Is stupidity Invisible?

My stupidity is invisible to me. But others' is very clear.

I entirely agree with you on Obamacare, and I entirely disagree with you on ozone.

Ozone is harmful or helpful depending on where it's at. In the Stratosphere, it acts as a UV filter by constantly breaking and bonding different Oxygen atoms, and absorbing that heat energy, creating it's own layer (Stratosphere) and acting as a critical part of the Earth's heat structure. The Atmospheric Greenhouse Effect created in the Troposphere is directly related to the ability of the ozone layer to absorb or deflect long-wave radiation (UV). Essentially, the upper ozone layer keeps us cools and leads to the surface temperature being at stabilized levels for life through short-wave radiation from the sun. When a hole forms in the ozone layer, UV radiation comes directly through, not only harshly reacting with everything in direct contact, but also heating the surface more than was generally allowed. A hole also allows for extreme cooling during the dark periods.

CFC's and halo-carbons are problematic because they are essentially light dusts that get carried up to the upper atmosphere and bonding with the highly reactive ozone while it's doing its job.

Just some basic stuff. If you have some time, look up all the research about it. This is an almost unanimously accepted theory in the science communities. Also, if you want to see what happens when you don't have environmental controls in place, look up images of the disaster Chinese cities are going through right now. They were pretty late on the industrial controls and now they're really paying for it.

You're missing how insurance works.

Fred, Joe, Wilbur, and 9,997 other people each pay, say, $1000 a year for insurance.

So the insurance company takes in ten million dollars a year.

In that year, Wilbur needs a heart transplant that costs $120,000.

Has Wilbur really paid more for his health care than he got out of it?

Insurance is about distributed risk. MOST people pay more for all forms of insurance than they get out of it. They pay for insurance nevertheless, so that when something horrible happens to them, they aren't financially destroyed.

This is true of health insurance, car insurance, home insurance, all forms of insurance. Obamacare did not invent insurance.

A life-threatening illness is not winning the lottery.

Your issue is not with Obamacare. It seems to be with concepts—insurance, medical care—that have been around for centuries.

If, say, my appendix bursts and a simple operation will give me forty more years...I’m not going to shrug and accept it’s “my time”. And if I have insurance, I won’t lose my home to pay for that operation.

Most people want to live.

“You can’t always get what you want” is not relevant here. You can get lifesaving medical care. Apparently you think that’s a bad thing. You are a minority.

Does the “you cant always get what you want” philosophy also stop you from eating, clothing yourself, or living in shelter?

Edited to add: Someday I might be unable to afford food. I eat today, anyway. Sometime I might develop a medical problem that can’t be solved. I solve the ones I can, anyway. Someday I might not be able to afford insurance. I buy insurance today, anyway, so that I can afford to solve those solvable medical problems.

The math says no such thing. You are not understanding the math.

(Can I assume that you are also vehemently opposed to automobile insurance? It's the same math.)

If you want to deprive yourself of health care, or food, or shelter, or shoes, you can do that. But you can't decide to force that misery on all the rest of the world.

The ACA is what happens when good intentions meet the need to keep powerful interests like insurance companies happy. Both the public and industry know what they want, but industry can direct their power with more control. They can make specific demands, whereas the people just want their concerns addressed. This leads to messy, expensive plans that technically solve the problem but do so in such an expensive, inefficient, and inelegant way as to make no one happy about it.

Either a single payer or a true private sector plan would be better than a messy compromise I think -- we see both work in other countries, to varying degrees. The fact is that the US healthcare system is the most expensive in the world looking at total cost compared to GDP and what individuals have to pay. That's a problem. The system in the US is one of the worst, if you take it either direction (free market or government-backed) it would probably come out better. What we see now is kind of a corporate crony system, the worst of both worlds. Where private companies are secured through government influence in their ability to price-gouge a captive audience out of their life savings. That is disappointing.

Our system is probably better after the ACA because it helped alleviate the pre-existing condition crisis. But right now we are going through a cost crisis, where people can't afford to buy the care they need. There are multiple ways to solve that. Whoever gets to "win" that doesn't matter as much as it actually getting solved.

Single payer would, certainly, be much better than the ACA. But the ACA is much better than the "free market" system that we had before.

That's why I say a true free market solution might be better. I don't think what we see now, or what we saw before the ACA was a true free market.

Drug prices are too high. Companies take advantage of multi-decade patents to hold a monopoly over sale of a drug that is needed to keep people alive. Then, before it expires, they find an alternative use for the same drug then re-patent it for another term.

Regulations that strictly control who can sell insurance where prevent competitors from challenging the profiteering business models of existing companies. Insurance sellers, pharmaceutical companies, and large healthcare conglomerates form oligopolies of understanding that allow them to reap enormous profits from people who have no choice but to pay. They form deals amongst themselves to prevent people from circumventing the system. Health insurance is a must not only because it is now required by law, but because of rate negotiation. An individual has far less resources than a health insurance provider, yet they are expected to pay 10x the bill?

I could support either plan (single payer or free market) depending on the specifics. The plans that either side would propose are often misrepresented, especially since they are corrupted by corporate interests by the time they reach the floor of congress. The democratic party has been unable to bring true single payer to serious proposal. Likewise, a republican party has failed to bring a reasonable free market plan to the floor. What we see are bad, corrupted compromises mostly. A good free market plan would be combined with strong anti-trust legislation to prevent the formation of dangerous and powerful oligopolies. That is how to implement a free market right, and it has worked pretty well at many points throughout our history. Currently antitrust laws have no real practical teeth -- we see the government help corporations, not oversee them.

I think we may agree on the specifics here to a greater extent than may seem on the surface. Either an effective free market or an effective single payer plan demands more government involvement, just in different roles.