Comment by yellowapple | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yellowapple | Hacker News Reader

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Not at all. ObamaCare requires every citizen to enroll in an insurance plan. If your employer doesn't offer one, then you're stuck with going through your state's exchange. Here in California, the available plans either have outrageous monthly costs or outrageous deductibles.

There's an income tax penalty for each month you're uninsured, which eats into your tax returns. Last I checked, this penalty is still cheaper than actually paying for insurance.

Congress basically looked at the healthcare systems in Canada and Europe, looked at the existing healthcare system, took all the worst parts of both, and squished them together to make ObamaCare. Conservatives hate it because it's big government in action. Liberals hate it because it does absolutely nothing to fix the undue burden on individuals to pay for their own healthcare. It's a lose-lose proposition.

This. There's no actual incentive to cover yourself if you didn't like any of the options in the "marketplace", it's just that now you're taxed heavily for making that decision (and still not covered). While it may have helped force insurance companies to accept patients they wouldn't have otherwise, it also regressively taxed Americans who were already underserved by the market. "Too poor for health insurance? Here, have a kick in the teeth. You'll forget all about that back pain."

Wow... and here's me thinking my own government (UK) was useless.

So basically, the US government system doesn't care about its populous at all, regardless who sits in the big chair?

Now you're getting it.

Obamacare also lets people under 26 stay on their parents health insurance longer, prevents insurance companies from dropping people from coverage or denying them coverage in the first case because of illness (yes, this used to be a thing in america, if you got cancer or some other disease that takes years of very expensive treatment to deal with your insurance company could just say "nah we're not paying for that" and drop you like a rock) and made health insurance affordable for millions of people who previously could not get it.

the affordable care act is far from perfect, but it's also not useless in any sense, and it needs to be modified not repealed. And yes I'm partially saying that because I and my brother will both lose and not be able to afford health insurance if it is repealed. I'm also saying that because I strongly belief in the benefits that have come out of the bill, even at the cost of some major downsides.

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