Sir Xsarus wrote:
So you think the ACA has been a complete disaster? Interesting.
Yes. Just looking at my own health care plan (which was quite nice before the ACA passed), the deductible doubled, the copays doubled, and the max contribution before the insurance takes up the rest doubled (the "hole in the middle" actually got bigger). Of course, that's just my insurance based on the fact sheet that I got last year about all the changes that were made in response to the passage of ACA. So maybe anecdotal. But then, there's a hell of a lot of such anecdotes. Every single person I know who is employed and had insurance from their employer previously (and this includes people in both the private and public sectors) saw their out of pocket health care insurance costs increase.
I'm not even sure how much it helped those who previously didn't have health insurance. The numbers are kinda iffy on that, given that most of them are still under exemption clauses created in order to avoid some serious problems in the health care law itself. So either no benefit, or a promised benefit, which may or may not actually come. And that's not counting the millions who will (once this part of the law goes into effect) find themselves being required to purchase health insurance that they still can't afford.
The law basically created mandates that couldn't be paid for, presumably under the intention that when those mandates finally went into effect and negatively impacted a boat load of people, they'd cover that gap with yet more spending for public health care pools (ie: expand medicare to subsidize the mandated health care costs). There are a host of problems with this as well though, problems which we haven't even run into yet (but are looming).
So far, the only positive effect the ACA has had was that it closed some gaps with regard to low income earners who previously fell out of the medicaid coverage levels, but could not afford (or were not provided by their employers) health insurance. But it's still unclear how many that's really helped, given that so far it looks like an equal number of people (possibly more) who previously did have health insurance lost it because of the increased costs of meeting the ACA mandates. So we basically made the initial problem (millions of Americans who did not have health insurance, but were not covered by medicaid) worse. We could have simply closed those gaps while keeping the existing system intact, and done much better. Or maybe tried the whole "let insurance companies compete across state lines" idea, and maybe made it possible for more of those people to find health coverage plans that they could afford (gasp! A market solution? That's crazy talk!). The method used was like smashing a fly with a wrecking ball.
The negatives of the ACA vastly outweigh the incredibly tiny positives. As I said, most of the actual good things about the ACA were already on the table from the outset (see the GOP alternatives above). Protection for pre-existing conditions, and closing of coverage gaps, for example. What the ACA did was hold the relatively simple and obtainable solutions hostage in the name of creating a massive government power grab into our health industry. And yes, that has been a "complete disaster". Even not considering the terrible roll out problems, there are a host of legal problems with the law that have still not been resolved, and a host of funding issues that are just waiting to bite us because the law was basically written with a "kick the cost can down the road" approach from day one.
How would you describe it? Did your health care costs go up or down? It's just funny because everyone points to all the sources predicting these wonderful positive results of the ACA, but the reality doesn't seem to be remotely matching that. It's actually matching quite well with exactly the concerns the Right raised back in 2009 when opposing passage of the law in the first place. But hey! What did we know. I mean, we only predicted that employers would drop their plans and dump people on the exchanges. And we only predicted that those who didn't do that would shift to new plans with cost points that would hurt the insured. And that's just the low hanging fruit of obvious predictions that came completely true. If I were to dig into the issue, I could probably find a half dozen more.
And again, lest we forget, we're still operating under a set of very questionable (from a legal standpoint) exemptions designed to make it so the negative effects don't hit as many of the "common people". So if you're joe average low income earner, you haven't had the negatives hit you yet. The folks earning mid or higher wages are the only ones who've seen their insurance costs skyrocket since the ACA came into effect. But just wait until folks earning minimum wage are told that they must go out and purchase health insurance because that's what the mandate requires of them. And just wait until the cost limits disappear and they're suddenly faced with several thousand dollars a year in costs that they didn't have before. Then we can start asking the working poor how they think the ACA has helped them.
