America The Generous

Let's take two of your topics; the housing bubble and Obamacare.

The impetus for the housing bubble was deregulation of the banking industry. This is what made possible securitization and massive leveraging. The push for deregulation was made under the Clinton administration and pushed by Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Alan Greenspan, among others. The Federal Reserve drove interest rates low which increased demand. It resulted in massive profits for the financial industry. Property values soared, fraud permeated throughout the period with bogus appraisals, liar loans enabled unqualified buyers to make purchases, rating agencies fudged numbers, and banks sold securities to duped investors. The "boom" was basically built on fraud. Just like any ponzi, it eventually collapsed when the number of buyers became too low to support the bubble.

But nobody important went to jail, the top executives got to keep their millions, the taxpayer bailed out the banks that were impaired (except Lehman), and the combination of QE and zero interest policy continues to this day robbing savers of interest in order to keep the FIRE economy propped up. If I recall, the polls showed the public opposed the bailout by a whopping majority but the bailout passed regardless. Who has the power?

Obamacare was written by lobbyists representing the insurance and pharmaceutical companies. The bill was written so that the government would backstop any losses that might occur to insurance companies. How have stock prices performed for these companies since Obamacare was passed? Their profits? Pretty damn good. Who's interest was really served, the corporate or that of the public?
The impetus for the housing bubble was government intervention in the mortgage market. Deregulation was the mechanism used to carry out the fraud. Both parties played a part, but Congress went over the top in putting pressure on lending institutions to make loans to unqualified borrowers. Chris Dodd and Barney Frank repeatedly criticized the Bush administration for trying to reign in the poor mortgage underwriting they helped foster (or required via threats). Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had many defenders that engaged in the political crusade to promote "affordable housing". Among the foremost were Dodd, Frank, Maxine Waters, Nancy Pelosi and Charles Rangel. In other words, the usual dumbasses. Those turds are as far from corporate advocates as you can get. The "massive profits" you mention caused some of the largest financial firms in the U.S. to go bankrupt, or be saved by bailouts. I agree that there were massive profits for some briefly, but not in the end.

Here is a quote from one of the authors of Obamacare (Jonathan Gruber):
You can’t do it politically. You just literally cannot do it, okay, transparent financing…and also transparent spending.” Gruber said. “In terms of risk-rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in—you made explicit that healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed, okay. Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass…Look, I wish Mark was right that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.” Another author was a known communist and felon named Robert Creamer. If insurance carriers had written the law, they wouldn't have the need to pull out of the Obamacare exchange market en masse. Not only have they not made a profit off of writing policies for Obamacare, they have suffered huge losses.
 
As for Frank, Waters, and Pelosi not being corporate shills, they were very much in bed with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - kind of hybrid corporate-government entities -'which greatly enriched the top executives there to the tunes of millions in compensation.

And on Obamacare, here's an excerpt describing how the insurance companies have suffered from Obamacare.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.co...hile-blaming-obamacare-for-losses-110116.html

Sick, elderly, and/or poor people who actually need health insurance are ruining Obamacare for the rest of us, if a common mantra of the health insurance industry is to be believed.

While not wording it quite as harshly, the health insurance industry has said that Affordable Care Act customers are making heavy use of medical services, more than the industry anticipated, costing health insurance companies revenue and explaining next year’s premium increases.

People who need Obamacare and who do not qualify for any government subsidies are expected to pay the price, as a recent report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services shows that premiums for policies sold on the Healthcare.gov exchanges are rising at a national average of 25% next year.

The premium increases follow months of major insurance companies groaning about financial losses thanks to Obamacare customers. In March 2016, insurer Blue Cross Blue Shield published a report stating that people who signed up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act have higher rates of certain diseases “than individuals who had BCBS individual coverage prior to health care reform.”

A Blue Cross Blue Shield lobbyist quoted in an accompanying press release suggests that customers are visiting the emergency room excessively, among other problems. “Better communication and coordination is needed so that everyone understands how to avoid unnecessary emergency room visits, make full use of primary care and preventive services and learn how to properly adhere to their medications,” she says.

The month after the BCBS report was published, UnitedHealth, the nation’s largest insurer, announced that it was leaving almost all of the Obamacare markets due to the high expense of insuring patients. Aetna, the nation’s third largest insurer, followed suit this summer. “[Aetna] Chief executive Mark Bertolini said in a statement that there are not enough healthy people to financially offset those with major health problems who require high-cost care,” reported the Washington Post.

As with other major policy problems, millennials are also accused of making things worse. Consider all the young, healthy people who don’t want to pay for any insurance because they realized it’s much cheaper to just pay the penalty. The number of healthy people opting to go without coverage “helps explain why insurers are worried about the financial viability of the exchanges over time,” according to a New York Times report published earlier this year.
The refusal to expand Medicaid
Luckily for people in some states, policy analysts note that the premium increases won’t be distributed across the country equally.

“The story in California is really different,” Amy Adams, a senior program officer with the California Health Care Foundation, tells ConsumerAffairs. In California, premiums are only rising 13 percent next year, a relatively modest increase compared to the national average.

Adams and others credit the expansion of Medicaid with keeping Affordable Care Act premiums lower in California. They blame states that refused to accept federal money and expand Medicaid for bringing more sick people into the Affordable Care Act risk pool and driving costs up.

“We chose to expand Medicaid and we expanded it early,” which kept low-income people who may require more medical services out of the Marketplace risk pool, Adams says. In addition, California in 2014 banned insurers from selling plans that were less comprehensive than federal requirements, even as other states continued to do so."That made one big risk pool in California. So there was a lot more security and stability for the insurers."

In places like Texas, meanwhile, where state lawmakers have refused to take federal money to expand Medicaid, premiums are expected to rise by 30%, according to some estimates.

Record profits
But the claim that corporations are losing money on Obamacare ignores the record-breaking profits and compensation packages that health insurers continue to collect.

Consider UnitedHealth, the nation's largest health insurer that is leaving the marketplace next year. UnitedHealth claims that Obamacare has reduced its 2016 earnings by $850 million. While they might have $850 million less than they wanted, UntedHealth’s profits are still soaring.

In fact, UnitedHealth announced record-breaking profits in 2015, followed by an even better year this year. In July 2016, UnitedHealth celebrated revenues that quarter totalling $46.5 billion, an increase of $10 billion since the same time last year. And company filings show that UnitedHealth’s CEO Stephen J. Hemsley made over $20 million in 2015. To be fair, that is a pay cut. The previous year, in 2014, Hemsley took home $66 million in compensation.

"If you look at our Proxy, the Board lays out in extensive detail, in great detail, the thinking behind both CEO and executive compensation,” UnitedHealth executive Don Nathan tells ConsumerAffairs.

“At his request, Mr. Hemsley’s total compensation is below the median for CEOs in the Company’s peer group,” the proxy statement says, “even though the Board believes his performance has been outstanding."

In other words, Hemsley is far from being the only health insurance CEO making millions of dollars every year.

Sky-high profits
Aetna, whose CEO Mark Bertolini reported to the Securities and Exchange Commission a $27.9 million compensation in 2015, has similarly celebrated sky-high profits. “In 2015, we reported annual operating revenue of over $60.3 billion, a record for the Company,” Aetna recently told investors.

Aetna spokesman T.J. Crawford wrote a brief statement to ConsumerAffairs describing the company's losses under Obamacare: “As updated on our Q3 earnings call last week, we now expect a 2016 pretax loss in our individual products (on- and off-exchange) of approximately $350 million,” he said via email, otherwise directing questions to a company press release.

Thanks to the insurance industry’s combination of record profits in recent years and increasing premiums, people on both sides of the political aisle have criticized the Affordable Care Act as being more beneficial to the insurance industry than consumers, though politicians remain deeply divided on what a good, viable alternative would entail.

“Given this dysfunctional reality under the ACA, it’s remarkable that neither major political party has a plan to truly fix the situation,” wrote Dr. John Geyman, a professor and past president of Physicians for a National Health Program, a nonprofit advocating for a single-payer national health insurance program, in a recent column.

Meanwhile, Amy Adams, the program officer from the California Health Care Foundation, is optimistic that many consumers will not be stuck footing the bill for next year’s premium increases. She notes that people who qualify for government subsidies under the Affordable Care Act will not actually be paying the higher premiums. And neither, of course, will the people who receive coverage through their employer.

“I don’t think this a death spiral for the exchanges, I don’t think the sky is falling,” she says.
 
Yeah. I put more blame on the government for the housing bubble and the health care cost bubble.

Housing bubble - there were laws in place to coerce banks to finance loans that were risky and would not have been financed under normal circumstances. Everything else that happened was a result of this coercion. Banks did bad things as result, but they did them because they knew they were going to lose money when all (or enough) of the risky loans failed. In the meantime they were bundling things together to sell them to people who didn't know better, so that they could make a little extra money in the mean time before the bubble burst. Bad on them, worse on government. Banks would not have done what they did without government coercion.

For the ACA, that wasn't an idea the insurance companies brought to Obama. That was an idea Obama brought to the insurance companies. The government had to get the insurance companies to play ball, so voila the individual mandate appears. They just increased insurance demand out of thin air and also set up short term profit increases before the true costs really shook out. That is why you see most providers getting out of the exchanges. They can't provide what the government requires them to at the prices the government tells them to.

Musberger1, even your article says that the ACA is reducing profits to insurance companies since 2016. The headlines are very misleading.

That is exactly how this was supposed to go, subsidize demand to produce increased profits to insurance companies. Then once you have the hook in, subsidies and therefore enrollment declines, leaving the mess we are in today in 2017.

Iatrogenic, is correct on this.
 
Yeah. I put more blame on the government for the housing bubble and the health care cost bubble.

Housing bubble - there were laws in place to coerce banks to finance loans that were risky and would not have been financed under normal circumstances. Everything else that happened was a result of this coercion. Banks did bad things as result, but they did them because they knew they were going to lose money when all (or enough) of the risky loans failed. In the meantime they were bundling things together to sell them to people who didn't know better, so that they could make a little extra money in the mean time before the bubble burst. Bad on them, worse on government. Banks would not have done what they did without government coercion.

For the ACA, that wasn't an idea the insurance companies brought to Obama. That was an idea Obama brought to the insurance companies. The government had to get the insurance companies to play ball, so voila the individual mandate appears. They just increased insurance demand out of thin air and also set up short term profit increases before the true costs really shook out. That is why you see most providers getting out of the exchanges. They can't provide what the government requires them to at the prices the government tells them to.

Musberger1, even your article says that the ACA is reducing profits to insurance companies since 2016. The headlines are very misleading.

That is exactly how this was supposed to go, subsidize demand to produce increased profits to insurance companies. Then once you have the hook in, subsidies and therefore enrollment declines, leaving the mess we are in today in 2017.

Iatrogenic, is correct on this.
You don't understand my argument of what caused the housing bubble. You both are focused on the fact that the government created the environment for the debachle to occur. Deregulation didn't happen in a vacuum where a bunch of Congressmen got together and said "gee, why don't we make it easier for people to get loans and force banks to loan to deadbeats." What your missing is the fact that the government was coerced into creating that environment by politicians who in fact were part of the revolving door and profited greatly even as the institutions like Citi and Bear Stearns became insolvent. The financial insiders basically used their own institutions as looting mechanisms. In other words, government would never have made the run up in bad loans possible without massive lobbying from the likes of Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Jamie Dimon and the likes. Without the participation of speculators, fraudsters, and unqualified buyers, the run up causing the bubble would never have happened.

Wall Street individuals, CEO's made millions as a result of the bubble and kept every penny after the implosion. And ever since, they've fought to keep deregulation in place in hopes of repeating the process again.
 
...If insurance carriers had written the law, they wouldn't have the need to pull out of the Obamacare exchange market en masse. Not only have they not made a profit off of writing policies for Obamacare, they have suffered huge losses.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-govern...-rand-paul-senate-gop-decides-keep-obamacare/

Paul contradicts your argument; or at least shows that the Republicans will try to pass something which refutes your argument. An excerpt from the interview:

Exclusive – Sen. Rand Paul: Senate GOP Decides to Keep Obamacare
Rand-Paul-J.-Scott-ApplewhiteAP-640x480.jpg

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY)12 Jul 20171049

I miss the old days, when Republicans stood for repealing Obamacare. Republicans across the country and every member of my caucus campaigned on repeal – often declaring they would tear out Obamacare “root and branch!”
What happened?

safe_image.php

Now too many Republicans are falling all over themselves to stuff hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ dollars into a bill that doesn’t repeal Obamacare and feeds Big Insurance a huge bailout.

Obamacare regulations? Still here. Taxes? Many still in place, totaling hundreds of billions of dollars.

Insurance company bailouts? Those, too. Remember when Republicans complained about Obamacare’s risk corridors? Remember when we called the corridors nothing more than insurance company bailouts? I remember when one prominent GOP candidate during a presidential debate explicitly called out the Obamacare risk corridors as a bailout to insurance companies. Does anyone else?

Now, the Senate GOP plan being put forward is chock full of insurance bailout money – to the tune of nearly $200 billion. Republicans, present company excluded, now support the idea of lowering your insurance premium by giving a subsidy to the insurance company.

Remarkable. If the GOP now supports an insurance stabilization fund to lower insurance prices, maybe they now support a New Car stabilization fund to lower the price of cars. Or maybe the GOP would support an iPhone stabilization fund to lower the price of phones.

The possibilities are limitless once you accept that the federal government should subsidize prices. I remember when Republicans favored the free choice of the marketplace.

The Senate Obamacare bill does not repeal Obamacare. I want to repeat that so everyone realizes why I’ll vote “no” as it stands now:

The Senate Obamacare bill does not repeal Obamacare. Not even close.

In fact, the Senate GOP bill codifies and likely expands many aspects of Obamacare.

The Senate Obamacare-lite bill codifies a federal entitlement to insurance. With the Senate GOP bill, Republicans, for the first time, will signal that they favor a key aspect of Obamacare – federal taxpayer funding of private insurance purchases.

The bill will transfer billions of dollars to people who will then transfer billions of dollars to insurance companies. What a great business model – encourage the federal government to use taxpayer money to buy a private company’s product. Great business model, that is, if you are Big Insurance. Remarkable.

The Senate Obamacare-lite bill does what the Democrats forgot to do – appropriate billions for Obamacare’s cost-sharing reductions, aka subsidies. Really? Republicans are going to fund Obamacare subsidies that the Democrats forgot to fund?

Doesn’t sound much like repeal to me. One might even argue it’s worse than Obamacare-lite because it actually creates a giant superfund to bail out the insurance companies – something even the Democrats feared to do.
 
I think if this were an honest effort to make things better it would be different. Warren Buffet said this was going to lower his tax burden by $670,000,000. I picked that number up in some podcast in my brain.
 
I think if this were an honest effort to make things better it would be different. Warren Buffet said this was going to lower his tax burden by $670,000,000. I picked that number up in some podcast in my brain.
I believe you have too many zeros. Warren does not pay anywhere near that much tax.
 
Oh, you call it painting. I call it getting wasted.
Painting. Had a house fire in May. Painting the whole house. Kilz is not the friend of your brain cells....that's why I qualified it with a disclaimer because I didn't turn it up on a google search.
 

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