So thank you Sarah. Maturity is a never ending process for all of us.

First she thinks she is a volunteer for AmeriCorp. Sorry Sarah but you are not.
You are being a paid wage you agreed to work for. Just like all of us who work for a living.
You are even being given health benefits. Granted your boss made a deal with the government to not bring them up to legal standards but thats between you and your boss.
The company I work for has always given benefits and they always beat the ACA standards.

Sarah you are as much a volunteer as the solders you look down on. The only difference between the both of you is they get more training and better benefits.

As for your ideas of wealth disparity. You are WAY off. You have no clue how it was back in the gilded age. Comparing our poor to the poor back during the depression is not even possible.
Just the changes in the labor laws since then make any comparison impossible.
The technological advancement in EVERY facet of life since then makes any comparison just silly.
Toilet paper wasn’t even common in every household until after the depression when new plumbing was being installed into every home.
Want to live like they did back then and see what it was like? Just try going a month with no phone, radio, TV, toilet paper, a car, and your education after grade school.

We still have the right to free speech; we just have to pay for the newspaper space or airtime. That is fair enough. We still have the right to healthcare and once had the right to its insurance (see below, as I explain how it is no longer a right); we just have to pay for it. I know of no one who was turned away from needed healthcare in this country, but they may have chosen to not pay for it and voluntarily left the doctor or hospital without treatment, just as many have not paid for ads to express their opinions.

Upon reading the Constitution, and specifically the Bill of Rights, I see that the only right that costs people, other that ourselves, is the right to a trial by jury, where our peers are required to expend part of their valuable time determining whether a defendant is in the wrong.

A right to something does not mean that it should be free. Under such a definition, we would not have a right to healthcare, as we are now required – *required* – to buy insurance for it. Indeed, health insurance is no longer a right but a duty, as is jury duty. It is not free for us. Even those who receive subsidies must first pay for the insurance and hope that they receive the subsidy later.

And thus we have been thrust, by the president’s (and Sarah Sklaw’s) good intention, onto the road to hell.

“In my opinion it is much more embarrassing that as a nation we have levels of inequality unseen since the gilded age, concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny minority that influences undue control over our government and a corporate class willing to pay their employees such a tiny sum that they force them onto welfare while raking in astronomical profits. This, in my opinion is corporate welfare.”

What an interesting definition of welfare. Sarah failed to show where the corporations are being given money or give an example of corporate employees on welfare. Indeed, those corporations are doing more for their employees than they would get “on the dole.” Otherwise, unless they believed in the corporate mission, they would not be working for those corporations but would be sitting at home collecting welfare. Her logic seems to have failed her.

What does she have to say about the national government’s treatment of its employees? The military pays so little that many of those families really *are* “on the dole.” (Why do they volunteer for the military? Because they believe in the mission.) Why does she think that the corporations’ treatment of people should be better than the government’s treatment of them?

The best way to eliminate “corporate welfare” is to repeal the 16th Amendment. Then the national government would be unable to afford to give welfare to corporations, and they would take less (or none) from you, Bob, as it is only that amendment which allows them to. (I know that it will never happen, but I dream big.)

“I must say, however, that her very sincere good intentions to provide everyone free healthcare can only lead us to one place, and it ain’t a place anyone would want to go willingly, if they realized that was their destination.”

Even free healthcare has a cost. Not only does someone have to pay for it (at the very least, the doctor is either paid or he pays for it with volunteer time), but the quality also suffers in order to reduce costs. That is already happening in the policies offered through the ACA exchanges. The best hospitals and the best doctors are not covered by those plans, because they cost too much.

The “free” healthcare in Canada is so bad that they are letting private practices, paid for by the patient, back in that country. There are tales that in Britain, ambulances are required to park away from the hospital until such time that the quota (so many ambulances in a certain amount of time) is freed up for the ambulance to arrive without violating that quota. Where is the quality in that delayed care?

As with Wodun, above, I lost my insurance. The replacement was so expensive with such a high deductible that I can save money by going uninsured; within six short years, I will break even on a $100,000 hospital bill – and that does not take into account the higher premium prices that are being suggested starting next year. And just as with Wodun, the replacement policy wanted to treat me as a hermaphrodite. I am not a hermaphrodite. How is this unaffordable insurance *not* harming me, Wodun, and others in the same situation?

The ACA may have been declared constitutional, but that does not mean that it really is. After all, we may have depended upon a tyrannical government, willing to ignore or misinterpret the constitution, to determine whether such tyranny is constitutional.

And don’t get me started on the tyranny of a government coercing us to buy something, whether we want it or not. Or the mess that the ACA has made of the hours people work and the added jobs and hours that they will have to work due to reduced work weeks and higher health insurance costs. Or other economic calamities that are befalling us due to this heinous law. Or the disregard for religious freedoms that are being applied through the ACA.

That’s what struck me and made me laugh out loud, that’s personal and hurt full if I understand the standards adhered to on this site. I totally understand her perspective though, people who think or thought they thought as she does ask me every day to clarify and guide them on such matters as is being addressed in this piece.

My observation is that the people of America, until they are directly affected by the politicians that they vote for and empower can draw a clear line between them and the money or freedom that is being taken away from them personally they have the luxury of existing in an unconscious myopic state and can drink the Kool aid.

This woman is an indoctrinated and true believer, eats and absorbs everything that the president utters and is unaware of history or the nature of what she is so upset about.

Dubious quality, look at the NYT if you want to find agenda and dubious quality, not here.

This, in a nutshell, is contemporary American liberalism. It can be reduced to the following sentence: “Hey, you! Get over here and help this person!” In other words, this person should be helped, but only others should do something about it. Our Founding Fathers, wisely, limited our natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Setting aside the fact that most liberals do not agree with the right to life, there is nothing in the Constitution, our foundation of laws, that speaks of a right to good health. But all of this is beside the point. Ms. Sklaw seems unable to detach her enmity and disdain from insurance companies (many of which are non-profit organizations, by the way — Blue Cross/Blue Shield being the most prominent example) while casting no righteous indignation toward the thousands of federal bureaucrats, all making six figures in salary and benefits, that are administering this monstrosity of a healthcare plan and raising its costs considerably.

I would recommend that Ms. Sklaw take the time to read the so-called Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. She might find within its 2,700 pages many reasons why this legislation, particularly as administered by this president, is an assault not only on liberty but also on the health and well-being of all Americans.

As you, Robert, and other commenters have attempted to advise her, this approach to law and society has been tried time and again over the past century. Each time, it has led only to hardship and misery. So perhaps in addition to reading the law she supports, she might also want to study Socialism’s sorry history in the world.

But I bet if we dig a bit deeper I bet AmeriCorp got an exemption.

The Corporation for National and Community Service or AmeriCorps is a federal government organization not a private group or company.
Started by Bill Clinton and run by our present head honcho, Barack Obama.

Even Sarah has seemed to forget that Barack only needs make a phone call and AmeriCorps will have its insurance upped to everything she and the ACA expects.

Sarah needs to start putting the blame on her boss. Barack Obama.

She speaks of the U.S. as “…a country with the lowest economic mobility in the western world….” This is a canard frequently trotted out by progressives. In fact, it’s virtually impossible to compare income distribution between countries in absolute dollars because there are too many variables and omissions in reported statistics to make that feasible. Differences in country and population size, demographics, range of purchasing power between top and bottom quintiles, tax liabilities and credits, percentage of GDP spent on transfer payments and in-kind services, the value/quality of those services, employer-paid benefits, etc. These differences are not taken into account, and the list of missing factors goes on and on. The truth is that roughly 40% of those born into the top tier of income distribution in America stay there, and 40% of those born on the bottom rung of the income ladder do the same. The 60% of people in the quintiles in between move up or down according to a different set of variables irrelevant to Ms Sklaw’s assertion.

What we lack, as a country, is grown-ups.

I bet she thinks the IRS was just doing their job too and doing it well.

“I am aware that some previously covered individuals have had to undergo changes to their insurance due to the Affordable Care Act. To say it is hurting them terribly is a massive overstatement. ”

Hey lady, I lost my insurance and the replacement plan saw a deductible increase of 222% making it so that I will never hit the deductible unless I need quadruple bypass or chemo. My new plan has maternity care and dental for children, neither of which do I have but they are mandated coverages. So my premiums are subsidizing other people’s wives and kids. Why should a bronze plan be subsidizing other people with silver and gold plan health care?

Not only that but I lost my doctor after many assurances by Obama and the media that I wouldn’t. After almost two months without my doctor being covered, they were suddenly back in the network because people were so upset about getting jerked around by these politicians. During that time I was shopping for both new insurance and a new doctor and during that time I was unable to be treated for my pre-existing conditions. I was lucky but other people in my situation had to either find new doctors or new insurance companies.

I don’t blame businesses for what happened because it was politicians, Obama and the Democrats specifically, that created this mess. To the extent that insurance companies are to blame for this is because they collaborated with the Democrats in writing the legislation, lobbying for its passage, and acting as the PR arm of the Democrat party promoting it to the public. Democrats get a lot of money from the health insurance industry so why wouldn’t they mandate everyone buy their products?

To say that people are not being negatively affected by Obamacare is not only a massive overstatement but dishonest.

“I do care about them and I believe that if the Congress could open debate about Obamacare and making necessary changes to the law”

First of all, Republicans have offered lots of legislation that would have delayed in individual mandate or other parts of Obamacare for a year. Obama said he would veto anything that made it to his desk and he even shut down the federal government rather than delay the rollout of Obamacare, which clearly wasn’t ready to be implemented.

“(which is a law and has been ruled constitutional by the US Supreme Court) without try[ing] to repeal it then those issues could be addressed.”

I can not seriously believe you said that. Slavery was once the law to so it isn’t like unjust laws can’t be changed. Also, how can it unchangeable as “the law” when Obama changes it as a whim with Presidential Dictates?