Trump cheats at golf - the ONE and ONLY politics thread

Only really big policy problem I have with Obama is the ACA, which has seriously jacked up health insurance rates for a lot of people.

My sister and her husband are both retired and paying $1500 a month on COBRA, which remarkably enough was $100 a month cheaper than the most affordable low-deductible policy they could find under Obamacare.

They're not hurting for money so they can afford it, but they're not "rich" either.

I've heard similar stories from many family members, friends and people I've met through work.

I get what Obama was trying to do, and I do sympathize with people who don't have health insurance, but I don't agree with a plan that is so clearly punitive to upper middle-class people. That's not any more "fair" than it was before he took office.

 

Low unemployment rate -- by not counting people as unemployed once their unemployment payments run out; the real unemployment is at 9.9% ( Charts: What's the real unemployment rate? )... By the way, he promised that the bogus unemployment rate would fall to 5% by July 2013 if we passed the stimulus. It was 7.4% and the U6 rate was 14.2%. What did we get for our trillion dollars? Other than broken promises.

bringing our troops home -- leading to the rise of ISIS and terrorism on our shores

stock market -- accomplished completely with manipulation of the currency, with a huge payback coming down the road that will make 2007-08 look like a picnic;

killing OBL -- sorry, Seal Team 6 did that, and had to wait and wait and wait and wait for the OK to act on intelligence we never would have had if Obama had his way.

auto industry -- completely screwed real investors to pay off union pals; meanwhile, GM will never pay back taxpayers. And Toyota, Honda, Nissan, still kick ass over GM, Ford and Chrysler when it comes to quality.

low gas prices -- created entirely by the Bakken boom in North and South Dakota, a development he did everything in his powers to block.

Yes, it's hard to pick which was a bigger failure.

 

Holy shit

 

Trump and Sanders beating Hillary with the same stick:

 

Is it really that punitive if they could retire before being eligible for Medicare? Must be nice.

 

Any of them give birth to a 10-pound baby boy?

 

My sister went to work for the government straight out of HS, worked her ass off for 38 years and retired as a GS 14. So yeah, she has a nice retirement.

At the same time, my bro in law had to retire unexpectedly on disability. He was in the private sector and just has a 401-k.

$1500 a month for health insurance for two people is pretty steep. I thought the whole point of the ACA, other than covering the millions of uninsured, was to rein in costs? From what I've seen, it has failed to achieve that in fairly spectacular fashion.

 

In 2008, the total cost of my family plan (flat rate for two or more people) was around $1300. My employer picked up half of that. Has your sister looked at the Marketplace? One goal of the ACA was to have people shop around. Yeah, it stinks to change plans, but it seemed liked it happened all the time when I was a kid in the days of yore before the ACA, despite my dad working for a single large multinational corporation. His employer shopped around for the best rates and that meant changing plans every year or so.

 

That's fine and a perfectly understandable argument.

But that horrible 9.9% number was at 17.1% a few months after Bush43 left office (the time when a new administration's policies begin to take effect).

Your reply?

Re: ACA: I agree it has been a failure. My insurance and its $4,000 deductible is basically worthless IMO, so much so that my wife asked me to remove her from our policy last year. I did. Turns out she had a kidney stone that resulted in $6,000 of medical costs. The punch line? We didn't pay a penny more out of pocket than we would have had she been fully insured. We would have been out $4,000 anyway, plus we saved $2,400 in premium costs.

 

LOL. Tony would bitch about the rival party no matter which way a situation breaks.