Hacker News Reader

Comment by solosoyokaze | Hacker News Reader

Certainly they wouldn't support M4A, but it's definitely the Democrats that work to pass laws that increase the cost of healthcare. Prices have been spiraling out of control since the ACA.

View on HN

As someone who has been purchasing individual insurance since 2003, prices were spiraling out of control long before the ACA. My premium went up every single year outside the first couple years the ACA was in effect where they went down a little bit.

While it was certainly going up pre-ACA, if your costs went down due to the ACA then your case was extremely unusual. Costs are way up since it was enacted:

https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-spe...

The graph of "how much does healthcare cost over time" on the link that you provided yourself to prove that costs have been "spiraling out of control" has had the same steepness since 1990. If it's spiraling out of control because of the ACA, then it's also spiraling out of control because of the Gulf War. At least now people with pre-existing conditions can be covered. We're not even done dealing with a pandemic that has infected 31 million people. Imagine a world where none of those people could ever get healthcare in the future because Covid-19 is a pre-existing condition.

The ACA forced people into this system with the individual mandate. I gave the insurance industry zero dollars until the ACA forced me to send them almost a thousand dollars a month. Before the ACA you could go to the doctor and just pay out of pocket. If you’re healthy this was a much more cost effective solution.

So not only did the ACA continue the increase in healthcare costs, it forced more people to pay for something they didn’t even need.

It is very easy to win an argument if you change what it is you're arguing in the middle of a discussion. You said that "Prices have been spiraling out of control". I said that the rate of price increases in healthcare in the United States have been relatively constant. Now, your response is that you, the commenter, used to pay nothing, and now you pay a lot more. Did you know that you are not the entire United States? Did you know that your experience is not a representative sample of all citizens of the United States? Did you decide to selectively ignore data that you provided, on your own, to prove a point that is only true for a fraction of people?

I posted data that shows that price is indeed spiraling out of control so it’s not just my personal experience. My situation isn’t that unique. Why do you think they created the individual mandate? To force people who didn’t want or need insurance to pay for it. Zero to non-zero is a huge jump. If I was alone, they wouldn't have needed to create this legislation to artificially capture the market.

The price has been "spiraling out of control" for the past 30 years, at the same rate almost the entire time. Saying that it's the ACA's fault is to lie by omission, because you're blaming the past 10 years on something that's been a trend for 20 years before that.

The fact that you now have to buy insurance is a separate issue from whether the costs have been spiraling out of control, because even if the prices had remained flat since 2009 your personal experience would be that you're spending more than you used to. That's not "cost". If I walk to work, then start driving a car, and then replace that for a truck, I don't say that "gas costs are spiraling out of control." You're conflating two things and think you made a slam dunk case. You didn't. It's embarrassing.

There's a huge difference between $100->$200 and $500->$1,000. People's earnings make it that there's a threshold that gets crossed where insurance becomes unaffordable. It's debatable if that happened before or after the ACA but the raw amount changed post-ACA is much larger than prior periods. People aren't measuring this by rate of change, their measuring it with their bank account.

> If I walk to work, then start driving a car, and then replace that for a truck, I don't say that "gas costs are spiraling out of control." You're conflating two things and think you made a slam dunk case. You didn't. It's embarrassing.

The correct analogy is that you live a block from work so you walk. Then one day the government introduces legislation that makes driving a car mandatory, so you have to buy one to drive the block to work. Your commute costs are definitely spiraling out of control at that point.

> You're conflating two things and think you made a slam dunk case. You didn't. It's embarrassing.

If you have a point to make, make it. You don't need to attack me as well.

You said that "health care costs are spiraling out of control". Your justification for that is that you spend more money on health insurance than you used to back when you used to spend nothing because you got nothing. Making a blanket statement of "healthcare costs" and "out of control" needs to come with the following caveats:

1. They're spiraling out of control for you - 2. Because you used to pay nothing 3. Because you used to get nothing 4. Because you didn't worry about it.

Say all that. The price, for the average consumer, that buys health insurance has been rising for decades. It has not slowed down because of the ACA but it hasn't sped up because of the ACA.

You're making a blanket statement based on your atypical experience of not having health insurance and then making it seem like it affects everyone.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com