So are you saying that hospitals (to avoid free riders) should turn away the critically ill until their insurer agrees to cover them or they pay up-front? Or are you saying the ways to avoid paying for ACA be removed?

I think I've mentioned it before but I live in Australia.

Hobby Lobby has no objection of 16 forms birth control methods and gladly provides for its employees under the ACA act. They only object to 4, which these cause the demise of the fertilized egg.

To say this a serious blow to woman's right is bunk.

To say once again Men ( 5 to 4 men ) deciding women rights is bunk.
( men decided Roe V Wade)

If you want to prevent getting pregnant, Hobby Lobby has no issue with that.

If you want to murder, don't expect Hobby Lobby to pay for it.

Let's just fire the Supreme Court and put this funnyman in since he is obviously wiser and knows the law so much better, being from....wherever the fuck foreign country he's from.

Also, where does the gov't get off telling companies what they have to offer in the way of medical insurance? Oh...it's the ACA. That makes it legit.

$9000!?! Sooo...is that with or without insurance? Because I'm not sure if you've heard, but our prez has this new fangled ACA out and it's supposed to be dope.

This must be the low information voter channel.

Now we know how low does a President have to reach mindless youth.

The ACA is just a a Ponzi scheme where the youth pays in and the elders get the care they need.

Sounds like Social security.

The youth of today would see jack benefits of neither.

Sorry you feel sick, but tough. Get used to it.

"the only people who can get elected are over-calculating douchebags."
(for many other reasons besides public scrutiny.)

Ah, you're quite the Sherlock Holmes.
(At least we have some area of agreement here.. even if we attribute this to different causes.)

"The First Lady is subjected to this shit and she wasn't even elected."

She never asked for it! That's why she goes on national TV to lecture people, and call people knuckleheads. And yeah, she never even got elected. No one wants her on TV telling people what to do. So why does she? Or do people actually want this. Some may, I guess, like you!

"They're terrified of offending anyone and everyone."

Yeah, that's right.. The politicians are the victims. The poor politicians. Such a thankless "job".

"Shut up with this bullshit and talk about how Obamacare is stupid"

That's beating a dead horse. At this point, only the most fanatical don't accept the ACA as an abject failure. Even Democrats know it. Even Obama knows it.

(Not to mention everyone who knew it would fail from the beginning!)

"the richest fucking country in the world have a problem with free healthcare
when poor ass countries can do it better?"

Because many in "the richest fucking country in the world" would like to keep it the "richest" and not turn it into a "poor ass country" with "free" healthcare.

Your failure of imagination is not my problem, @Yogi.

That's ok. Everyone has off days and more imaginative ones. Other people can imagine why I posted it.

What's up with the Australian health care system?

Oh, well if that's the test, why don't we just have a mandatory test before you can go vote which asks simple questions most voters should know the answers to.

What country was Obama born in?

Who will benefit from the ACA the most?

If taxes were doubled on the top 1% of Americans, would that help, or hurt, middle and lower income voters?

Did man evolve, or were we created this way?

I think we can weed quite a few Republicans out of the voting pool that way.

The whole "it's not a game" thing from Boehner was completely hypocritical

Immediately after the shutdown, Everyone starts talking about who the "winners and losers" were.

Obama immediately says "there are no winners"
Boehner immediately starts talking about how they "didn't win"
all the news outlets start running articles about who "won and lost"

And Cruz is already talking about the next shutdown.

If the ACA wasn't already a law, I could SORTA understand it. but nah, It's a law, they have an oath to uphold it. They want to change it, more power to them, but have that argument elsewhere, not as a negotiating tactic to keep the gov't running. They supposedly want to cut costs, but this shutdown costs us even more money so they can't claim ANY sort of fiscal responsibility here.

What's hilarious is that suddenly, now that they are starting to realize that they aren't going to win, they're pretending that the shutdown had nothing to do with the ACA, They've changed their argument again and now trying to pretend it was to "curb wasteful spending"

Which again, is only a valid argument...IF YOU ARE STUPID! It's been debunked time and time again. the debt ceiling is not about new spending, it's about PAYING OUR EXISTING BILLS!!

They are completely changing their argument again and just playing up the anti-Obama rhetoric and counting on low-information voters to buy into their nonsense.

It's like they've completely given up on even trying to be truthful, every interview with a Republican on the shutdown is just them changing the subject or throwing up an ad hom attack on Obama or some other logical fallacy.

They've gone completely insane.

And one small faction of the Republicans promised even before the 2010 elections that they were going to shut the government down. They've continued to make exactly that claim for 3+ years now...why would anyone be surprised they have done exactly that. It's not even an issue with the ACA, they're out to destroy the government.

And if it wasn't for a ball-less, spineless Speaker of the House, they couldn't have done it. All he had to do was offer a vote on the compromise "clean" funding resolution the Senate sent back to the House, which would very likely pass. But he appears to be more concerned about losing his position than he is about working to make things better for the citizens of this country.

The website delay is not a big deal at all. I've worked in major social media for the last five years and believe me, when you launch a new product that attracts 3-10 million users on its first day, there are going to be problems.

Also, I tested it out at launch and I had to wait about 30 minutes to be able to use the system. Then it worked fine for me.

You say you need the ACA coverage, and that's great. I'm quite happy about that. But remember, even if the .gov worked absolutely flawlessly, it doesn't matter because the policies are open until March 14th 2014, and don't even take effect for two more months.

You've got time. And so does the ACA and the rest of us.

I guess I must be out of the loop as far as how the Republicans see things. This is just me talking. I am bi-vocational. I work as a substance abuse and marital counselor and I also own my own business, These are just things I have thought through, not been told about.

I am wondering if there will be enough money to fund the ACA without the employer mandate.

I am wondering if there isn't going to be civil disobedience on a massive scale with our young people who don't yet have insurance but now must buy it.

I read the article from Forbes and also the one from Reuters on a Google search because I was having so much trouble trying to navigate the healthcare.gov website. After repeated unsuccessful attempts and some strange pages popping up I began to think it was more than just overloaded servers causing the problem.

Until you mentioned the Republicans wanting to delay the mandate for a political advantage in 2014 I hadn't really given it much thought. Honestly, I really don't care why the Republicans want to delay the mandate. You wrote that there is absolutely no reason that the current admin may want to delay. I thought of a few scenarios that might end up being good reasons to delay it.

And just an FYI, I need to sign up for this. So the delay is hurting me. I'm not for delaying it. But the delay for me isn't coming from the the Tea Party. It's coming from the freaking website.

Yes, he does. As long as he faithfully executes the law.

But that is moot. There is absolutely no reason why POTUS/admin thinks the individual mandate should be delayed for a year. There is no reason.

Yes, there is a reason why republicans want it delayed, because they not only win this fight, they also remove a major revenue stream for ACA and then put the mandate back in play during the election.

Why would republicans want this to happen during an election?

Because bad-faith wedge issues is all they have. They are purposefully denying people, including kids and low-income citizens, access to affordable health care. They are 10000000% willing to let millions suffer for them to score political points in 2014.

This is why the GOP needs to cripple the baggers, and then the entire republican party should jump off a fucking cliff. This country has moved decades beyond their nonsense. The corporate Democrats are as far of a right-wing group as any modern country needs.

I despise the two party system, but one side, (or to be more specific, one subfaction of one side) is demonstrably more harmful than the other.

I'm all in favor of abolishing parties in this nation, this "but they're equally bad" argument is bull.

Government was actually designed that way though, sure we don't like shutdowns (but then again, here's the problem, some people DO want the gov't to be shut down so that corporations can run everything) but government WAS designed to be slow and not easy to change laws. It has the side benefit of being very resistant to tyranny since it requires so many people and multiple branches to agree

It's one thing to not like how government works, but its quite another to be willing to shutdown gov't over ONE piece of legislation that has the support of the people and the branches of gov't. It's quite another to have a faction completely and utterly oppose the president purely on the basis of the color of his skin.

The big tent GOP is being left behind and that tent is getting smaller and smaller. Gerrymandered districts are pretty much the only reason they are still retaining control. And typically when a company isn't doing so hot, they tend to not actually change tactics, but they do change their name so people with short memories get fooled, so then they called themselves the Tea Party, well that's not working out so well since again, they haven't really changed at all, so now they're rebranding themselves again and calling themselves Libertarians, but it's the same bullshit, just a different name.

No one ever said the ACA is perfect...no one. It was a compromise, What the public WANTED was single payer, but this was the compromise. You want to tweak it? change it? improve it? I'd agree with getting rid of all the exceptions people of talked about,

but you don't threaten to shutdown the gov't over it. especially when you've already failed to repeal it 40+ times in the past. Shutting down the gov't and waging message warfare trying to blame it on the president when it's 100% a congress issue is deranged behavior and basically counts on people being stupid enough to not know how the gov't works (like @lantern53) to believe the message.

People are dumb, but they're not quite THAT stupid, most people do know that it's the Tea Party holding the gov't hostage and not the President. This little stunt is really not helping their chances in the next election so in a weird way, I'm glad they're doing this because it just hastens them getting kicked out in 2014

Anecdotally speaking, a lot of my coworkers are conservatives and every single one of them is saying "fuck the Tea Party"

I see @lantern53 has no idea how gov't works. You see bobknight33, err I mean lantern53, There are three branches of government. Only one of them can create laws.

After much compromise, congress passed a law called the ACA. The President agreed and signed it into Law. It was ALSO upheld by the Supreme Court. So you see, ALL THREE branches of gov't are OK with this law.

Now this faction in the House of Representatives are trying to pass a law that says "sure, we'll fund gov't...but only if you de-fund or repeal the ACA. That's not governing, that's called taking a hostage. The senate isn't going to agree, so there's deadlock. See, the president isn't even involved.

He would ONLY get involved if both housed agreed with this, but guess what, even if congress agreed with the Tea Party, The President has this pesky little thing called a veto, which sends it back to Congress and they need a whopping 2/3rds majority vote to override him.

sorry, ain't going to happen. But hey, I'm happy that I could give you some remedial education since you refused to pay attention in class.

So in actuality, The Tea Party can keep having their little temper tantrum, They're all but digging their graves in the next election.