It isn't a 'good thing,' it's corporate welfare for the insurance industry that is forcing people to pay corporations for giving them shitty, expensive medical care (alternative medicine won't even be covered.)
To call it corporate welfare doesn't seem to fit with the facts as I see them. The insurance companies had to give and take. The up-side for them is obvious, more customers! But, in exchange for that, the insurance companies had to concede a bunch of changes to their practices. Some of the more notable ones:
1) can't deny people for having pre-existing conditions - this is HUGE!
2) kids get to say on their parents insurance while they go to college and settle down into working life. This is very significant since it is utterly unreasonable to expect kids already burdened with college loads to get even deeper into debt just to get healthcare cover.
3) Insurance companies must spend 80¢ if ever $ on actual healthcare - if they don't, they have to reimburse customers the difference.
Finally, not a single company is guaranteed a single extra customer. The MARKET is guaranteed millions more, but no individual company is. Companies will have to compete for business. The ingredients are there for a healthy market.
As for the red-herring of "Alternative medicine" - the bits of "alternative medicine" that work are called "medicine", the rest is just a placebo at best or outright dangerous at worst. I think evidence should always trump faith, but I think that's especially true when it comes to healthcare. The lives are people are not play-things. If you can't prove your "remedy" makes people healthier in a double-blind test, then you have no right to say it does, and no reputable healthcare company should come within a million miles of your quackery!
It will still leave out millions of people and refuse good care when needed for those who do have insurance. Obama/Romney/Clinton/Bush-Care will do nothing to change the fact that we have one of the worst and most expensive health care systems in the developed world.
I really don't get this argument at all. Things are REALLY shitty now, so people work really hard to make them better, and then they get berated for not making them perfect. W. T. F.?
I think there is a lot more work to be done to make things even better post-Obamacare, but that does not blind me to the fact that things are FINALLY moving in the right direction!
I dearly wish single payer had been an option, or failing that, at least a public option. Because of they people Americans elected, that was not on the cards.
I couldn't care less about 'republicans' or their identical twins the 'democrats,' we need single payer health care, and we could have had it if Obama's corporatist policies hadn't ruled it out at the beginning.
The Americans voted for Obama's corporatist policies - Americans have gotten the government they deserve! Most Americans don't vote, so the extremists who do get to run the country. There is a REALLY simple solution, educate yourselves and vote!
As for the Democrats being identical to the Republicans - did you miss the healthcare battle? Were you living in some kind of cave for the last three years or something? Clearly, they are exactly the same, because the Republicans did their very best to sabotage any and all reform, and the democrats fought tooth and nail to make as much progress as they could!?
If you want people to take your rantings seriously, you need to keep them at least connected to reality, of not anchored in it.
B.
