ETA: "Obamacare" is used because it's a catchy name which is both quite descriptive (Obama pushed this healthcare law thru, so he owns it) and is not inherently insulting (like "Bushoppression" or "Obamasux" mentioned elsewhere in this thread). Use of this popular nickname causes a frenzy because of its subject, not its inherent phrasing - it is not an ad-hominem attack.
Facts:
Congressional majority voted in favor of it, then Obama signed it, turning it into the law of the land. All those individuals were voted into their jobs by the American people, by a majority of voters.
The Supreme Court then upheld it.
The same President who, as you said, pushed for it, and signed it into law, and who was the candidate of the very party which also comprised the overwhelming majority of the Congressional votes which turned it into law, was then chosen by a majority of voters to be re-elected as President for a second term.
Now, that law is starting to finally go fully into effect.
This is how government works. All the key players above were either elected directly (or put into place indirectly by the former) by a majority of American voters. Your side (I assume), lost. It happens. This is a democracy.
Using your logic, you shouldn't call Social Security Social Security you should call it FDR Forced Set Asides. Because you know, nobody likes being forced by the government to set aside their hard earned cash by some politician, and one who's personally and solely responsible for that happening. And which has absolutely no upside to it at all, of course. But wait, that wouldn't be true. So people don't do that. They call it Social Security. Because that is it's name, and is less loaded, and more politically neutral.
So I meant during the polling... one name already had bias baked into it by using the word affordable rather than the word subsidized. Not many people are keen on subsidies when you call them subsidies. But if you just say something is now more affordable and don't tell people it is more affordable because it is subsidized, you have baked in a bias from the start. So naturally that bias is going to be reflected in more favorable polling results.
Read some of the opposition to it. For many people it is not a neutral name.
President Obama endorsed the nickname, saying, "I have no problem with people saying Obama cares. I do care."[2] Because of the number of "Obamacare" search engine queries, the Department of Health and Human Services purchased Google advertisements, triggered by the term, to direct people to the official HHS site.[3] In March 2012, the Obama reelection campaign embraced the term "Obamacare", urging Obama's supporters to post Twitter messages that begin, "I like #Obamacare because...".[4]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Protection_and_Affordab...
[2] http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20092578-503544.html
[3] http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/1210/HHS_buys_ObamaCa...
[4] http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/217893-obam...
Unsurprisingly, the ensuing decrease of supply and increase in demand is making health plans more expensive for a lot of people.
So, "Obamacare" might be more accurate.
If you really want to be both more accurate and more true to your critiques, try something like "ExpensiveCare" or "ConstrainedSupplyCare" or "BubbleDemandCare" or something like that. I could even see critics attempting something like "UnfairCare", referencing the fact that young healthy people with incomes are now paying for old/unhealthy/indigent people's healthcare in addition to their own.
But "Obamacare" is silly, non-descriptive, purely partisan, and universally detracts from any conversation about it.
Constraint-free purchase of health insurance would mean that I could sell you health insurance that would 'insure' that you could only be doctored by me, on my yoga mat, with a chainsaw. Someone less principled than me would have the same idea --- or one like it --- and sell a billion innocent souls a false comfort and a dangerous service. So someone would. Like someone has already sold those same people fake food that's killing them.
Do you like alive citizens, or dead ones? The utopia you seek may be for the machines and the undertakers. And the undertakertrons.
http://www.propublica.org/article/answered-why-two-obama-loy...
My brother is a healthy, single, childless young college student who has a cheap, catastrophic plan to insure (aka share risk) for a major accident or major ailment (cancer, etc). He won't get to keep it after Dec 31st. Instead he'll have to pay a dramatically larger sum to offset risks that he doesn't have.
Unless your brother is immortal, he will eventually fall ill or suffer an accident. Such is the nature of life. Some people live long & healthy lives, others get cancer at 25. You simply cannot know the future. Shared risk, in the greater scheme of things, is preferable to the alternatives.
Do you think people should be able to own and have their own nuclear weapons? How about biological weapons? What about murder? Should that be legal?
If you said no, then you do agree there needs to be some "nanny state regulations". We only differ on where the line should be drawn.
When people "grow up", they realize that the general populace isn't too bright. The world is filled with nutjobs, idiots and crazies. People who are downright evil. People who are sociopaths. Letting the "free market" sort them out is a fairy tale for the young and children.
I don't mean to sound condescending or harsh, it's just that I was once a libertarian myself (in my early to mid twenties.) I came to realize what a horrible ideology it was and when you see people making the same mistake you made, you can't help but try to help that person out.
I'll let the results speak for themselves.
Childless men who are incapable of getting pregnant _must_ carry pregnancy coverage under Obamacare.
How does that follow?
Calling it Obamacare makes it personal, and this is about much more than Obama taking care of all of us.
I'd love to see a neutral name for the legislation itself. I am starting to call it "the current health care legislation".
[0] - http://www.hhs.gov/healthcare/rights/law/
Edit: copying this as an edit to my first post, but leaving this here in case anyone replies.
I'm not so sure about the affordable part. Maybe all I see is people posting letters about their rates going up though. What is the argument against that from people who still support this legislation? Is it denied that prices have gone up in general or accepted and justified because of increased benefits on the plans?
That what you see is not representative, because along with those I see plenty of people that could not get private insurance at any price (e.g., for whom the cost was infinite) due to preexisting conditions that can get health insurance because of the ACA.
> Is it denied that prices have gone up in general
For like benefits, costs have gone down since the ACA was introduced, in part because of parts of the ACA that went into effect earlier, like the limit on profits which required refunding excess premiums (because health insurance, even prior to the ACA, was not an ideal competitive market but an oligopolistic one in which rents were being extracted, and this was a limit on the rents that could be extracted.)
With the minimum benefit levels effective for non-grandfathered plans some low-cost, low-benefit plans are going away. This, on its own, would increase the minimum price of private insurance after this stage of implementation of the ACA above what it was prior to this stage of the implementation. In addition, changes to rules on what factors can be used in price setting have shifted costs so that, compared to what they would be without those rule changes, prices for plans for young, currently healthy individuals have gone up, while prices for everyone else have (again, considering only the effect of that rules change) gone down.
Expanding the size of risk pools as the mandate does should slightly reduce overall prices, but that may be a lagging effect since it can't be factored in fully without a clear picture of the magnitude and how many people will opt out in favor of paying the penalties for non-insurance.
Additionally, subsidies have been made available to people at the low end of the scale to which the individual mandate applies; this doesn't help with total costs (ignoring the effect that coverage vs. non-coverage has on total healthcare costs, which is significant in the long term, but not necessarily the short term) but does help with affordability.
Even moreso, except in states that opted out of it, Medicaid expansion means a lot of people are getting coverage with no out-of-pocket cost that could not afford any coverage before.
But, yes, the people that could afford insurance and who paid the least for the coverage they were getting because of youth and current health are often going to be paying more.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/six-stories-of-oba...
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/10/ted-cruz-obamaca...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/05/i-am-obamacare-_n_4...
Because you don't want to, it's as simple as that. If you were actually looking there's plenty of stories to find.
a data point:
I also see a lot of people talking about God and Jesus and how they have a personal relationship with them, etc, etc. Personally I've never seen them. I have a guess as to the status of things in those situations.
Also I see a lot of "people" saying how Justin Bieber is, "like, so cute. OMG. he's so hawt! and a genius! omg. like, amazing. omg. omg". So clearly, this must be factually true, correct?
I didn't say that. You shouldn't try to put words in someone else's mouth. I was mainly looking for some credible, unbiased facts. A lot of the positive anecdotes seem to be ignoring price reductions due to tax credits or something but I am not sure. Huffington Post's story has a family of 5 getting insurance for $100-something, while I see people saying their family went from like $600 to $1,000+.
I didn't say you said that. boggle
My point was to bring up the general phenomenon of:
-- some people are stupid
-- some people are ignorant (and/or draw conclusions from a very limited or ephemeral data set)
-- some people are liars
-- some people are malicious
-- some people spin
-- some "people", on the web, don't exist, or they're sock puppets
-- some people have subjective tastes ("Burgers taste bad." --> Therefore, all burgers taste bad for everybody. What?)
A more apt analogy would be Bushtactics.
It's a controversial topic on its substance; the name does not change that either way.
[0] - http://www.policymic.com/articles/65625/why-americans-are-ok...
Ask people if they want universal affordable health care, and most people will discuss the issue. Ask people if they want Obamacare, and you instantly raise all sorts of issues that have nothing to do with health care.
Edit:
I agree with many of the responses here as well. The actual name, which I believe has ten titled parts [0], is a bit of marketing copy as well. But at least it's marketing copy that relates to the substance of the act.
Calling it Obamacare makes it personal, and this is about much more than Obama taking care of all of us.
I'd love to see a neutral name for the legislation itself. I am starting to call it "the current health care legislation".
[0] - http://www.hhs.gov/healthcare/rights/law/