I guess the penalty really is a tax after all.
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Two things to remember - the ACA, with all it’s flaws, is still way better than the old system where insurers could and would kick you to the curb if you had a condition they didn’t feel like insuring.
Second, I never saw the R’s agree on a replacement. All they wanted to do was get rid of it because of Obama or whatever, and folks rightly saw that there was nothing that could help any better than what we had.
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If you had continuing coverage under the old system, that wasn’t true. There were also high risk pools where you could get coverage, but those cost something close to your real health costs, so they weren’t really much for insurance.
The ACA is basically the same thing, just with tons of taxpayer money shoveled in - a toxic high risk pool and a bunch of poor people getting free low end care. The ACA could have worked well if they had extended it to the whole government staff and all the employer covered plans, but of course no one would vote for worse choice and worse coverage, so the tiny 5% pool or whatever now isn’t big enough to be financially sustainable without huge subsidies.
Second, I never saw the R’s agree on a replacement.
Yeah. The old system worked pretty well, but with problems at the margins. The new one is the same - now they pretend you have coverage only you can’t actually get appointments or good doctors. Remember Obamacare was about increasing the insurance coverage stats, not reducing costs or making healthcare “more affordable”, neither of which it has done.
Healthcare costs are going up, and more hikes in insurance premiums and care costs in the pipeline from all the inflation.
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…and your “coverage” requires you to first pay a $7k deductable before most things are covered at all.
Uh … what … the hail you say!! I distinctly recall hearing the anointed one saying that his plan would reduce healthcare premiums by up to $2500. I realize that “up to” is a marketing term, but presume the anointed one wouldn’t stoop so low as to purposely mislead people.
I also recall his “promise” that Obamacare would never add to the deficit.
Granted, he had a problem with the truth, or understanding, but how can you say it wasn’t supposed to make healthcare more affordable. It certainly has for the people that now have someone else paying for their health insurance.
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This doctor would disagree with you.
There are many, many other articles that I’m too lazy to look up on how things were much worse for individuals before the ACA. The high risk pools were a joke in many states, for example.
The ACA expanded coverage to many more folks that couldn’t get it before. Yes, a lot of that is because the gov’t is funding it. It has helped lower income folks much more than the average middle class, I agree.
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he ACA could have worked well if they had extended it to the whole government staff and all the employer covered plans, but of course no one would vote for worse choice and worse coverage, so the tiny 5% pool or whatever now isn’t big enough to be financially sustainable without huge subsidies.
yes, that is definitely a good point of how the whole thing could have been implemented “better” – basically roll ALL federal government health insurance into the system and probably strongly incentivize state government participation in some way to massively increase the participant pool.
It helped the lower class at the expense of the tiny slice, like 5% maybe, of people who are unemployed or self-employed, and in both cases not married to someone with a job that included health benefits. That’s what that guy is talking about.
One of the most prominent reasons our patients did not have health insurance was because of preexisting health conditions. If they did not work for a large employer and sought to purchase a health insurance plan on their own, insurers would readily deny the application, charge an exorbitant premium or exclude the preexisting condition from the policy
Yes, it sucked for that group, but it was a small group. Now it sucks for a larger group.
The problem with health “insurance” is that it doesn’t work when one group costs $50k/year (really sick) and the other equally large group is healthy. You have to split the difference if the insurance is going to price it right because they weren’t allowed to price based on health, so all the healthy people opt out and pay the penalty (or not now) since it’s way way cheaper to self insure your real costs instead of paying huge amounts for someone else. It’d be fine if 95% paid a little for the 5% with issues, since they wouldn’t pay that much more. But when 90% keeps the old system and they screw the self-employed 5% to pay for the really sick 5%, the impacts are dramatic.
In response, the insurance keeps cutting benefits and raising costs to make the expensive people pay for their actual costs. Well, in the case of ACA now, basically for the only people in the plan, the taxpayer pays most of it, so nobody cares what it costs anymore.
Before the ACA, you could buy out of network coverage. You could buy a good top tier doctor network. Now you get BC/BS’s low end thing where half the doc’s have quit and just don’t report it, and most of the rest don’t want these new, unprofitable patients. It’s Medicaid for All, even if you wanted to pay more, nothing better is available.
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So the solution was to federalize those pools and throw taxpayer dollars in to subsidize those people only. That would have cost a fraction of what the current policy costs, helping only the people that truly fell through the cracks of the old system, while not screwing over everyone else.
To be fair, the republicans didn’t fight for this policy as an alternative, but they should have.
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It also forced the inclusion of a lot of stuff at 100% that would previously have been subject to deductibles/copay. For instance, a $1200 colonoscopy is now free, as long as it’s coded as screening vs. diagnostic. That’s only a little more than my annual (subsidized) premium, lol.
The major issue as I see it, is who is your risk pool? Dems say “everyone” and the Republicans say not so fast. Of course it’s a better deal if you don’t have to split with any sick people, lol.
They didn’t fight for anything other than repeal, and that’s why the half-assed ACA remains.
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People on Obamacare have apparently been even more subsidized by the taxpayer “due to covid” of late, and that’s scheduled to expire, inconveniently, just before midterms.
So like any voting problem, expect the Democrats to try to throw more of your money at it and hope it goes away, without actually addressing the underlying causes of healthcare cost inflation.
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Would an extension of these extra subsidies require voting by the Senate?
Voters are set to receive notices about premium increases in late October , as they head to the ballot box for the November midterms. Others would find out during the ACA open enrollment period, which begins on November 1 according to Insider.
Or compliant insurance companies will suddenly have “unfortunate delays due to covid-19” in releasing their 2023 premiums…
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Looks like 10-20% premium inflation is going to be typical this year.
Channeling Joseph Robinette Biden …
Mmmm, your hair smells good, wanna … Uh, oh, uh, with Iranian, uh, Ukranian, 'er, Russian inflation running at ~11%+, we’ve lowered insurance premiums by 1%, just like the anointed one promised. As well, since coming into power, we’ve lowered sea levels, as promised, beyond the levels set forth in the Macedonian - Carthaginian Global Warming Treaty. 
Appeal / repeal efforts seem to have ended after a decade of fighting - perpetual bureaucracy achieved!
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Once an entitlement is entrenched, it is almost impossible to remove. The blues know this and this has been their modus operandi – start small / limited time, then keep extending the entitlement until there is no more appetite to repeal.
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