I don't know, I read something somewhere at some point that implied that democrats are giving free Healthcare to transgenders and illegals. I didn't take any time to figure out if this is true or not, but it sounds like it's true to my broken brain, so it probably is. The worst thing that could possibly happen is people that I hate getting stuff for free, so I'm going to keep voting for Republicans to make sure that my life is as difficult and painful as possible since some of that pain and difficulty will surely also apply to the minorities that I hate. Going bankrupt and dying decades early is a small price to pay to make sure the owners of insurance companies can make a little bit more profit.
Personally, I heard Republicans loudly talk about taking away healthcare, but I also saw a meme about how the Democratic candidate had a weird laugh (no, I didn’t watch the event that screenshot came from), so frankly I can’t decide. That’s why I didn’t vote. (/s)
So many people sat out the election and got us into this mess. Again.
Unfortunately Obama didn't totally abolish private health insurance companies and completely rebuild healthcare in America unilaterally. So actually both sides are the same and there's no point in voting.
He had a whole 75 days of filibuster-proof majority, and he couldn’t even unilaterally upend capitalism worldwide!?! Truly my centrist position of abstaining from voting and letting everyone else decide the future of the country for me is an enlightened one.
--The worst thing that could possibly happen is people that I hate getting stuff for free, so I'm going to keep voting for Republicans to make sure that my life is as difficult and painful as possible since some of that pain and difficulty will surely also apply to the minorities that I hate.
I get that you are caricaturizing, but do you really think that we can just say "all our taxes and government spending are good" ? Like, couldn't we possibly say that at least some of the people have some kind of valid point about there being different options than just massively taxing and centralizing power at the federal level in the hope that some small percentage might help all people in the country with healthcare?
I mean, even look at JUST the state of California. It's the 7th largest economy in the entire world, with an almost exclusive democrat majority in every branch of government. Even California won't just make a "government health plan". Why is that do YOU think?
I think it is because in order to do "government healthcare" you have to put price controls in place. In England, the DHS sets income rates for doctors and nurses. I think if California tried to do that, pretty much every doctor and nurse would just nope out to the next state over and only super shitty uncompetitive bad doctors would remain. In England, you can't just emigrate. You are captured. But in the US, healthworkers could just nope out. Or, without price controls, health premiums would rise considerably from present conditions, and a lot of working people would just nope out even faster than they are today with 11% income tax rates, and a death spiral would happen.
Again, this is my speculation. Why do YOU think a pure democrat state like CA isn't doing this? If they DID do it, and it worked, wouldn't they gather tons of businesses and citizens as this lower cost, better healthcare system attracted others from around the country? So why don't they lead the way as a shining example?
If you say so, but one party would give me inexpensive healthcare, the other party would give me no healthcare, and voting for a third party would give me what the second party would give me.
If the healthcare in another country doesn't change no matter how I vote, I'd go for the first option.
If people hadn’t sat out the 2010 midterms and effectively made Obama into a lame duck for six years, we could have actually expanded on the foundation set by the ACA.
Honestly you'd need to be 50s-60s to really have any experience with it. When you're in your 20s you can pretty much live off pizza and beer 6 days of the week and spend maybe 30 minutes exercising and still feel pretty fucking great. Healthcare reform wasn't even on my radar back then. I heard all the older folks bitching about it but I didn't really listen because I had to catch up on the latest Halo 2 developer leaks.
When you're in your 20s you can pretty much live off pizza and beer 6 days of the week and spend maybe 30 minutes exercising and still feel pretty fucking great.
Well, if you're lucky you can. I graduated college in 2010 and when I was job hunting I was painfully conscious that I could not afford to be uninsured at any point thanks to chronic health issues. As long as I could get my prescriptions I was reasonably functional, but without them there was no way I could hold down a job. Extending the age that you could stay on your parents' insurance to 27 was a lifesaver. After 27, I was on the Medicare expansion program and again, lifesaver. I've actually gotten into several fights with older relatives and my parents' friends about ACA/Obamacare because they were against it.
Fights!? Did you punch them in the nose!? Speculative wishful thinking.
Seriously though. The U. S. spends an average of 16,000 a year for every man woman and child. It is remarkably on par with my useless ass health insurance premiums. It'll be good to know people are not only making 30% a year now but also that they will get paid when I am dead.
Surprisingly we are not dead last in the western world on the percentage of our GDP we spend on healthcare. We are about fifty if I remember correctly. Finland spends the most per GDP. Somewhere on r/dataisbeautiful there is a nice map showing percent of the GDP spent on healthcare of every country in the EU. I had to do some research on the U. S.
The one where they compare money spent per capita vs average life expectancy is pretty eye opening. We're spending 12x more than China to achieve the same outcome, which honestly tracks pretty well with how we do things around here.
That is freaking awesome. Much more useful then the chart I have. All of the spending with an actual reversal in life expetancy in the last few years. We are doing great. I don't see why profits in the healthcare industry should be tied to results. Nor should we hold people accountable for all the junk food they eat. We might start looking to closely at the fact that there are over a hundred names for high fructose corn sysrup. My favorite as of late is "natural sweetner". Ain't nothing natural about it.
In 1999 I had a coworker in her 20’s who’d had cancer 3 times and had to pick jobs based on who would cover her insurance. My karate dojo was also doing fundraisers for a 20-something student who was a self-employed contractor who’d been diagnosed with brain cancer.
In my mid 40s. Grew up mostly without health insurance because we couldn’t afford it, and my knee is permanently fucked because if “if you get a diagnosis now you’ll get denied health insurance because you’ll have a pre-existing condition” decisions pre-Obamacare.
I was really lucky my appendix waited to rupture until I was covered by my college’s heath insurance plan.
I'm that age, though a smaller group of younger people might remember those days if they had parents with health issues.
My mom died in her 50s of a chronic disease a few years before Obamacare passed, she didn't have insurance. I didn't fully get it at the time, but she basically gave up on trying to access treatment because she didn't want to have to lose our house. I have always wondered if she'd had health insurance if she might have lived.
Mid 30’s here, was in my late teens into early 20’s at the time, and was affected by this and absolutely was making “real” healthcare decisions back then. I almost lost my life and my sanity (separately) because of it. If the ACA hadn’t been implemented when it had, I’d be dead several times over at this point.
I came to the US before Obama got elected from the UK and the concept of being dropped because preexisting, let alone th idea that you could die because you couldn’t afford life saving treatment was utterly alien to me.
More crazy were the right wing loonies I’d argue with who kept comparing it to car insurance as if the two were comparable in any way, shape or form.
If I didn’t have insurance on my car and it’s wrecked I could potentially either get a new one, car pool or rely on public transport. Can’t really do that with my body
A 30 year old today was 15 when the ACA passed. Everyone I know who is over 40 remembers but younger than around that it seems to mostly be people who had a seriously ill immediate family member when they were young or were seriously ill themselves.
Yeah, I'm in your cohort and we're officially into at least "starting to get old" territory.
Plenty of people who weren't alive when 9/11 happened already have kids who will soon grow up with COVID and the black plague in the same bucket of "stuff that happened to old people a long time ago." That last part should even hit home for 20-somethings — time's a brutal motherfucker.
What's astounding is seeing firsthand just how much knowledge and understanding gets lost and has to be relearned the hard way. That feels easier to mitigate than ever with information being more accessible than ever, but if anything it seems to be getting worse as people just get cocooned into echo chambers.
In my lower 30s, I don't know much about it, as I was still in high school and under parents insurance, who were a hospital admin and a senior partner at one of the big 4 tax firms. Insurance wasn't something we ever worried about
I'm 35 and remember the before times. There were arguments that the ACA wasn't important because everyone already had access to healthcare (ignoring the price tag attached to the access), the ACA would be a death panel, the wait times increases that would become years for a broken leg, and that our taxes would skyrocket and no one would have any money.
I was aware because I have a benign tumor on my arm that my doctor said to ignore unless it becomes a problem, because it would most likely be rejected and deemed as cosmetic since it wasn't hurting me in any way. Same thing for a tooth I lost in a running accident. Ignore it because it's cosmetic and won't be covered. Because of this, both would be insanely expensive.
I know people who have been able to get insane surgeries for things like an aneurism, but claimed about Obamacare wanting them to try various headache relief techniques first, ignoring that it's the insurance company doing it and they probably wouldn't have been able to get the procedure covered at all for substance abuse and other accidents in their teens and twenties.
The ACA was one of the most important pieces of legislation passed in my lifetime, maybe the most important.
It's also not enough. The US is still a place where people sometimes have to use gofundme to raise money for medical bills. And by "sometimes", I mean it's so common that more than a third of gofundme campaigns are for healthcare.
And maybe that was always going to happen, but at least part of why it didn't do enough is because Democrats didn't understand what they were up against. Obama kept offering concession after concession, trying to reach a compromise with Republicans so he could pass the bill with bipartisan support. Eventually he straight-up asked if there was anything he could do to get their votes, and the answer was no. So he shouldn't have compromised.
And it is still so good that people have entirely forgotten the horrors that were just normal before it was passed.
There is a lot in the ACA that was specifically changed to try and court a small handful of Republican Senators - notably Olympia Snowe, who made countless edits and adjustments - but none of who ended up voting for the legislation. Much, much of what is wrong with the ACA is because we had centrist Democrats asking for specific stupid things, and Republicans existing.
Don't ignore the traitors inside the tent pissing into the tent. Fucking Joe Lieberman (Independent - Representing insurance companies based in Connecticut), who is hopefully now burning in hell, said that he would filibuster any ACA plan that had a public option. Not Medicare for all, just a public option. And the bill could not advance without his blessing.
Yeah, it's still not good. I have really really good insurance throughout my wife's job. It's expensive, relatively speaking. I also have cancer. I've got a little bit of a positive right now because I hit my yearly out of pocket maximum of $6k, so my prescriptions are free right now, and my co-pays are waived. We're just going to pretend I'm not also shitting my pants about getting dropped. I'm talking with my niece the other day while she was taking me to treatment, and she's like $6k would financially wreck her. We aren't even addressing the fact she couldn't afford this coverage in the first place.
Maybe if you have pretty good insurance and aren't sick and don't know anyone sick you can think the system is ok. But the second you need to use it, the house of cards collapses. I have it "good" and can still recognize that I'm incredibly fortunate in that one aspect.
I think that the other side is, voters failed the Democrats. They managed to push through large improvements with the ACA. Expecting the American people would see that policy and want even more, and therefore vote for Democrats.
That...did not happen. Dems got crushed in the midterms and set us on the road to where we are. So, apparently, the median voter did not like that very much and voted accordingly.
Whether they were mad thanks to Fox News propaganda or mad because the ACA didn't do enough, the end result is the same.
I’m just so fucking ashamed of my country more and more often nowadays ngl. Wealthiest nation in history and you read stories like OP’s and it makes me so fucking angry that a good chunk of the country genuinely wants that reality again.
I'm old enough to remember before it was that bad. The original HMOs were good. And before that it was 80/20 health care provided by your employer. Then came the for-profit healthcare laws under Reagan and our country went to shit.
Just the reality of how insurance companies were completely screwing people with “pre-existing conditions” should be enough to make you a fan of the ACA. And I put quotes around pre-existing conditions because insurance companies had a huge financial motivation to make anything they could fall under that umbrella.
Pre ACA, my dad had some dark stools, mentioned it to his doc who was concerned since his mom had died of colon cancer. Insurance approved an early colonoscopy at age 40. Back then the recommendation was about age 50. Colonoscopy went well; they found no issues.
Two years later he got a new job, and his premiums with the new insurance company were increased by 20% because they found out he had a colonoscopy in the past. Not that he had polyps, or cancer or really anything; nope simply because he had a colonoscopy and had a parent who died from colon cancer.
He was basically financially punished for taking care of his own health and by having an ancestor with a type of cancer that is only passed down via genetics about 10% of the time.
It’s something you would think would unify all Americans, liberal and conservative. Like it’s not perfect but it’s still a damn good firewall against greedy evil corporations stealing more money from your pocket but nooooo, it’s communism/marxism/black president man bad for a disturbing chunk of the population.
Before the ACA, I couldn't get insurance on my own. If I worked for someone else, I could, but on my own, I was out of luck, and I was self employed beginning in 2011. I have a genetic bone disorder. Fucking born with a preexisting condition. I was making good money. I could afford insurance. No one would insure me. I tried, several times, and every time, I was declined coverage.
After the ACA was enacted, I got insurance because they could no longer turn me down for having a preexisting condition. But even then, the first time I filed a claim, about 6 months after getting coverage, for a routine annual checkup, they tried to rescind my coverage for incorrect statements on my original application. And that's when another little publicized provision of the ACA kicked in. They can only cancel your coverage for incorrect information on your application if those misstatements were made knowingly and with an intent to mislead the insurance company. They can't just rescind your coverage on a technicality. I was able to show that the mistakes on my application were innocent (and in one case, wasn't even a mistake) errors and got my coverage reinstated.
The ACA is not perfect. Some kind of single payer/Medicare-for-all program would be much better, but the ACA was better than what we had. It was a step in the right direction.
Back in 2009 I was working as a freelancer and my state mandated you have health insurance so I bought it on my own. I was a healthy 29 year old with zero medical issues, basically just needed insurance in case any accidents happened. I had to mail the insurance company my medical history and they told me while they waited for that info they would charge me the highest rate and then once they figured out my rate based on my age/history would reimburse me. The highest rate was like $800 a month - that was like half of what o made each month. Then the insurance company messed up and it took them 2 months to review my files, so I paid $1600 for 2 months of insurance. Then they gave me my new rate and lowered my payment by like half, and I asked for my reimbursement and they said “o sorry our policy just changed and we don’t offer reimbursements anymore, we’ll take a percentage of what overpaid off your bill each month”. I was counting on that money to pay my bills and live.
Really hated dealing with purchasing insurance and eventually got a full time job that provided benefits. I’d love to work as a freelancer and maybe start my own business, but dread dealing with insurance so I wouldn’t do it just because of that. Pretty shitty that insurance keeps me locked into working a job just for the insurance.
I mentioned this in a different post earlier today. No matter how big a company is they do NOT want to be in the insurance business. It's a huge expensive distraction from their actually business.
I was told I needed an MRI to judge the level of injury.
I went to the hospital to get the MRI and gave them my credit card. They came back and told me the charge had been declined by my bank.
On the phone with my bank, in the waiting room of the hospital, I asked why the charge had been declined. They told me it was so high that it flagged their fraud alert system.
Has anyone seen this little movie that came out a while ago and had like ten sequels called Saw? Ya, that first one was before Obamacare. A literal goddamn horror franchise was spawned from the American healthcare system before Obama.
Yup, that's how "real" insurance works. If the system knows that it will have to spend a ton of money on you, the fair price for insurance is even more money. The point is reducing risk, not saving money.
If you want the system to cover that cost for a reasonable price, you need to use money from healthy people. And that drives up the cost for those healthy people. Instead of just paying for their own probably costs, they need to also cover the guaranteed costs of people with pre-existing conditions. That will naturally tend to make insurance seem like less of a good deal for them, and so more and more people will simply do without health insurance.
Instead, what you need is a system to force everyone to pay in, so that the system can then pay out for whoever needs it. Any system like this is effectively going to be a single payer system. However, because we are allergic to the words "single payer", we insist on keeping health insurance companies in the loop and working through them, and the end result is the system that we all know and (don't) love.
Breaking Bad. Man resorts to cooking and selling meth to afford paying for cancer treatment. The entire premise literally doesn’t even work in other countries.
Common misconception. Walter White had insurance through the school job that he had that covered cancer treatments, he started selling meth in order to pay for experimental additional treatments.
Was that the premise? I remember thinking the whole thing was weird because a teacher even in a poor state like NM is going to have decent health insurance, even pre-ACA.
The healthcare I get through my work offers not only reduced cost and free preventative care options, they also offer a financial incentive ($500) if you do regular annual physicals/checkups.
Preventative care costs SO MUCH LESS than not doing it, which is why you'd question why an insurer wouldn't want you to do that.
...except before the ACA mandate that insurers HAVE to carry you, they could just not carry you as soon as they think they might have to start paying out more than you're paying them. They'll happily TAKE your money, and when it comes time to pay out, they pay people whose entire job it is to justify why they should pay as little as possible.
Insurers love a customer who pays and never uses the plan. They hate a customer who does use it, and, when you cross a certain affordability threshold, if they can't drop you, you dying is a best case scenario for them.
And what’s really crazy is that the current improved system still sucks ass. Oh you lost your job? Welp, there goes your insurance, unless you want to take on more than a car payment to get a high deductible plan. Pretty cool considering spending that kind of money when you’re out of work is pretty much a non-starter for most.
Oh you got injured or had a heart issue where you needed to be rushed to a hospital? I know you were doing the right thing by having insurance, but sorry, this hospital doesn’t take that insurance, so now you’re still totally fucked.
The fact that we don’t have universal healthcare in this country is monstrous. We are the richest country on the god damn planet. It is an absolute moral failing of this country for anyone to have forgo healthcare due to lack of insurance or lack of money with insurance.
"Pre-existing condition" was anything the health insurance company decided you could have detected while not being insured.
Their decision mechanism was basically "find any excuse" not actually the official goal of not having insurance and then getting it once you are diagnosed.
Eliminating the "pre-existing conditions" restriction was probably the biggest benefit to the ACA, but it isn't talked about nearly enough. I have kids with special needs, and when I got laid off from my job prior to the ACA, the amount of stress it put my family under over the fear of an insurance gap was insane. With me on the job hunt we couldn't afford COBRA, so my then wife had to change to full-time (against doctor's advice) while pregnant so she could become eligible for her insurance plan. That plan was expensive and didn't cover any of our normal doctors, but we had to pay for it just so that we still had insurance without a gap before I was eligible at the new job.
This doesn't even hit all of the bad things that could happen to you because of the preexisting condition loophole. Some health insurers would use them as an excuse to retroactively deny all the service they had provided to you if they decided later that you had a pre-existing condition that you didn't disclose to their satisfaction when you signed up. That would mean they would bill you for everything they had ever paid on your behalf.
I have a pre-existing condition since birth, and I lived in constant fear of that happening to me arbitrarily. I never wanted to go to the doctor for anything for years, even though I was covered.
I'm really lucky that I only had to go without insurance for 3 months once, just before Obamacare took effect. My doctor was really annoyed that I stopped getting Remicaid infusions for Crohn's, but it was $50,000 each.
You were stuck getting insurance from your employer if they offered it. You were denied access to affordable means of healthcare if you had a preexisting condition. Those 2 provisions are the only thing the ACA really did but they are super important because this meant:
1: you were essentially bound to your job for the insurance and if you moved, insurance companies who knows what you would have covered
2: many people working werent able to access insurance for a variety of reasons.
3: denial of care could occur due to lack of insurance.
Yes, ACA was better in some ways than the existing system.
But now that it exists it creates a huge sunk cost in our collective minds to throw it away and implement a truly equal system.
And I want to call out something VERY political here.
Part of that cost is Obama and race. Obama was an inspiration not just to me and others but a generation of kids who saw their first minority President.
Part of Obama's legacy may be the Affordable Care Act. But it doesn't have to be the primary component.
Remember how it felt hearing Obama talk elegantly about politics and equality and a future vision for America?
There is a very real public health and mental health cost to our current political climate. We shouldn't have to be strong all the time.
Obama showed us another world was possible.
I'm sure some political operatives somewhere think it's clever bringing up that this could be seen as a nasty "Well spoken black man" trope.
It's not. I'm willing to fight through that bullshit to the point his speeches literally fucking made us healthier. And I hope those political hacks enjoy the real government healthcare and retirement they enjoy.
One thing I don't get: it seems like there are sooooooo many people who seem to say/recognize what a good humanitarian insurance/medical system should look like, but then it seems like absolutely zero of these people are contributing to such a thing in a country where we are absolutely free to do so without requiring a vote on it.
First, there must already be someone trying to organize such a non-profit healthcare system.. right? When we make these posts, can we not also include links to such organizations to join?
If this style of health insurance /care is so much better, then why aren't people participating in greater numbers, even at the margins?
Also, I have a question about this story. In this story, the dad has a highly preventable and low cost prevention treatment available. But then, they don't do that treatment, but instead wait until he gets high cost full blown cancer, then sell the house to pay for that. Ok I understand people don't know the right thing to do right off the bat. But why didn't they sell the house and pay for the low cost cancer prevention? They could keep some of the leftover money from the house sale and the dad would still be here?
My own family does this: a family member has a neck issue. Even with "good" insurance, there is often a denial/appeal/approve process for physical therapy. But in the interim, even when in serious pain, the person will not go and pay for physical therapy on their own because "insurance should be covering this", and they absolutely have money to be able to pay for it, well away from bankruptcy or selling a house, or even eating into their going out budget. It would likely just lower their savings rate for a month. It ruins their quality of life, sometimes for months, and often incurs other associated expenses. I question that this will even affect their long term quality of life if there are joint degradation issues, etc.
It's very weird to me. It's like people want to be forced by a government babysitter to pay into an insurance pool because then they don't have to make a choice. And at the same time, they are then mad at people who don't want to make that choice freely and not participate in the insurance pool, and want to force them to also. They don't care what that person's situation may be, but they say their own situation is unique, and that's why they are not doing it.
The trade-off is that everyone that had insurance lost insurance benefits, and the prices were jacked up.
A lot of folks who weren't covered got covered. But the cost was very high to others, there was very little advance warning on the resulting benefit cuts, the promises on 'keeping your doctor' and 'prices remaining steady' were both broken, brutally for some.
It's definitely nice that people benefited. Nobody talks about how the masses have paid for it, and how so many of us lost health care benefits as a result. It's a great benefit for 10-20% of people, at the cost to about 60%+ of us.
Obamacare isn’t the reason premiums went up. The reason is having a rent seeking middle man at all.
They realized that there was no political will with the Democratic leadership for a public option, so without that threat they no longer had to keep prices down.
Getting a group together one time doesn’t represent political will. There have been many times that if Democrats had good leadership they could have gotten this done.
When people talk about Democratic leadership, it’s not just elected officials that are being talked about. It’s the people who make the platform.
This should be an issue that is talked about at every election the same way Republicans talk about immigration, “the liberal woke agenda” and abortion.
But it’s not, you hear about it because a small faction like Sanders ages Warren scream it from the rooftops. But then they’re maligned as socialists for it.
It seems that maybe you’re the one being “disinformed.”
OK but the political will among Dems is there. Dems would 100% provide a public option if the votes were there, it's core to all their Healthcare proposals (except Bernie's).
The political will among the electorate, however isnt. Voters literally punished democrats for expanding Healthcare access and banning pre-exisitng conditions in 2010.
No idea how you've let the internet convince you that Democrats have moved to the right over the past 2 decades, that's crazy.
Democrats in the US are a center right party. The Overton window in the US has clearly moved right. If you don’t see that, then you don’t know what that means and you need you need to take a political science class.
This is happening because most of the major media organizations are owned and influenced by right wing billionaires, even those that identify as left.
The only way forward is to understand the problem. You can’t change Republicans. But you can identify the problems within the Democratic Party and fix them, thereby defeating these far right agendas. But the head in the sand methodology that you’re championing has been an utter failure these last 12 years or so.
Obamacare isn’t the reason premiums went up. The reason is having a rent seeking middle man at all.
Incorrect. The rent-seeking middle man was there beforehand.
My insurance coverage was dramatically cut, so were the 60% of the USA who had employer coverage, or me, who paid directly for my coverage as a small business owner. My wife lost her doctor, who couldn't take the new and deeply lower-benefit payments. Even after the cuts, my new plan was 250% higher. This was common across the board.
And we all just got used to it, because nobody wanted to talk about the costs. We just shoved it onto employers. Notice how people complain about wages not going up as high as inflation? This is where it went! Compensation used to be 5% benefits, now it's about 30% benefits.
We wanted a system where insurance was forced to accept you, and insurance charged you the same regardless of age and medical history. You have to pay for that some how, and those costs have been put on people with lower risks, and people who would buy insurance no matter what. I'm surprised that under-40 folks are raging about it, because they would have much, much cheaper insurance - the health care needs for young people are a tiny fraction of older folks.
It's an objectively true fact that the ACA slowed the rise of rates. You can look that up anywhere.
You aren't wrong, but you are neglecting the drop in benefits and rise in costs at the time of the changeover.
We were never going to reduce costs because republicans will always refuse to allow the public option.
You aren't wrong, but it's way beyond that. The ACA made sure that consumers never had control of their health insurance. Always employers. Can't believe that the 2008 Admin under Obama sold us out to our corporate overlords.
I'm not impressed with other things that are 'rights' that other people have to pay for,
Education comes to mind first - the poor are getting screwed with their 'right' to education.
Arbitrary economic demand is not a good policy - it's a plan that causes shortage, excessive prices, or inequality.
Housing became a right back decades, too, and housing prices have became more over-inflated. It's a good idea on the surface, but economics rules apply more than our own good intentions.
Oh I understand. You're against all public services including libraries, roads, public transport, national parks and so on. I mean, I don't use the library or roads on the other side of my city, why should I have to pay for it?
A society has to be very careful at making something a 'right'. The reasons are rooted in economics.
Rights to religion, freedom of speech, and so on don't require effort to produce. On the other hand, rights to goods and services require people and resources to 'produce those rights'.
There are trade-offs involved with diverting production and resources in some areas to producing a 'right' in other areas. In most cases, political leaders can hide this from the public, and the trade-offs are there, but aren't really noticed. Just like I'm here, noting that not all was 'just fine' with the ACA, and people are commenting on things that they don't remember about before the policy was put in place. They don't remember that deductibles were $3,000 and premiums were $350 a month (my policy in 2008!) because it's been years that the deductibles and premiums are much higher.
And the ACA did nothing to change that. They could have given consumers more power over their own insurance. That's why life insurance (which has a very similar payout model!) hasn't increased nearly as much as health insurance.
Instead, the ACA strengthened insurance company power, and corporate power as our employers. They get to deduct the insurance from their taxes, not us as consumers. Very disappointing.
What's hilarious is there is an entire portion of our country that has free, socialized medicine (military and veterans), yet theres an entire political faction that's too dumb to figure it out for everyone else.
The extra irony there is a majority of that portion votes R ensuring no one else will ever get that sort of healthcare, and they routinely complain about military/VA medical even though many of them have likely never had to deal with the nightmare that is health insurance.
Hard disagree on that last line especially. Insurance prices have definitely continued to skyrocket because the law gave insurers very little incentive to cut costs, but ACA is better than pre ACA. Most people who actually got sick had experiences closer to this story than not. When you have workplace healthcare, you lose it when you get cancer and can't work. Then, insurers could just say you have a preexisting condition and therefore not offer coverage. It was brutal.
Insurance prices have definitely continued to skyrocket because the law gave insurers very little incentive to cut costs,
Mandating that we give money to insurance companies is what I'm seeing there.
You force people to buy an industry's products, this is a natural economic response. We all want things better.
When you have workplace healthcare, you lose it when you get cancer and can't work.
Yes, and the ACA had the opportunity to empower consumers to control their own coverage. Instead it forced us to abandon that control to the government or the employer.
I didn't mention it before, but I think it's the worst part of the policy.
Are you really trying to argue that the story at the top, aka one of the most common experiences with the American healthcare system pre ACA, is better than the annoyances we face now? Your points are valid, and a big reason I believe in single payer universal coverage.
Are you really trying to argue that the story at the top, aka one of the most common experiences with the American healthcare system pre ACA, is better than the annoyances we face now?
My argument is that it's not that simple. You are looking at those who benefit, ignoring those who suffered.
How many people have died under because of their worse coverage than pre-ACA? How many lost medical care quality because of ACA? How many more, especially young people, are struggling because they are paying for over-priced insurance? The answer: tens of millions got small or medium sized cuts, in order to pay for a small portion of folks that benefited.
When so many people lost benefits, and prices rose so much, to say it was 'better for society' isn't easy. And, given the choice, where people could have actually had control over their insurance, instead of their corporate overlords, which would have solved the problem OP discusses? No, I don't think it was good policy. We could have solved it without giving insurance companies so much control. We could have solved it and given the masses tax benefits, instead of employers.
More people are covered with better coverage because the companies are required by law to do so. Where is this quality of care argument coming from? Yes, it is expensive. Yes, it gives way too much to the insurance industry on all fronts. Yes, it is better that what it replaced.
More people are covered with better coverage because the companies are required by law to do so.
That situation did not improve with the ACA.
The insurance companies raked in the money though, since we were forced to spend more on their services. Not everyone, especially if you are under 40, needs health insurance much at all - they need very basic coverage, and could afford to pay cash (if not for the convoluted insurance system).
Yes, it is expensive. Yes, it gives way too much to the insurance industry on all fronts. Yes, it is better that what it replaced.
I don't agree at all. The system was crappy before, and it was more crappy afterward. And given the opportunity we had, where young people could have bought cheap insurance, and older people could have had options, and none of us were handcuffed to our jobs because of health care? The ACA has performed terribly, by cementing in many problems instead of relieving them.
Literally none of that happened, you really need to stop being so gullible when it comes to republicans. It's why america has been held back from improving for decades now.
I was there. I was paying for my own insurance at the time, the ACA forced me to abandon control to my employer. Prices skyrocketed, benefits cratered. I was there.
My wife and I learned that "keep your own doctor" was a lie when she was miscarrying. There we were, wife bleeding, being told that our doctor would not take the updated plans. We couldn't find a doctor that did ultrasound in the office - now everything was multiple visits, multiple days. I was there.
You can talk policy all you want, and you can hold up all the nice stories of people that get benefits. They are nice stories. But others paid for those nice stories, so stop insulting them. I was there.
Did you ever question how things could be so much better without being paid for?
The difference is, smart people look up information and don't just believe whatever Donald Trump tells them to believe.
So, apparently you weren't there.
What I'm talking about was 15 years ago, when the ACA was first implemented. Donald Trump had nothing to do with it. It's not relevant, anyways, you're just manipulating. I'm far, far away from a Trump voter.
If you cared to know the truth, nothing is stopping you. The problem is, you don't.
I did care to know the truth. And I was much more deeply impacted by it, directly connected to paying my own health insurance, having to actively look at health care at the time. Nothing is stopping you from looking up other information, either. Why haven't you? Did you just accept the government narrative?
Have you done any research? As I fall in that category I thought the same until I googled a little bit. Seems insurance companies used to just up and change their policy to not cover upcoming outbreaks. With aca getting put in act the same insurance companies slyly raised the price of everything in the medical field $15 shot now cost $200 than $75 next week than $120 next month. Without regulation we are only going to get bad of the before and during the aca. Main examples people used are they used to change their insurance policy in the middle of a life saving procedure and inform hospital to stop work cause insurance won't pay anymore
With aca getting put in act the same insurance companies slyly raised the price of everything in the medical field $15 shot now cost $200 than $75 next week than $120 next month.
Yes. Prices skyrocketed. This is how the new benefits were paid for.
Main examples people used are they used to change their insurance policy in the middle of a life saving procedure and inform hospital to stop work cause insurance won't pay anymore
Yes, because the ACA made the problem of 'employer insurance' even worse. The ACA could have put control of health insurance in consumer hands, but it didn't. Instead, it was a profound giveaway of power to insurers.
Aca puts insurance companies under more scrutiny than it was before aca. My problem is every policy we put in we only keep the bad stuff. Insurance companies really don't care apparently neither does our government. With aca gone and nothing to replace it we will be stuck with how things are now but it'll be even worse. We live in a capitalist nation where every businesses goal is to get as much money as fast as possible
Aca puts insurance companies under more scrutiny than it was before aca.
ACA also gave insurance companies more power.
ACA could have put more power in consumer hands, but it didn't. Instead, we got more corporate power (employer-provided insurance) and less control.
My problem is every policy we put in we only keep the bad stuff. Insurance companies really don't care apparently neither does our government.
Right. The ACA requires that we buy insurance or get penalized. We have to put up with their shit. We also can't get our own insurance outside the bullshit system - so insurance companies don't have to compete.
With aca gone and nothing to replace it we will be stuck with how things are now but it'll be even worse.
View from my desk: A 100% Republican issue. You know what makes me happy? That we didn't elect for single payer/universal health. Because I don't want a system where Trump dictates my health care.
We live in a capitalist nation where every businesses goal is to get as much money as fast as possible
When insurance companies bought the regulations back in 2008, don't call this a 'capitalist' problem. Capitalism is supposed to 'make money by providing something to the public'. This ain't it. Just as welfare programs aren't socialism. Economists don't use these terms because they have become meaningless.
This is an oligarchy problem. It was a Republican or non-partisan-inspired idea in the early 2000's, the Democrats implemented it in 2008-09, and the Republicans have made it worse in the last few years.
Tit for tat we repeating ourself now. Can we agree that Healthcare needs to be cheaper and with plenty of options? Universal Free Healthcare for every us citizen would do this 👌🏾.
Tit for tat we repeating ourself now. Can we agree that Healthcare needs to be cheaper and with plenty of options?
Yes.
Universal Free Healthcare for every us citizen would do this 👌🏾.
Fuck, no. I don't want Republicans to ever touch my health care. I can't believe anyone would want a world where Trump could get within a country mile of that.
No, no, 1000 times no. Never. We need to erase that from our minds.
Universal health care doesn't mean private companies go away it just means everything we just commented as bad would go away. We'd be able to go inside of most hospitals get what we needed to get done and go home for free. If you want to go to a private Healthcare provider you can search and find it. Same way we can go to our favorite grocery get what we need and leave, and if you decide at any given moment that you don't like that store you just go to a new one. Also it's not just trump the government is a group that got together and agreed with the head.
Universal health care doesn't mean private companies go away it just means everything we just commented as bad would go away.
No. You can't just 'make everything bad go away and it's all free'.
We'd be able to go inside of most hospitals get what we needed to get done and go home for free.
Yeah. Unless you aren't in a wealthy area, and you're screwed. Like 'free education'. And then RFK is in charge of what hospitals can and can't provide? Fuck no, I'll say it again. It's nice on the surface, but when you look at the trade-offs, it's a bad idea.
In today's world, universal health care would be cutting vaccines for children right now, unless you are rich and can afford to pay for your own healthcare outside the system.
Same way we can go to our favorite grocery get what we need and leave, and if you decide at any given moment that you don't like that store you just go to a new one.
No. We choose our grocery store because we pay with our own money for grocery stores. When 'food is free', either you get government controlled food places, or luxury stores, because all normal stores were bankrupted when government competition forced them out of business with 'free' prices.
So, no, universal care is not like grocery stores.
Surprisingly it would be very similar to grocery stores, everybody needs to see a dr eventually. With not having to worry about money the consumer will worry about how they are cared for, with freedom to just leave competition to give better care to consumers well raise.
Extra info: Currently we give about 20% to not have free Healthcare. With only about 5% us people could cover free Healthcare in the USA. It will literally only benefit the us people. Currently and previously the us people have been footing a bill for policies that don't care about us at all and only care how much money they can get from us.
I don't know, I read something somewhere at some point that implied that democrats are giving free Healthcare to transgenders and illegals. I didn't take any time to figure out if this is true or not, but it sounds like it's true to my broken brain, so it probably is. The worst thing that could possibly happen is people that I hate getting stuff for free, so I'm going to keep voting for Republicans to make sure that my life is as difficult and painful as possible since some of that pain and difficulty will surely also apply to the minorities that I hate. Going bankrupt and dying decades early is a small price to pay to make sure the owners of insurance companies can make a little bit more profit.
Jesus hates transgender people, the gays, and brown people, so I vote any time I can to make sure their lives are bad.
Known minority hater Jesus.
Always remember to remind these assholes that when God came to Earth, he chose to incarnate as a brown middle eastern Jew.
You're asking too much from a population that thinks Jesus was a blonde, blue-eyed American.
Good old straight, white, American Jesus.
Clutching an AR-15 in all his imagery.
But simultaneously jacked and super lean.
— Bad Religion, American Jesus
And we know he spoke English, because that's the language the Bible is written in.
Don’t forget the poors. Republican Jesus especially hates the poors.
Jesus not only had two fathers but he was his own father. As non-traditional as you can get.
Personally, I heard Republicans loudly talk about taking away healthcare, but I also saw a meme about how the Democratic candidate had a weird laugh (no, I didn’t watch the event that screenshot came from), so frankly I can’t decide. That’s why I didn’t vote. (/s)
So many people sat out the election and got us into this mess. Again.
Unfortunately Obama didn't totally abolish private health insurance companies and completely rebuild healthcare in America unilaterally. So actually both sides are the same and there's no point in voting.
He had a whole 75 days of filibuster-proof majority, and he couldn’t even unilaterally upend capitalism worldwide!?! Truly my centrist position of abstaining from voting and letting everyone else decide the future of the country for me is an enlightened one.
And this is why we should have voted in Bernie, but instead they went with Hillary and we got Trump.
It is sad that I'm not 100% sure you are /s.
Its like chemo, but for society!
--The worst thing that could possibly happen is people that I hate getting stuff for free, so I'm going to keep voting for Republicans to make sure that my life is as difficult and painful as possible since some of that pain and difficulty will surely also apply to the minorities that I hate.
I get that you are caricaturizing, but do you really think that we can just say "all our taxes and government spending are good" ? Like, couldn't we possibly say that at least some of the people have some kind of valid point about there being different options than just massively taxing and centralizing power at the federal level in the hope that some small percentage might help all people in the country with healthcare?
I mean, even look at JUST the state of California. It's the 7th largest economy in the entire world, with an almost exclusive democrat majority in every branch of government. Even California won't just make a "government health plan". Why is that do YOU think?
I think it is because in order to do "government healthcare" you have to put price controls in place. In England, the DHS sets income rates for doctors and nurses. I think if California tried to do that, pretty much every doctor and nurse would just nope out to the next state over and only super shitty uncompetitive bad doctors would remain. In England, you can't just emigrate. You are captured. But in the US, healthworkers could just nope out. Or, without price controls, health premiums would rise considerably from present conditions, and a lot of working people would just nope out even faster than they are today with 11% income tax rates, and a death spiral would happen.
Again, this is my speculation. Why do YOU think a pure democrat state like CA isn't doing this? If they DID do it, and it worked, wouldn't they gather tons of businesses and citizens as this lower cost, better healthcare system attracted others from around the country? So why don't they lead the way as a shining example?
Bonus: voting either party also provisions Israel with this free healthcare, that you so desperately don’t want, with your hard earned money.
If you say so, but one party would give me inexpensive healthcare, the other party would give me no healthcare, and voting for a third party would give me what the second party would give me.
If the healthcare in another country doesn't change no matter how I vote, I'd go for the first option.
There are many words to describe health care in the US. Inexpensive is not one of them, no matter which party has been in turn.
If people hadn’t sat out the 2010 midterms and effectively made Obama into a lame duck for six years, we could have actually expanded on the foundation set by the ACA.
Am I really this old now that people don’t remember how bad it was?
Well that and many people just didn't experience this due to being lucky enough not to get an expensive illness.
Some of the most terrifying people are those unaware of how fortunate they are.
You’d need to be in your mid to late 40s if you were making real healthcare decisions in the pre Obamacare world.
Honestly you'd need to be 50s-60s to really have any experience with it. When you're in your 20s you can pretty much live off pizza and beer 6 days of the week and spend maybe 30 minutes exercising and still feel pretty fucking great. Healthcare reform wasn't even on my radar back then. I heard all the older folks bitching about it but I didn't really listen because I had to catch up on the latest Halo 2 developer leaks.
Well, if you're lucky you can. I graduated college in 2010 and when I was job hunting I was painfully conscious that I could not afford to be uninsured at any point thanks to chronic health issues. As long as I could get my prescriptions I was reasonably functional, but without them there was no way I could hold down a job. Extending the age that you could stay on your parents' insurance to 27 was a lifesaver. After 27, I was on the Medicare expansion program and again, lifesaver. I've actually gotten into several fights with older relatives and my parents' friends about ACA/Obamacare because they were against it.
Fights!? Did you punch them in the nose!? Speculative wishful thinking.
Seriously though. The U. S. spends an average of 16,000 a year for every man woman and child. It is remarkably on par with my useless ass health insurance premiums. It'll be good to know people are not only making 30% a year now but also that they will get paid when I am dead.
Surprisingly we are not dead last in the western world on the percentage of our GDP we spend on healthcare. We are about fifty if I remember correctly. Finland spends the most per GDP. Somewhere on r/dataisbeautiful there is a nice map showing percent of the GDP spent on healthcare of every country in the EU. I had to do some research on the U. S.
The one where they compare money spent per capita vs average life expectancy is pretty eye opening. We're spending 12x more than China to achieve the same outcome, which honestly tracks pretty well with how we do things around here.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-health-expenditure
That is freaking awesome. Much more useful then the chart I have. All of the spending with an actual reversal in life expetancy in the last few years. We are doing great. I don't see why profits in the healthcare industry should be tied to results. Nor should we hold people accountable for all the junk food they eat. We might start looking to closely at the fact that there are over a hundred names for high fructose corn sysrup. My favorite as of late is "natural sweetner". Ain't nothing natural about it.
In 1999 I had a coworker in her 20’s who’d had cancer 3 times and had to pick jobs based on who would cover her insurance. My karate dojo was also doing fundraisers for a 20-something student who was a self-employed contractor who’d been diagnosed with brain cancer.
I spent my 20s trying to stay alive when I couldn't be on my parent's insurance.
Not everyone in their 20s
it was horrible
the ER was my doctor and dentist. the ACA is the only reason I've had access to healthcare as an adult
In my mid 40s. Grew up mostly without health insurance because we couldn’t afford it, and my knee is permanently fucked because if “if you get a diagnosis now you’ll get denied health insurance because you’ll have a pre-existing condition” decisions pre-Obamacare.
I was really lucky my appendix waited to rupture until I was covered by my college’s heath insurance plan.
Can confirm.
38 here, we still experienced it plenty
I'm that age, though a smaller group of younger people might remember those days if they had parents with health issues.
My mom died in her 50s of a chronic disease a few years before Obamacare passed, she didn't have insurance. I didn't fully get it at the time, but she basically gave up on trying to access treatment because she didn't want to have to lose our house. I have always wondered if she'd had health insurance if she might have lived.
Mid 30’s here, was in my late teens into early 20’s at the time, and was affected by this and absolutely was making “real” healthcare decisions back then. I almost lost my life and my sanity (separately) because of it. If the ACA hadn’t been implemented when it had, I’d be dead several times over at this point.
I came to the US before Obama got elected from the UK and the concept of being dropped because preexisting, let alone th idea that you could die because you couldn’t afford life saving treatment was utterly alien to me.
More crazy were the right wing loonies I’d argue with who kept comparing it to car insurance as if the two were comparable in any way, shape or form.
If I didn’t have insurance on my car and it’s wrecked I could potentially either get a new one, car pool or rely on public transport. Can’t really do that with my body
A 30 year old today was 15 when the ACA passed. Everyone I know who is over 40 remembers but younger than around that it seems to mostly be people who had a seriously ill immediate family member when they were young or were seriously ill themselves.
Well I’m 40 lol
Yeah, I'm in your cohort and we're officially into at least "starting to get old" territory.
Plenty of people who weren't alive when 9/11 happened already have kids who will soon grow up with COVID and the black plague in the same bucket of "stuff that happened to old people a long time ago." That last part should even hit home for 20-somethings — time's a brutal motherfucker.
What's astounding is seeing firsthand just how much knowledge and understanding gets lost and has to be relearned the hard way. That feels easier to mitigate than ever with information being more accessible than ever, but if anything it seems to be getting worse as people just get cocooned into echo chambers.
My sentiments exactly
In my lower 30s, I don't know much about it, as I was still in high school and under parents insurance, who were a hospital admin and a senior partner at one of the big 4 tax firms. Insurance wasn't something we ever worried about
I'm 35 and remember the before times. There were arguments that the ACA wasn't important because everyone already had access to healthcare (ignoring the price tag attached to the access), the ACA would be a death panel, the wait times increases that would become years for a broken leg, and that our taxes would skyrocket and no one would have any money.
I was aware because I have a benign tumor on my arm that my doctor said to ignore unless it becomes a problem, because it would most likely be rejected and deemed as cosmetic since it wasn't hurting me in any way. Same thing for a tooth I lost in a running accident. Ignore it because it's cosmetic and won't be covered. Because of this, both would be insanely expensive.
I know people who have been able to get insane surgeries for things like an aneurism, but claimed about Obamacare wanting them to try various headache relief techniques first, ignoring that it's the insurance company doing it and they probably wouldn't have been able to get the procedure covered at all for substance abuse and other accidents in their teens and twenties.
That is what aggravates me the most when people say dems didn't do enough with ACA. It's like, What???? Do you even know what it was like pre ACA?
Both things are true.
The ACA was one of the most important pieces of legislation passed in my lifetime, maybe the most important.
It's also not enough. The US is still a place where people sometimes have to use gofundme to raise money for medical bills. And by "sometimes", I mean it's so common that more than a third of gofundme campaigns are for healthcare.
And maybe that was always going to happen, but at least part of why it didn't do enough is because Democrats didn't understand what they were up against. Obama kept offering concession after concession, trying to reach a compromise with Republicans so he could pass the bill with bipartisan support. Eventually he straight-up asked if there was anything he could do to get their votes, and the answer was no. So he shouldn't have compromised.
And it is still so good that people have entirely forgotten the horrors that were just normal before it was passed.
And Joe libermann singlehandedly killed the public option.
And the public blamed Obama.
People don’t even remember the blown Senate race for Ted Kennedy seat that made Lieberman matter.
There is a lot in the ACA that was specifically changed to try and court a small handful of Republican Senators - notably Olympia Snowe, who made countless edits and adjustments - but none of who ended up voting for the legislation. Much, much of what is wrong with the ACA is because we had centrist Democrats asking for specific stupid things, and Republicans existing.
Don't ignore the traitors inside the tent pissing into the tent. Fucking Joe Lieberman (Independent - Representing insurance companies based in Connecticut), who is hopefully now burning in hell, said that he would filibuster any ACA plan that had a public option. Not Medicare for all, just a public option. And the bill could not advance without his blessing.
Yeah, it's still not good. I have really really good insurance throughout my wife's job. It's expensive, relatively speaking. I also have cancer. I've got a little bit of a positive right now because I hit my yearly out of pocket maximum of $6k, so my prescriptions are free right now, and my co-pays are waived. We're just going to pretend I'm not also shitting my pants about getting dropped. I'm talking with my niece the other day while she was taking me to treatment, and she's like $6k would financially wreck her. We aren't even addressing the fact she couldn't afford this coverage in the first place.
Maybe if you have pretty good insurance and aren't sick and don't know anyone sick you can think the system is ok. But the second you need to use it, the house of cards collapses. I have it "good" and can still recognize that I'm incredibly fortunate in that one aspect.
I think that the other side is, voters failed the Democrats. They managed to push through large improvements with the ACA. Expecting the American people would see that policy and want even more, and therefore vote for Democrats.
That...did not happen. Dems got crushed in the midterms and set us on the road to where we are. So, apparently, the median voter did not like that very much and voted accordingly.
Whether they were mad thanks to Fox News propaganda or mad because the ACA didn't do enough, the end result is the same.
I mean, yes. It wasn’t enough. It was just the best thing that they could get passed with conservatives screaming socialism and “death panels”.
Also not everyone is American here, I had no idea
As a non-American, I read these stories in disbelief. The USA system seemed so damn barbaric. Even under the ACA, it didn't seem that much better.
It isn't. But the big bonuses are not being denied for pre-existing conditions and free/cheap annual and preventative screenings.
I’m just so fucking ashamed of my country more and more often nowadays ngl. Wealthiest nation in history and you read stories like OP’s and it makes me so fucking angry that a good chunk of the country genuinely wants that reality again.
I'm old enough to remember before it was that bad. The original HMOs were good. And before that it was 80/20 health care provided by your employer. Then came the for-profit healthcare laws under Reagan and our country went to shit.
The people who remember are on Medicare and don't care.
no, although ops story of "we stopped paying for insurance for a few months" could be equally true now and have the exact same outcome now.
nope. they can't stop you from getting reinsured now like they could then.
if you did this then and had issues during that break you'd never be able to get insurance again. pre existing conditions
What’s it like having the confidence to just say shit even though it’s obviously not true?
Just the reality of how insurance companies were completely screwing people with “pre-existing conditions” should be enough to make you a fan of the ACA. And I put quotes around pre-existing conditions because insurance companies had a huge financial motivation to make anything they could fall under that umbrella.
Being female could and was considered to be a pre-existing condition. Not even kidding.
I couldn’t get insurance because I’d had abnormal pap results.
Pre ACA, my dad had some dark stools, mentioned it to his doc who was concerned since his mom had died of colon cancer. Insurance approved an early colonoscopy at age 40. Back then the recommendation was about age 50. Colonoscopy went well; they found no issues.
Two years later he got a new job, and his premiums with the new insurance company were increased by 20% because they found out he had a colonoscopy in the past. Not that he had polyps, or cancer or really anything; nope simply because he had a colonoscopy and had a parent who died from colon cancer.
He was basically financially punished for taking care of his own health and by having an ancestor with a type of cancer that is only passed down via genetics about 10% of the time.
With DNA mapping now they would lump any genetic issue into preexisting conditions. Oh, you are predisposed to Alzheimer's, no insurance for you.
It’s something you would think would unify all Americans, liberal and conservative. Like it’s not perfect but it’s still a damn good firewall against greedy evil corporations stealing more money from your pocket but nooooo, it’s communism/marxism/black president man bad for a disturbing chunk of the population.
Let's not forget 'recission'. That was basically that if you cost too much money, the health plan could just terminate on you and you're SOL.
So if you had aggressive cancer or some lifelong debilitating illness, your insurance company could just drop you like a hot potato.
Before the ACA, I couldn't get insurance on my own. If I worked for someone else, I could, but on my own, I was out of luck, and I was self employed beginning in 2011. I have a genetic bone disorder. Fucking born with a preexisting condition. I was making good money. I could afford insurance. No one would insure me. I tried, several times, and every time, I was declined coverage.
After the ACA was enacted, I got insurance because they could no longer turn me down for having a preexisting condition. But even then, the first time I filed a claim, about 6 months after getting coverage, for a routine annual checkup, they tried to rescind my coverage for incorrect statements on my original application. And that's when another little publicized provision of the ACA kicked in. They can only cancel your coverage for incorrect information on your application if those misstatements were made knowingly and with an intent to mislead the insurance company. They can't just rescind your coverage on a technicality. I was able to show that the mistakes on my application were innocent (and in one case, wasn't even a mistake) errors and got my coverage reinstated.
The ACA is not perfect. Some kind of single payer/Medicare-for-all program would be much better, but the ACA was better than what we had. It was a step in the right direction.
Back in 2009 I was working as a freelancer and my state mandated you have health insurance so I bought it on my own. I was a healthy 29 year old with zero medical issues, basically just needed insurance in case any accidents happened. I had to mail the insurance company my medical history and they told me while they waited for that info they would charge me the highest rate and then once they figured out my rate based on my age/history would reimburse me. The highest rate was like $800 a month - that was like half of what o made each month. Then the insurance company messed up and it took them 2 months to review my files, so I paid $1600 for 2 months of insurance. Then they gave me my new rate and lowered my payment by like half, and I asked for my reimbursement and they said “o sorry our policy just changed and we don’t offer reimbursements anymore, we’ll take a percentage of what overpaid off your bill each month”. I was counting on that money to pay my bills and live.
Really hated dealing with purchasing insurance and eventually got a full time job that provided benefits. I’d love to work as a freelancer and maybe start my own business, but dread dealing with insurance so I wouldn’t do it just because of that. Pretty shitty that insurance keeps me locked into working a job just for the insurance.
Universal Health Care is very much pro-business. So much easier to start a new innovative company if insurance is not a cost/risk factor.
I mentioned this in a different post earlier today. No matter how big a company is they do NOT want to be in the insurance business. It's a huge expensive distraction from their actually business.
I got hurt one night playing drunk basketball.
I was told I needed an MRI to judge the level of injury.
I went to the hospital to get the MRI and gave them my credit card. They came back and told me the charge had been declined by my bank.
On the phone with my bank, in the waiting room of the hospital, I asked why the charge had been declined. They told me it was so high that it flagged their fraud alert system.
I spent a few years paying off that MRI.
Has anyone seen this little movie that came out a while ago and had like ten sequels called Saw? Ya, that first one was before Obamacare. A literal goddamn horror franchise was spawned from the American healthcare system before Obama.
Yup, that's how "real" insurance works. If the system knows that it will have to spend a ton of money on you, the fair price for insurance is even more money. The point is reducing risk, not saving money.
If you want the system to cover that cost for a reasonable price, you need to use money from healthy people. And that drives up the cost for those healthy people. Instead of just paying for their own probably costs, they need to also cover the guaranteed costs of people with pre-existing conditions. That will naturally tend to make insurance seem like less of a good deal for them, and so more and more people will simply do without health insurance.
Instead, what you need is a system to force everyone to pay in, so that the system can then pay out for whoever needs it. Any system like this is effectively going to be a single payer system. However, because we are allergic to the words "single payer", we insist on keeping health insurance companies in the loop and working through them, and the end result is the system that we all know and (don't) love.
My mom has seizures, mom's job went overseas, moms new job didn't offer insurance.
Mom had to pay out of pocket for seizure medicine or mom dies.
Breaking Bad. Man resorts to cooking and selling meth to afford paying for cancer treatment. The entire premise literally doesn’t even work in other countries.
Common misconception. Walter White had insurance through the school job that he had that covered cancer treatments, he started selling meth in order to pay for experimental additional treatments.
Was that the premise? I remember thinking the whole thing was weird because a teacher even in a poor state like NM is going to have decent health insurance, even pre-ACA.
The healthcare I get through my work offers not only reduced cost and free preventative care options, they also offer a financial incentive ($500) if you do regular annual physicals/checkups.
Preventative care costs SO MUCH LESS than not doing it, which is why you'd question why an insurer wouldn't want you to do that.
...except before the ACA mandate that insurers HAVE to carry you, they could just not carry you as soon as they think they might have to start paying out more than you're paying them. They'll happily TAKE your money, and when it comes time to pay out, they pay people whose entire job it is to justify why they should pay as little as possible.
Insurers love a customer who pays and never uses the plan. They hate a customer who does use it, and, when you cross a certain affordability threshold, if they can't drop you, you dying is a best case scenario for them.
And what’s really crazy is that the current improved system still sucks ass. Oh you lost your job? Welp, there goes your insurance, unless you want to take on more than a car payment to get a high deductible plan. Pretty cool considering spending that kind of money when you’re out of work is pretty much a non-starter for most.
Oh you got injured or had a heart issue where you needed to be rushed to a hospital? I know you were doing the right thing by having insurance, but sorry, this hospital doesn’t take that insurance, so now you’re still totally fucked.
The fact that we don’t have universal healthcare in this country is monstrous. We are the richest country on the god damn planet. It is an absolute moral failing of this country for anyone to have forgo healthcare due to lack of insurance or lack of money with insurance.
"Pre-existing condition" was anything the health insurance company decided you could have detected while not being insured.
Their decision mechanism was basically "find any excuse" not actually the official goal of not having insurance and then getting it once you are diagnosed.
Eliminating the "pre-existing conditions" restriction was probably the biggest benefit to the ACA, but it isn't talked about nearly enough. I have kids with special needs, and when I got laid off from my job prior to the ACA, the amount of stress it put my family under over the fear of an insurance gap was insane. With me on the job hunt we couldn't afford COBRA, so my then wife had to change to full-time (against doctor's advice) while pregnant so she could become eligible for her insurance plan. That plan was expensive and didn't cover any of our normal doctors, but we had to pay for it just so that we still had insurance without a gap before I was eligible at the new job.
This doesn't even hit all of the bad things that could happen to you because of the preexisting condition loophole. Some health insurers would use them as an excuse to retroactively deny all the service they had provided to you if they decided later that you had a pre-existing condition that you didn't disclose to their satisfaction when you signed up. That would mean they would bill you for everything they had ever paid on your behalf.
I have a pre-existing condition since birth, and I lived in constant fear of that happening to me arbitrarily. I never wanted to go to the doctor for anything for years, even though I was covered.
I'm really lucky that I only had to go without insurance for 3 months once, just before Obamacare took effect. My doctor was really annoyed that I stopped getting Remicaid infusions for Crohn's, but it was $50,000 each.
You were stuck getting insurance from your employer if they offered it. You were denied access to affordable means of healthcare if you had a preexisting condition. Those 2 provisions are the only thing the ACA really did but they are super important because this meant:
1: you were essentially bound to your job for the insurance and if you moved, insurance companies who knows what you would have covered
2: many people working werent able to access insurance for a variety of reasons.
3: denial of care could occur due to lack of insurance.
I am so sorry about your Dad.
Yes, ACA was better in some ways than the existing system.
But now that it exists it creates a huge sunk cost in our collective minds to throw it away and implement a truly equal system.
And I want to call out something VERY political here.
Part of that cost is Obama and race. Obama was an inspiration not just to me and others but a generation of kids who saw their first minority President.
Part of Obama's legacy may be the Affordable Care Act. But it doesn't have to be the primary component.
Remember how it felt hearing Obama talk elegantly about politics and equality and a future vision for America?
There is a very real public health and mental health cost to our current political climate. We shouldn't have to be strong all the time.
Obama showed us another world was possible.
I'm sure some political operatives somewhere think it's clever bringing up that this could be seen as a nasty "Well spoken black man" trope.
It's not. I'm willing to fight through that bullshit to the point his speeches literally fucking made us healthier. And I hope those political hacks enjoy the real government healthcare and retirement they enjoy.
Goddammit, I had other values.
Note: Edited to spell correct mental.
God damn
Purrfection captured on camera.
One thing I don't get: it seems like there are sooooooo many people who seem to say/recognize what a good humanitarian insurance/medical system should look like, but then it seems like absolutely zero of these people are contributing to such a thing in a country where we are absolutely free to do so without requiring a vote on it.
First, there must already be someone trying to organize such a non-profit healthcare system.. right? When we make these posts, can we not also include links to such organizations to join?
Example: https://info.libertyhealthshare.org/ppc/changing-healthcare . Note this is a christian org, I'm not religious and I don't particularly endorse this, its just an example of something that exists from a quick google search.
If this style of health insurance /care is so much better, then why aren't people participating in greater numbers, even at the margins?
Also, I have a question about this story. In this story, the dad has a highly preventable and low cost prevention treatment available. But then, they don't do that treatment, but instead wait until he gets high cost full blown cancer, then sell the house to pay for that. Ok I understand people don't know the right thing to do right off the bat. But why didn't they sell the house and pay for the low cost cancer prevention? They could keep some of the leftover money from the house sale and the dad would still be here?
My own family does this: a family member has a neck issue. Even with "good" insurance, there is often a denial/appeal/approve process for physical therapy. But in the interim, even when in serious pain, the person will not go and pay for physical therapy on their own because "insurance should be covering this", and they absolutely have money to be able to pay for it, well away from bankruptcy or selling a house, or even eating into their going out budget. It would likely just lower their savings rate for a month. It ruins their quality of life, sometimes for months, and often incurs other associated expenses. I question that this will even affect their long term quality of life if there are joint degradation issues, etc.
It's very weird to me. It's like people want to be forced by a government babysitter to pay into an insurance pool because then they don't have to make a choice. And at the same time, they are then mad at people who don't want to make that choice freely and not participate in the insurance pool, and want to force them to also. They don't care what that person's situation may be, but they say their own situation is unique, and that's why they are not doing it.
It seems kind of insane.
The trade-off is that everyone that had insurance lost insurance benefits, and the prices were jacked up.
A lot of folks who weren't covered got covered. But the cost was very high to others, there was very little advance warning on the resulting benefit cuts, the promises on 'keeping your doctor' and 'prices remaining steady' were both broken, brutally for some.
It's definitely nice that people benefited. Nobody talks about how the masses have paid for it, and how so many of us lost health care benefits as a result. It's a great benefit for 10-20% of people, at the cost to about 60%+ of us.
Obamacare isn’t the reason premiums went up. The reason is having a rent seeking middle man at all.
They realized that there was no political will with the Democratic leadership for a public option, so without that threat they no longer had to keep prices down.
We literally had 58 votes for it 15 years ago. You've been just as misled by disinformation as the person you're replying to, all for the same goal.
Getting a group together one time doesn’t represent political will. There have been many times that if Democrats had good leadership they could have gotten this done.
When people talk about Democratic leadership, it’s not just elected officials that are being talked about. It’s the people who make the platform.
This should be an issue that is talked about at every election the same way Republicans talk about immigration, “the liberal woke agenda” and abortion.
But it’s not, you hear about it because a small faction like Sanders ages Warren scream it from the rooftops. But then they’re maligned as socialists for it.
It seems that maybe you’re the one being “disinformed.”
OK but the political will among Dems is there. Dems would 100% provide a public option if the votes were there, it's core to all their Healthcare proposals (except Bernie's).
The political will among the electorate, however isnt. Voters literally punished democrats for expanding Healthcare access and banning pre-exisitng conditions in 2010.
No idea how you've let the internet convince you that Democrats have moved to the right over the past 2 decades, that's crazy.
Democrats in the US are a center right party. The Overton window in the US has clearly moved right. If you don’t see that, then you don’t know what that means and you need you need to take a political science class.
This is happening because most of the major media organizations are owned and influenced by right wing billionaires, even those that identify as left.
OK so you're going to continue with the false narratives spread online to help elect trump, I guess there is no capacity for learning here.
The only way forward is to understand the problem. You can’t change Republicans. But you can identify the problems within the Democratic Party and fix them, thereby defeating these far right agendas. But the head in the sand methodology that you’re championing has been an utter failure these last 12 years or so.
Incorrect. The rent-seeking middle man was there beforehand.
My insurance coverage was dramatically cut, so were the 60% of the USA who had employer coverage, or me, who paid directly for my coverage as a small business owner. My wife lost her doctor, who couldn't take the new and deeply lower-benefit payments. Even after the cuts, my new plan was 250% higher. This was common across the board.
And we all just got used to it, because nobody wanted to talk about the costs. We just shoved it onto employers. Notice how people complain about wages not going up as high as inflation? This is where it went! Compensation used to be 5% benefits, now it's about 30% benefits.
We wanted a system where insurance was forced to accept you, and insurance charged you the same regardless of age and medical history. You have to pay for that some how, and those costs have been put on people with lower risks, and people who would buy insurance no matter what. I'm surprised that under-40 folks are raging about it, because they would have much, much cheaper insurance - the health care needs for young people are a tiny fraction of older folks.
It's an objectively true fact that the ACA slowed the rise of rates. You can look that up anywhere.
We were never going to reduce costs because republicans will always refuse to allow the public option.
You aren't wrong, but you are neglecting the drop in benefits and rise in costs at the time of the changeover.
You aren't wrong, but it's way beyond that. The ACA made sure that consumers never had control of their health insurance. Always employers. Can't believe that the 2008 Admin under Obama sold us out to our corporate overlords.
Healthcare should be a human right, not a benefit of employment
I'm not impressed with other things that are 'rights' that other people have to pay for,
Education comes to mind first - the poor are getting screwed with their 'right' to education.
Arbitrary economic demand is not a good policy - it's a plan that causes shortage, excessive prices, or inequality.
Housing became a right back decades, too, and housing prices have became more over-inflated. It's a good idea on the surface, but economics rules apply more than our own good intentions.
Oh I understand. You're against all public services including libraries, roads, public transport, national parks and so on. I mean, I don't use the library or roads on the other side of my city, why should I have to pay for it?
No. You don't understand.
A society has to be very careful at making something a 'right'. The reasons are rooted in economics.
Rights to religion, freedom of speech, and so on don't require effort to produce. On the other hand, rights to goods and services require people and resources to 'produce those rights'.
There are trade-offs involved with diverting production and resources in some areas to producing a 'right' in other areas. In most cases, political leaders can hide this from the public, and the trade-offs are there, but aren't really noticed. Just like I'm here, noting that not all was 'just fine' with the ACA, and people are commenting on things that they don't remember about before the policy was put in place. They don't remember that deductibles were $3,000 and premiums were $350 a month (my policy in 2008!) because it's been years that the deductibles and premiums are much higher.
Did you skip over the second part of my comment?
And the ACA did nothing to change that. They could have given consumers more power over their own insurance. That's why life insurance (which has a very similar payout model!) hasn't increased nearly as much as health insurance.
Instead, the ACA strengthened insurance company power, and corporate power as our employers. They get to deduct the insurance from their taxes, not us as consumers. Very disappointing.
If this is a bad choice, why have most countries chosen to care for their sick?
What's hilarious is there is an entire portion of our country that has free, socialized medicine (military and veterans), yet theres an entire political faction that's too dumb to figure it out for everyone else.
The extra irony there is a majority of that portion votes R ensuring no one else will ever get that sort of healthcare, and they routinely complain about military/VA medical even though many of them have likely never had to deal with the nightmare that is health insurance.
Hard disagree on that last line especially. Insurance prices have definitely continued to skyrocket because the law gave insurers very little incentive to cut costs, but ACA is better than pre ACA. Most people who actually got sick had experiences closer to this story than not. When you have workplace healthcare, you lose it when you get cancer and can't work. Then, insurers could just say you have a preexisting condition and therefore not offer coverage. It was brutal.
Mandating that we give money to insurance companies is what I'm seeing there.
You force people to buy an industry's products, this is a natural economic response. We all want things better.
Yes, and the ACA had the opportunity to empower consumers to control their own coverage. Instead it forced us to abandon that control to the government or the employer.
I didn't mention it before, but I think it's the worst part of the policy.
Are you really trying to argue that the story at the top, aka one of the most common experiences with the American healthcare system pre ACA, is better than the annoyances we face now? Your points are valid, and a big reason I believe in single payer universal coverage.
My argument is that it's not that simple. You are looking at those who benefit, ignoring those who suffered.
How many people have died under because of their worse coverage than pre-ACA? How many lost medical care quality because of ACA? How many more, especially young people, are struggling because they are paying for over-priced insurance? The answer: tens of millions got small or medium sized cuts, in order to pay for a small portion of folks that benefited.
When so many people lost benefits, and prices rose so much, to say it was 'better for society' isn't easy. And, given the choice, where people could have actually had control over their insurance, instead of their corporate overlords, which would have solved the problem OP discusses? No, I don't think it was good policy. We could have solved it without giving insurance companies so much control. We could have solved it and given the masses tax benefits, instead of employers.
More people are covered with better coverage because the companies are required by law to do so. Where is this quality of care argument coming from? Yes, it is expensive. Yes, it gives way too much to the insurance industry on all fronts. Yes, it is better that what it replaced.
That situation did not improve with the ACA.
The insurance companies raked in the money though, since we were forced to spend more on their services. Not everyone, especially if you are under 40, needs health insurance much at all - they need very basic coverage, and could afford to pay cash (if not for the convoluted insurance system).
I don't agree at all. The system was crappy before, and it was more crappy afterward. And given the opportunity we had, where young people could have bought cheap insurance, and older people could have had options, and none of us were handcuffed to our jobs because of health care? The ACA has performed terribly, by cementing in many problems instead of relieving them.
Literally none of that happened, you really need to stop being so gullible when it comes to republicans. It's why america has been held back from improving for decades now.
but they OWNED a SMALL BUSINESS!!!!11!
I was there. I was paying for my own insurance at the time, the ACA forced me to abandon control to my employer. Prices skyrocketed, benefits cratered. I was there.
My wife and I learned that "keep your own doctor" was a lie when she was miscarrying. There we were, wife bleeding, being told that our doctor would not take the updated plans. We couldn't find a doctor that did ultrasound in the office - now everything was multiple visits, multiple days. I was there.
You can talk policy all you want, and you can hold up all the nice stories of people that get benefits. They are nice stories. But others paid for those nice stories, so stop insulting them. I was there.
Did you ever question how things could be so much better without being paid for?
We were all there bud. The difference is, smart people look up information and don't just believe whatever Donald Trump tells them to believe.
If you cared to know the truth, nothing is stopping you. The problem is, you don't.
So, apparently you weren't there.
What I'm talking about was 15 years ago, when the ACA was first implemented. Donald Trump had nothing to do with it. It's not relevant, anyways, you're just manipulating. I'm far, far away from a Trump voter.
I did care to know the truth. And I was much more deeply impacted by it, directly connected to paying my own health insurance, having to actively look at health care at the time. Nothing is stopping you from looking up other information, either. Why haven't you? Did you just accept the government narrative?
Have you done any research? As I fall in that category I thought the same until I googled a little bit. Seems insurance companies used to just up and change their policy to not cover upcoming outbreaks. With aca getting put in act the same insurance companies slyly raised the price of everything in the medical field $15 shot now cost $200 than $75 next week than $120 next month. Without regulation we are only going to get bad of the before and during the aca. Main examples people used are they used to change their insurance policy in the middle of a life saving procedure and inform hospital to stop work cause insurance won't pay anymore
It's been ten years, but yes.
Yes. Prices skyrocketed. This is how the new benefits were paid for.
Yes, because the ACA made the problem of 'employer insurance' even worse. The ACA could have put control of health insurance in consumer hands, but it didn't. Instead, it was a profound giveaway of power to insurers.
Aca puts insurance companies under more scrutiny than it was before aca. My problem is every policy we put in we only keep the bad stuff. Insurance companies really don't care apparently neither does our government. With aca gone and nothing to replace it we will be stuck with how things are now but it'll be even worse. We live in a capitalist nation where every businesses goal is to get as much money as fast as possible
ACA also gave insurance companies more power.
ACA could have put more power in consumer hands, but it didn't. Instead, we got more corporate power (employer-provided insurance) and less control.
Right. The ACA requires that we buy insurance or get penalized. We have to put up with their shit. We also can't get our own insurance outside the bullshit system - so insurance companies don't have to compete.
View from my desk: A 100% Republican issue. You know what makes me happy? That we didn't elect for single payer/universal health. Because I don't want a system where Trump dictates my health care.
When insurance companies bought the regulations back in 2008, don't call this a 'capitalist' problem. Capitalism is supposed to 'make money by providing something to the public'. This ain't it. Just as welfare programs aren't socialism. Economists don't use these terms because they have become meaningless.
This is an oligarchy problem. It was a Republican or non-partisan-inspired idea in the early 2000's, the Democrats implemented it in 2008-09, and the Republicans have made it worse in the last few years.
Tit for tat we repeating ourself now. Can we agree that Healthcare needs to be cheaper and with plenty of options? Universal Free Healthcare for every us citizen would do this 👌🏾.
Yes.
Fuck, no. I don't want Republicans to ever touch my health care. I can't believe anyone would want a world where Trump could get within a country mile of that.
No, no, 1000 times no. Never. We need to erase that from our minds.
Universal health care doesn't mean private companies go away it just means everything we just commented as bad would go away. We'd be able to go inside of most hospitals get what we needed to get done and go home for free. If you want to go to a private Healthcare provider you can search and find it. Same way we can go to our favorite grocery get what we need and leave, and if you decide at any given moment that you don't like that store you just go to a new one. Also it's not just trump the government is a group that got together and agreed with the head.
No. You can't just 'make everything bad go away and it's all free'.
Yeah. Unless you aren't in a wealthy area, and you're screwed. Like 'free education'. And then RFK is in charge of what hospitals can and can't provide? Fuck no, I'll say it again. It's nice on the surface, but when you look at the trade-offs, it's a bad idea.
In today's world, universal health care would be cutting vaccines for children right now, unless you are rich and can afford to pay for your own healthcare outside the system.
No. We choose our grocery store because we pay with our own money for grocery stores. When 'food is free', either you get government controlled food places, or luxury stores, because all normal stores were bankrupted when government competition forced them out of business with 'free' prices.
So, no, universal care is not like grocery stores.
Surprisingly it would be very similar to grocery stores, everybody needs to see a dr eventually. With not having to worry about money the consumer will worry about how they are cared for, with freedom to just leave competition to give better care to consumers well raise. Extra info: Currently we give about 20% to not have free Healthcare. With only about 5% us people could cover free Healthcare in the USA. It will literally only benefit the us people. Currently and previously the us people have been footing a bill for policies that don't care about us at all and only care how much money they can get from us.