[curun1r]

Yes, it's semantics...no quotes needed, that's what it is. But it's also people trying to make other people look stupid by being wrong, and they deserve to be called out for their improper semantics.

It's not "just insurance." That's not "what insurance is." We're talking about a form of socialized medicine, not insurance. That's the correct terminology. Anyone arguing for anything between Obamacare and Medicare For All (which includes me, BTW) needs to own up to that terminology or something to that effect and stop selling the notion that what they're arguing for is just insurance.

Insurance, as a concept, doesn't shift the burden for risk from people who can't afford to pay to people who can. It's something different and you don't get to alter definition of insurance just because the correct terminology has a stigma. So when the comment I replied to says,

> This is the whole point of health insurance!

No, it's not. That's the whole point of socialized medicine. Words have meaning and we should be using the correct ones.

[b1daly]

It’s true “Obamacare” is a form of socialized health care. But the bottom line is that it chose to implement the subsidization of poor peoples’ health care through the mechanism of health insurance. It’s simply not the case that poor people included into the plans are having their care covered through the mechanism of increasing the premiums of the healthy, which is what Paul Ryan is implying.

Poorer members of the insurance pool have their premiums subsidized. From the insurance companies point of view, they are (theoretically) managing the pool and premiums using the same actuarial tools they used previously.

The rules about not being able to reject people for pre-existing conditions force them to broaden the set of (heterogeneous) members included.

The plans are provided by “health insurance companies.” The product you buy from them is called “health insurance.” The imaginary, purist notion of what you are declaring to be “insurance” is like a simplified model of economic theory you might find in a textbook. It’s used to gain insight about how an insurance product works. There are no real world example of “health insurance” that conform to your simplified definition.

Health insurance in the US has long included coverage for routine care, which already falls outside of your model.

I’m of the theory that the meaning of words is defined by how they are used in everyday language, not how I think they should be defined.