No, Obamacare is not making your insurance premiums go through the roof.

[dreamnightwind]

76. True, he is not a dictator

But he chose this fight at that time, when millions were without work, when people were being thrown out of their homes, when our military had doubled its already insane size in the preceding 8 years, when we needed to muster every bit of political capital and courage to go up against the ravages of the financial industry. He chose the healthcare fight instead. The other fights got lip-service and band-aids, while the focus of the administration went to this fight. Why? Because he had donors to think of. Because he would wage this fight as an expansion of coverage rather than as getting less money into the pockets of the corporations that were the root of the problem.

If he wanted this fight, he should have made the case for real reform, setting the context for future victories that would remove the private insurers from our pockets. He would have been aided in this battle by the skyrocketing healthcare costs. It was obvious we had to fix it. Everyone knew the current system was unsustainable.

Instead, he worked with Baucus and Wellpoint lobbyists. He guaranteed an expanded customer base for those corporations. He used subsidies (essentially money from the government given to the health insurance corporations when the people who are required to buy their too-expensive product couldn't afford it) as a way to sell his "fix", which was basically a Heritage-foundation Romney-care derivative product. In my mind, he locked us into the institutions which are the cause of the problem.