How the Affordable Care Act benefits you

[Riot]

One problem is that many people are woefully unawares of what is really in the bill. It's not single payer, it's not government running your healthcare. Too many rumors left over from the multiple plans that were being thrown about at the start of this. Sarah Palin's lie about "death panels" comes to mind.

The ACA has things most people support: not throwing people off insurance when you get sick, encouraging more doctors to enter the profession, encouraging preventive health care, helping your insurance premiums go down.

It's not big healthcare reform. It's little healthcare reform. It's really not even healthcare reform, as much as it is insurance company consumer protection reforms.

Why is someone against this? If you have insurance, keep it and go about your business. If you don't have insurance, you can now get it.

Note that the Republicans have just passed, or are trying to pass, multiple bills across many states mandating an invasive healthcare procedure, and mandating the recipient pay for it.

How can the very people that support mandated healthcare - the government literally forcing a medical procedure on it's citizens against their will- and a financial mandate literally forcing citizens to pay for it against their will, also be against this?

Why are citizens literally not taking arms up in the street, against their government forcing, against the patient and doctor's will, an invasive medical procedure the patient has to pay for! It's worse than Sarah Palin making raped women in Alaska pay for their rape kits. It's the government raping women with an ultrasound probe **, and then demanding the woman pay for it!

That's crazy. All the Dems want to do is leave healthcare up to the privacy of the doctor-patient relationship, but enable people to access it!

Hey, Senator Santorum - why don't you call the mandated ultrasounds, "the death knell for freedom"? If the government forced you to have a yearly colonoscopy, and made you pay for it, you'd freak out.

Obama and congressional Democrats pushed the mandate through in 2010, without Republican support, in hope of creating a fair system that ensures everyone — rich or poor, young or old — can get the health care they need. Other economically advanced countries have done it.

Doing nothing is more expensive than most people realize.

Congress found that when the uninsured go to clinics and emergency rooms, the care they can't pay for costs nearly $75 billion a year. Much of that cost is passed along and ends up adding $1,000 a year to the average family's insurance premium.

The overhaul is neither the liberal dream of a single government program supported by taxes and covering everyone nor the conservative vision of stripping away federal rules and putting free enterprise in charge.

The Obama plan relies on private companies plus lots of regulation to make sure they provide basic benefits, keep premiums reasonable, and cover the sick as well as the healthy. That's where the mandate comes in. If insurers must cover everyone, even those with existing medical conditions, healthy people have little incentive to sign up before they get sick.

Insurance companies argue that if only the sick sign up, insurers will go broke. So the law says everybody must have insurance for themselves and their children, or pay a penalty.

Also, because everyone needs health care sometime, if everyone purchases insurance, the price per person can be lower, with the cost of care spread out over many people.

** insert Dell's head exploding here, no, Dell, I am not saying this is the very same thing as sexual assault by a stranger (or friend), I'm using an appropriately defined word: if someone were to stick an object up your azz without your permission, you'd define yourself as raped, too.