They are always very self serving. Filibuster a bill for 24 hours during a key vote to gain notoriety. What they want is higher stature and power concluding their careers with multi-million dollar book deals when they are done. State sponsored entertainment is what it ends up as. 

Odd, this train is behind schedule. We should be in Siberia already.

Well, everyone he knows is against it, so the entire country MUST hate it....

...but wait, everyone I know supports it! How is that possible? Could it be that anecdotal information and personal experience is not as reliable as scientific polling!? Surely not!

Bottom line: Most people support the law. A lot don't, but even among the ones that don't support the law most don't think that the government should be shut down to make this point--which is not going to stop the law anyway. 

Hello Siberia!

I offer you the same thing, PM me if you want to debate it. This is obviously not the place, unless you want to simply grandstand. I will say this, where do you get your "bottom line"? Are you contradicting your own statement about anecdotal evidence?

It's an illusion to claim that this is the Government taking over an unregulated industry. Government has controlled healthcare for a long time. Long gone are the days when, if you were sick, you ran down to your local Doctor, who ran his office however he felt like it. Regulations control what kinds of policies are eligible for deductability. Regulations control how healthcare is administered, and what records must be kept. Courts require that all medical practitioners provide only the most up-to-date medicines and treatments. Insurance companies control what treatments are given, too. A big chunk of patients are on Medicare and Medicaid. One can debate whether or not these are good things, but they are also the reason why healthcare costs have risen as fast as they have for the last 30 years.

Let's say you're crossing the street to go check out a sale on Western shirts that are made to look like the American flag, when out of nowhere, -BANG!-, you get run over by a bus driven by an uninsured illegal immigrant. Now, because you're a Freedom lovin', flag waivin' patriot that has used his God given Liberties to chose to not buy health insurance, you're going to have to pay for the emergency medical care you receive out of pocket.

But, do to the extent of your injuries, when you finally leave the hospital 6 weeks later you're stuck with a bill for $280K and have no means to pay for it. Here's where the fun part begins- the debt collectors will put a lien on your house and will eventually foreclose on it and force you into bankruptcy, leaving you penniless and homeless. But in the mean time the hospital will push your costs back onto all of the other patients, raising their costs too.

Now, the insurance companies make huge profits and can afford to payout multi-million dollar annual bonuses to their executives, but they're not going to stop doing that just because the hospital is raising its rates to cover your unpaid medical treatments. So now insurance rates must go up and businesses are forced to either raise their insurance costs to their employees and/or offer insurance plans that leave them under-insured with high deductibles and low max payouts, or in some cases, without insurance all together.

This then leads to more uninsured or under-insured people arriving in Emergency Rooms needing medical treatments they can't pay for, and the cycle continues, leaving us with the bloated, untenable health care system we see today.

So, we have a choice- we can either require everyone to pay into a system that eventually everyone will use, OR, we can honor the choice to opt out of paying into the system by refusing to offer emergency medical services to those who chose to opt out. This way when you get hit by a bus, if the EMT's don't find enough cash or available credit on your person they can just drag you to the side of the street where you can die with all of your freedoms and liberties fully intact.

The "free market" has not worked itself out on its own, the Govt stepping in to correct course is NOT a govt takeover. If you can find a way for us to continue to give people a service even if they don't pay for it, let me know and I'll support it. But the reality is, everyone takes from the system at some point, so everyone needs to put in.

Nope. The "free market" was working just fine until about the 1970s, when the government started meddling. The hospital can't refuse to treat those that can't pay. Because the government stepped in and meddled, the system doesn't work. So, if Government is the problem in the first place, is more government the answer?

It is true that this isn't a "government takeover" because the government took over a long time ago.

This is pure fantasy. There will never be a "slush fund" realized from this Act. You are adding millions of people to the insured roles who are either a) young and relatively healthy, and also not financially capable of paying huge premiums, and (mostly) b) people who don't have any money at all and will amount to huge additional costs, especially when they discover they now have "free" healthcare. Of course, all this is NOT free, and it will fall onto the backs of the middle class, who's premiums will skyrocket and work opportunities will shrink.

Gee, I wonder if I can find a poll to support my position...


"The CNN poll found that the public is growing more skeptical of Obamacare – 57 percent say they oppose the law, up 3 percentage points from a poll in May."

And by the way, we're debating whether or not the American people support Obamacare--not whether nor not they support a government shutdown.

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2013/0930/Obamacare...

OR....could it be that 83% of the public is against the government involved/forced healthcare insurance? I get the Jimmy Kimmel joke regarding semantics ... "Let's make people look like idiots because they don't know what the Government implemented healthcare insurance program is called".  Not sure I would jump to the conclusion that a majority are for government healthcare reform because of semantic positioning of poll questions.  

However, sounds like all military football games will played this weekend.  Standard governmental agency protocol: shutdown the most visible, direct impacting services first to get public reaction, whether it's a school district taking away busing and sports on up to the Feds kicking people of it's national parks/monuments, vets out of their war memorials or dropping military sports.  Glad to see they were able to work around it.

Now that the service academies have apparently resolved their issues for Saturday's games, can we move this thread off the football board?