obamacare

Thanks for the debate, 16kadams. == My opponent's plan == His plan is to build thousands of hospitals throughout the country and force the local governments to pay for it. My KEY responses here were: 1) His plan costs at least $10 trillion over 20 years, with no cost savings. Obamacare costs only $1 trillion over 20 years, and achieves $1.21 trillion in cost savings (according to the CBO). My opponent's ONLY answer is that we can make interns work for free, but there are two problems with this: a) interns have already graduated medical school and have massive student loan debt; they don't want to be slave labor and b) doctor's wages were only one small component of the $10 trillion; the other components were: cost of building hospitals, cost of medical machinery, cost of giving away free procedures and medicine, cost of cleaning staff, and cost of non-intern supervising doctors and surgeons. Given his plan is more expensive and his number 1 objection to Obamacare is cost, he should clearly lose. 2) Local governments are strapped for cash. California has slashed billions of dollars from our state school system because we are so desperately in need of money. Governor Jerry Brown is raising the retirement age for our pension system to 70 and is creating a hybrid defined benefit/401K retirement plan because we can no longer afford our state pension plan; refusing to implement Brown's pension cuts would require payroll cuts of 30% (i.e. laying off 1/3 of government workers). The situation in states is dire. According to Cato, state and local debt rose 55% between 2000 and 2006. Conclusion: STATES AND CITIES CANNOT AFFORD TO PAY FOR THIS. Lastly, and further hurting his credibility, when I asked my opponent to provide evidence that Texas did this on a wide scale, he provides a broken link. His other link is to a public hospital in Texas that would be hurt by Obamacare because the quality of care is so low there that once people have insurance, no one would choose to go to the public hospital. That's why Obamacare is less "socialized" than my opponent's plan: it allows consumers choice. The last thing I need to respond to here is whether tax cuts lead to job creation and ultimately more tax revenue. Here is a study by Anisha Desai that job growth was much lower than normal during the Bush years, in spite of tax cuts. [1] The conclusions from Reagan's "supply side" economics are the same: "A central component of supply-side economics is the Laffer Curve - named for its inventor, the economist Arthur Laffer - which shows that low tax rates produce more [government] revenue than high ones . . . In the media and [academia], however, the Laffer Curve is widely discredited." [2] == The rest == The rest of my opponent's previous round was pretty incoherent. One of his responses was something to the effect of "gah, my brain exploded" (see the 3:1 section). So I'm not going to try to parse through his responses (he still leaves most of my refutations untouched). I'll just restate the main voters on Obamacare. == Voting issues == 1) Obamacare covers pre-existing conditions. It's breach of contract for your insurance company to be allowed to drop you when you get sick. We buy insurance with the belief that it will be there when we need it. It's ridiculous that if you get cancer, your insurance company can refuse to renew your policy after a few years. 2) Obamacare extends insurance to dependents up to age 26. This is important for anyone going to graduate school. 3) Obamacare saves people a ton of money. Here are all the ways how: a) Obamacare ensures that the uninsured will no longer use the ER as free primary care. Currently, hospitals are forced to charge insured people MORE to make up for the losses from non-payment that they are constantly taking in the ER. Currently, 85% of ER visits are for non-emergencies, meaning they are uninsured people seeking free care. This would massively lower costs. b) Obamacare caps insurance industry profits. If you watch the documentary Sicko, the insurance industry used to do pretty horrible things to increase profit margins, like retroactively cancelling policies of sick people for stupid reasons ("you failed to disclose that you had a yest infection 10 years ago"). Obamacare ensures that 80% of insurance money MUST be spent on medical treatment. In the rules first year, a study found that 9 million Americans will save $1.4 billion on their premiums. c) Obamacare provides tax credits. The HHS study found that poor people could save up to $14,000 per year using tax credits. Small business can save 6 billion a year. d) State Insurance Exchanges let people pool together and demand lower rates, using a competitive bidding process for who gets to cover them. This is how large employers, like Costco, get lower rates for their employees. The Exchanges would save the average family $2,300 a year, according to the HHS study. 4) Obamacare saves the government money. Obamacare raises Medicare taxes to a more fair level, given that they were never increased to cover the additions of Medicare Part B, C, and D. It abolishes the wasteful Medicare Plus program. The CBO says in total, Obamacare saves so much money that it pays for itself AND generates an additional $210 billion in revenue for the government. For all these reasons, Obamacare is superior to my opponent's plan. Vote Pro. [1] http://www.faireconomy.org... [2] http://www.yorktownuniversity.com...