Could we please not call them subsidies???

[justgamma]

When you sign up for Obamacare, you get a tax credit. You can either use it to pay for part of your insurance or claim it at the end of the year.

It's all about framing the issues. Tax credits sound a lot better than subsidies.

[Grown2Hate]

1. GREAT idea, actually. I can use this with my conservative in-laws (not Baggers, just old school

cons). Hard to argue with TAX CREDITS from their point of view.

[BlueStreak]

2. It is a subsidy. That's not framing, that's denial.

If you want to frame it, then tell the WHOLE story. It is a subsidy -- to the INSURANCE COMPANIES. Americans are paying more than twice what other countries pay for mediocre coverage. The subsidies most certainly represent less than half the premium cost in the whole. If we had single payer, we would be paying less than we do WITH SUBSIDIES. Therefore it isn't the taxpayers that are benefiting from the subsidies. It is the private insurance industry.

I don't want a subsidy. I want a fair price. And I don't want my premium to go to obscenely inflated executive salaries -- not even the 20% of my premium that is allowed under this monstrosity of a law.

The only good thing that can be said about the ACA is that is a small step forward from where we were. Unless you are an insurance company executive. In that case you could say this law is a huge Bonanza, but I think most of them won't say that out loud.

[MrsKirkley]

3. Tax Credits hmmmm. What if we called them......Vouchers?

I believe that's what Paul Ryan called them. When Republicans start spewing hate about job loss, say "Don't you mean job lock? I remember McCain and Romney talking against job lock not too long ago." Keep reminding the Greedy Obstructionist Party how they were in favor of the health care law since it was their idea.

[Igel]

4. It's like not calling Social Security an entitlement.

We confuse connotation and denotation, and make the political tail wag the policy and legal dog. We want to win on form because we're afraid we can't win on substance, and then declare form to trump substance. Terra.

We don't like that (R) have managed to hang a bad feeling on the word "entitlement," and so we refuse to call entitlements "entitlements."

We have been busily hanging "loser" on the word "subsidy" and tarring it with bad feeling that now that we have subsidies we like we have to deny what they are because we can't get past our own emotional attachment to the disdain we attribute to the word.

We're stuck on words. At that level of thinking, no wonder that some of the worse insults deal with simple misspellings. (I've known a lot of truly brilliant people who couldn't spell with a damn.)