What does the ACA solve?

This is an open discussion about health insurance. I don’t pretend to be an expert, so please add your thoughts and/or tell me how wrong I am. This is the final of three parts.

Part 1: Why health insurance?
Part 2: Challenges to health insurance
Part 3: What does the ACA solve?

The Affordable Care Act (aka ACA or Obamacare) is Obama’s signature legislation, and a step forward for health care in the US. However, it’s very complicated, and few people understand the whole thing–I certainly don’t. Nonetheless, below I present a few ways in which the ACA addresses, or fails to address, challenges in health insurance.
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Challenges to health insurance

This is an open discussion about health insurance. I don’t pretend to be an expert, so please add your thoughts and/or tell me how wrong I am. The discussion comes in three parts, and this is part 2.

Part 1: Why health insurance?
Part 2: Challenges to health insurance
Part 3: What does the ACA solve?

Despite the obvious societal benefits of health insurance, there are a lot of obstacles that prevent it from functioning properly. Mostly focusing on the US, I list some possible challenges below.
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Linkspam: August 10th, 2016

Interrupting the health insurance discussion for my monthly linkspam.

Scientific Charity Movement – Jeff Kaufman is part of the effective altruism (EA) movement, which seeks the most efficient ways to do charity. In the late 19th century, there was a “scientific charity” movement that also tried to apply scientific methods to determine the best way to do charity. Unfortunately, their “scientific” method involved investigating individuals to see if they were deserving of charity. How horrible and inefficient. I support giving people money unconditionally.

Exits and Entrances – Somebody on FTB wrote a novel! As a skeptical/atheist nonfiction blogger who may one day write a novel, this is relevant to my interests. However, at the moment I am in the middle of the Cormoran Strike series (J. K. Rowling’s pseudonymous mystery novels).

Academic transphobia and The Media: The persistence of the “activists vs science” false dichotomy – Dr. Zucker’s clinic for conversion therapy for trans kids was recently shut down, and many of its defenders use an “activist vs science” narrative.  Siobhan points out that the clinic was wrong on scientific grounds, and that critics come from both within and without academia.  Hi!

The thing about academically-minded social criticism is that it’s not very accessible.  It’s there, but it usually won’t go viral, and is harder to find.  When people say that activists and academics are opposed to each other, that tells me that they like nuance in theory, but in practice can’t be bothered to actually find it and read it.
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Why health insurance?

Barrack Obama, well-known Nobel Laureate, recently authored an article published in JAMA about the Affordable Care Act (ACA). I had half a mind to write one of my paper reports about it.

However, I thought it would be more interesting to have an open discussion on health insurance. I don’t pretend to be an expert, so please add your thoughts and/or tell me how wrong I am. Shorter posts encourage more reader discussion, so I’m splitting this into three bites:

Part 1: Why health insurance?
Part 2: Challenges to health insurance
Part 3: What does the ACA solve?

Health insurance seems really complicated to me, and I’m amazed that so many people think they understand it. It’s basically an exchange of money, for money. It’s not at all obvious how this is beneficial, and yet it is. Below, I list some possible reasons why it might be beneficial.
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Paper: The Chaos within Sudoku

“The Chaos within Sudoku” is a paper about solving Sudoku puzzles with physics. They simulate an imaginary physical system, let it run, and when it stops the puzzle is solved. See the video below:

The thing about Sudoku is that Sudoku is hard. More specifically, when Sudoku is generalized to grids of arbitrary size, it’s NP-complete. What happens when you translate an NP-complete problem to a physical simulation? The authors find chaotic dynamics.  And in the process, they identify the hardest Sudoku puzzle…
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Origami: Bellflowers Ball

IMG_0872 (small)Bellflowers Ball, by Yuri Shumukov

As a gift, I got this new origami book called Origami Kusudama Garden: Delightful Paper Spheres.  But when I looked inside, I was dismayed.  This isn’t modular origami!  The flowers are all glued together, or sewn together.  Call me a traditionalist, but I prefer my origami to just have folding.

Of course, it turns out I was wrong.  Using sewing to make floral balls is in fact an old tradition, and modular origami is the modern innovation.  Well, okay, it’s worth a try, I thought.  I was also briefly tickled by the idea of assembling a dodecahedron using squares.

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My take on burden of proof

While I’m criticizing Austin Cline, I also want to say something about his article on burden of proof in the context of the atheism vs theism debate.  Again, I have nothing against Cline, and in fact he brings up several points that I agree with:

A more accurate label would be a “burden of support” — the key is that a person must support what they are saying. This can involve empirical evidence, logical arguments, and even positive proof.

The “burden of proof” is not something static which one party must always carry; rather, it is something which legitimately shifts during the course of a debate as arguments and counter-arguments are made.

The part I disagree with Cline’s assertion that the (initial) burden of proof “always lies with the person who is making a claim, not the person who is hearing the claim and who may not initially believe it.”

This leaves open the question of who has the initial burden of proof when both people are making claims.  For example, what if the theist claims there is a god, and I claim there is no god?  According to Cline, atheism refers to people who make no claims about gods, and thus atheists don’t have the initial burden of proof.  However, I am part of the subset of atheists who positively claims there are no gods, so where does that leave me?

In my analysis, burden of proof is the answer to three different questions:

  1. Who wins if no further arguments are made?
  2. Who should win if no further arguments are made?
  3. Whose turn is it to advance the argument?

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