
I have no choice but to use the American health care system, and I know how shitty it is, especially given the fact that Obama had a supermajority for a time and could have implemented universal health care. Few things will anger me as quickly as someone saying we have 'access' to health care when that supposed access is largely contingent on whether or not you can afford to be price-gouged.
You’re simply wrong here. Obama tried his damndest for universal health care. Supermajority or not, the republicans in congress used every trick in the book to stymie it until they gained the majority. The ACA was a lame compromise and the worst of both worlds, but it’s still benefitted millions including those who hate illogically.
That's always the first argument. The poor, defenseless Dems are just powerless to make real, substantial change. Their hands are tied. Better things simply aren't possible. It was all the fault of the rotating villain.
And yet people still vote for these same Democrats who are bleeding them dry.
I can't imagine it's that great for a country where tens of millions can't absorb a sudden $400 expense without going further into debt, seeing as how it's a capitalist system that price-gouges people for their care.
You're technically correct but you're ignoring the intention of the post. I agree Obamacare sucks. I want Medicare for All. But the people this post is obviously directed at want it to go away for reasons and just go back to how it was before.
Technically that's true, because it changed the law where you can't be denied coverage because of pre-existing conditions, but I'm guessing OP means he uses the marketplace thingy instead of having insurance provided by work.
(Also, the affordable care act didn't force you to have insurance, it was a tax penalty to not have insurance, but the 2018 tax act set that penalty to $0)
You're correct on all those, but OP was talking about people who praise the Affordable Care Act but vote for politicians who say they want to get rid of Obamacare. Those people aren't using the system but want better, they are just ignorant that the two are the same thing.
Now we absolutely could do better, but it's better than what we had, and Republicans still want to get rid of it, even with less ties to Obama in name now. They truly hate people.
Well, for almost a decade the GOP has had time to come up with their vision. They ran on "Repeal and Replace" in the 2016 cycle. But when it came time to vote to repeal, they still didn't have a replace option.
Prices didn't go down when the 2018 tax cuts reduced corporate tax by about 30%, I doubt when the ACA gets repealed and insurance companies can drop the uninsurable people they will lower the prices for healthy Americans, because they are already anchored at the higher price.