> Nobody’s health insurance is better or cheaper than before.
Speak for yourself. Before Obamacare if you had a pre-existing condition you couldn't switch jobs. There were lots of lower-priced health insurance... but had low life-time maximums (like $50K) which means it was useful only for doctor visits.
Yes, the mechanism of this is a wealth transfer from people who likely don’t have health conditions to people who do. This hurts young people. With the added benefit of having for profit institutions as a middleman.
The distortions caused by ACA will be papers in 20 years. It is so much worse than single payer or the previous corporatist insurance oligopoly.
I wholeheartedly agree that it's significantly worse than single-payer, but to say it hurt young people simply doesn't match reality as I saw it play out.
The ACA allowed me to get insurance for the first time since I'd left home several years before. I knew lots of other freelancers at the time who were in the same boat.
Of course in the following years, insurers found plenty of loopholes to increase prices significantly year over year - and this is why leaving the middlemen in the middle was a TERRIBLE choice - but at the very least the quality of those plans still has a reasonable low bar.
I still find myself on the ACA from time to time. I can't afford it. But the plans are still significantly better and thus more affordable than what was available before.
If life was perfectly predictable then, yes, insurance wouldn't have much of a point. But alas.
We all pay in a bit and those of us unlucky enough to need a huge amount of help can have access to the resources they need. Hopefully that will never be you! But as they say: The reward for a long life is to get to experience the decay of your own body. Good health is temporary for all of us.
That said, you're right: Single-payer would be a huge improvement. Let's do that.
I got to stay on my parents health care for additional years because of Obamacare - as have millions of others. That gave me flexibility to experiment and during that time I learned to program.
Bringing down costs while expanding the number of people getting healthcare was never in the cards unless someone had a magic machine to mint thousands of new doctors and not have to pay for patented medicine. Not to mention enormous tort reform.
However, the increase in costs did slow after ACA:
> … unless someone had a magic machine to mint thousands of new doctors.
That exists. Just buy them from overseas.
Grant special visas to doctors who commit to working at clinics for X years. Pay them some guaranteed wage that’s higher than they make in their homeland and they’ll take the deal.
That would increase the supply of providers, which shifts costs down due to basic economics.
Sure it’s not “fair” to the rest of the world, but that’s not our problem to solve. Too bad the AMA hates this idea.
>Grant special visas to doctors who commit to working at clinics for X years. Pay them some guaranteed wage that’s higher than they make in their homeland and they’ll take the deal.
Do those folks get bodyguards to keep the ICE thugs from disappearing them? If not, I'd expect they wouldn't come here for any price. Just sayin'.
Which was another stupid part of the ACA. Capping profits at 12% of the gross just means the only way to increase profits is to increase your costs. It directly incentivizes raising prices!
> Nothing, absolutely nothing, in the ACA brought down costs.
How it possible to calculate this theory when you don't have a control group? Said differently, if everyone is subject to ACA you can't compare it to a group of people that aren't subject to ACA. Also, insurance premiums are a direct result of how many people are in the pool.
If the control group was "just use the previous year before ACA" then there was absolutely scenarios where people got cheaper healthcare after ACA even without the subsidies. Like real estate markets, insurance markets aren't national, they're local.
FWIW - I'm neither advocating nor opposing the implementation of ACA, just stating it's not easy to conclude "healthcare costs more/less now".
Given that the ACA forced insurance companies to sell insurance to people they previously found unprofitable to sell insurance to, basic economics suggests that the ACA probably raised the cost of insurance. That's not to say it makes it a bad thing. I would actually argue the opposite.
Also the ACA requires insurance companies to make a max gross margin of 20%. This looks like a cost saving measure at first glance, but it's actually the opposite. Now insurance profits are actually increased by an increase in medical costs, and therefore the insurance companies are disincentivized to control costs.
If you believe that adding higher risk people into an insurance pool doesn't raise average costs, that is a conspiracy theory. Showing insurance rates over time is not relevant here because there are a million different reasons why the market as a whole will get more or less expensive.
It’s basic economics, supply and demand. To lower prices you need to either increase supply or decrease demand. The reverse shifts the curves the other way and costs go up.
The ACA did nothing to increase supply. There were no new doctors or clinics.
And the subsidies and mandates to purchase insurance increase demand for medical care.
> Nobody’s health insurance is better or cheaper than before.
It’s far better than before. You can’t be denied for pre existing conditions, there is no benefit limit, and a lot of preventative care is included.
>(before someone argues this, be aware that your state (taxes) heavily subsidizes this)
No, state taxes have nothing to do with ACA. The biggest subsidy is from young people due to the age rating factor capping highest premiums at 3x the lowest premiums. The second biggest subsidy is healthy to sick people, since pre existing conditions aren’t a factor in premium. And the federal government is what subsidized the premium tax credits for people with lower income.
He’ll have a hard time getting most of his stuff through. Rent regulation and busses are controlled by authorities that work for the governor, and she is facing an election against Sara Huckabee Part 2 - Elise Stefanik. The MAGAs will dump lots of cash into that race, and there’s plenty of dudes who will vote for her.
You’re mostly wrong on healthcare. The increased state costs are people who didn’t know they were Medicaid eligible who are now enrolled. The biggest failure imo of Obamacare is that it encouraged consolidation and creation of regional health networks, which have increased prices.
This is fantasy. Obamacare slowed the rising cost of healthcare, fullstop. It helped people get coverage who could not before. It was kneecapped and could have been better, but acting like it wasn't an improvement is so far from reality it is ridiculous.
Yes, a single payer system would be better, but this was better than doing nothing.
Before the ACA, insurance companies were allowed to have these things called “lifetime limits.”
Basically, once your healthcare got expensive, they could just cut you off and say they wouldn’t cover you any further. And because of pre-existing conditions (which the ACA also eliminated), you couldn’t get new health insurance. You were basically fucked.
My mom got cancer a few years before the ACA passed. So far as I’m concerned, the old insurance system killed my mom when she was only 40 years old. I lost my only surviving parent, and my little brother lost his mom when he was only 10 years old. So forgive the utterly flabbergasted look on my face as I read your comment.
