[gretful]

Obamacare is closer to car-insurance, with the caveat that even if you don't want a car you still have to buy the insurance. THAT is what has most of the nay-sayers agitated.

Medicare/Medicaid are, like the student loan programs with college tuition, at least partially responsible for driving up the costs of healthcare in the US.

We've backed ourselves into a very difficult corner, and getting out of it isn't going to be easy, and it won't be popular.

[cpwright]

Car insurance doesn't protect you, it protects the other drivers on the road. You can decide to risk it, and if your brand new car is totaled, its on you [assuming you paid cash, if you finance it any lender will also make you get collision and comprehensive]. What you can't decide to do is forgo liability insurance so that if you hit someone else's car they have to extract the payment from you rather than from a well-capitalized insurance company.

Of course this is all state regulated (and this is US-centric, but so is Obamacare), so it can work differently in different places.

Health insurance nominally protects you, though some make the argument that it protects society as a whole from any individual burdening the system.

[gretful]

Put Drs/Hospitals/HealthCare in place of the other car, and your body in place of your car. The analogy works very well. ACA is acting as the bank in the car insurance analogy, demanding that you HAVE to have bumper-to-bumper collision insurance.

In the car insurance case you can forgo the car and thereby forgo purchasing car insurance, but with the ACA you can't forgo health insurance.

[dragontamer]

     Obamacare is closer to car-insurance, with the caveat
     that even if you don't want a car you still have to buy 
     the insurance. THAT is what has most of the nay-sayers 
     agitated.

I must be listening to different nay-sayers than you.

http://www.foxnews.com/on-air/oreilly/2014/07/24/bill-oreill...

Bill O'Reilly, who is frankly a good conservative voice, clearly thinks that "Obamacare is Socialism"... that it is about income redistribution.

Which tells us a few things: Bill O'Reilly hasn't read Obamacare, and he also doesn't understand what "Socialism" means. Otherwise, he'd be attacking Medicaid.

And Bill O'Reilly is actually an overall intelligent guy. I do enjoy listening to him a lot of the time. His opinion and views are generally very reflective of conservatives. So when Bill O'Reilly gets it wrong, it reflects poorly upon conservatives as a whole.

-------------

Without getting into the Obamacare debate, you have to admit that a fairly large portion of the conservative crowd doesn't even understand what "Socialism" is. That's what I'm trying to say.

Obamacare is a massive example. The individual mandate has absolutely nothing to do with socialism or income redistribution, but is instead a provision to eradicate "pre-existing conditions" clauses in insurance companies.

Socialism is... like the US Postal Office. The Government ownership of a service that the Free Market could take over. (ie: FedEx / UPS)

[gretful]

Nothing? So the fact that young (presumably healthy) people HAVE to buy insurance to make ACA a success means nothing. It's pretty clear that the mandate IS Socialism.

[dragontamer]

No, that has absolutely nothing to do with Socialism.

    Socialism is a social and economic system characterised
    by social ownership of the means of production and
    co-operative management of the economy, as well as a
    political theory and movement that aims at the
    establishment of such a system.

If you don't like it, then say that you don't like it. But calling it "socialism" is absolute ignorance. It only demonstrates the fact that you don't know what Socialism is.

Socialism: Medicaid, Postal Office. When the government owns and manages a core service, that is Socialism.

Individual Mandate: Its a regulation, legally its a tax. The government is forcing you to do something, like drive under 65mph or making leaded gasoline illegal to buy. Or making it illegal for you to smoke in certain areas.

In fact, when I hear people call the Individual Mandate "socialist", it tells me two things: 1. You don't know the meaning of socialism 2. You probably don't understand the Individual Mandate.

Maybe you don't like the Individual mandate. That is fine. I don't really like it either and preferred Mitt Romney's solution. It probably was possible to fix the Health Care system without resorting to the Individual Mandate... but to call it "socialism" is wrong.

How about you figure out how to criticize policy without resorting to words you don't even understand.

-----------------

Let me help you. I criticize the individual mandate as overhanded, excessive, burdensome regulation, difficult to enforce. Empowering to the IRS. An unnecessary tax on citizens. An abuse of the Commerce Clause.

You know, facts, real reasons why the Individual Mandate sucks. But to call it "socialism" is pure ignorance.