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Speak for yourself. Before Obamacare if you had a pre-existing condition you couldn't switch jobs. There were lots of lower-priced health insurance... but had low life-time maximums (like $50K) which means it was useful only for doctor visits.
The distortions caused by ACA will be papers in 20 years. It is so much worse than single payer or the previous corporatist insurance oligopoly.
The ACA allowed me to get insurance for the first time since I'd left home several years before. I knew lots of other freelancers at the time who were in the same boat.
Of course in the following years, insurers found plenty of loopholes to increase prices significantly year over year - and this is why leaving the middlemen in the middle was a TERRIBLE choice - but at the very least the quality of those plans still has a reasonable low bar.
I still find myself on the ACA from time to time. I can't afford it. But the plans are still significantly better and thus more affordable than what was available before.
If life was perfectly predictable then, yes, insurance wouldn't have much of a point. But alas.
We all pay in a bit and those of us unlucky enough to need a huge amount of help can have access to the resources they need. Hopefully that will never be you! But as they say: The reward for a long life is to get to experience the decay of your own body. Good health is temporary for all of us.
That said, you're right: Single-payer would be a huge improvement. Let's do that.
But that’s only 5M people. For everybody else it just made healthcare more expensive.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, in the ACA brought down costs. And hiding it behind ever increasing subsidies eventually comes to a breaking point.
However, the increase in costs did slow after ACA:
https://cepr.net/publications/health-care-cost-growth-slowed...
That exists. Just buy them from overseas.
Grant special visas to doctors who commit to working at clinics for X years. Pay them some guaranteed wage that’s higher than they make in their homeland and they’ll take the deal.
That would increase the supply of providers, which shifts costs down due to basic economics.
Sure it’s not “fair” to the rest of the world, but that’s not our problem to solve. Too bad the AMA hates this idea.
Do those folks get bodyguards to keep the ICE thugs from disappearing them? If not, I'd expect they wouldn't come here for any price. Just sayin'.
How it possible to calculate this theory when you don't have a control group? Said differently, if everyone is subject to ACA you can't compare it to a group of people that aren't subject to ACA. Also, insurance premiums are a direct result of how many people are in the pool.
If the control group was "just use the previous year before ACA" then there was absolutely scenarios where people got cheaper healthcare after ACA even without the subsidies. Like real estate markets, insurance markets aren't national, they're local.
FWIW - I'm neither advocating nor opposing the implementation of ACA, just stating it's not easy to conclude "healthcare costs more/less now".
This isn't an argument, you're just stating a fact and didn't offer up an opinion
Source for that claim?
Also the ACA requires insurance companies to make a max gross margin of 20%. This looks like a cost saving measure at first glance, but it's actually the opposite. Now insurance profits are actually increased by an increase in medical costs, and therefore the insurance companies are disincentivized to control costs.
The ACA did nothing to increase supply. There were no new doctors or clinics.
And the subsidies and mandates to purchase insurance increase demand for medical care.
So it causes prices to rise.
It’s far better than before. You can’t be denied for pre existing conditions, there is no benefit limit, and a lot of preventative care is included.
>(before someone argues this, be aware that your state (taxes) heavily subsidizes this)
No, state taxes have nothing to do with ACA. The biggest subsidy is from young people due to the age rating factor capping highest premiums at 3x the lowest premiums. The second biggest subsidy is healthy to sick people, since pre existing conditions aren’t a factor in premium. And the federal government is what subsidized the premium tax credits for people with lower income.
You’re mostly wrong on healthcare. The increased state costs are people who didn’t know they were Medicaid eligible who are now enrolled. The biggest failure imo of Obamacare is that it encouraged consolidation and creation of regional health networks, which have increased prices.
Yes, a single payer system would be better, but this was better than doing nothing.
Basically, once your healthcare got expensive, they could just cut you off and say they wouldn’t cover you any further. And because of pre-existing conditions (which the ACA also eliminated), you couldn’t get new health insurance. You were basically fucked.
My mom got cancer a few years before the ACA passed. So far as I’m concerned, the old insurance system killed my mom when she was only 40 years old. I lost my only surviving parent, and my little brother lost his mom when he was only 10 years old. So forgive the utterly flabbergasted look on my face as I read your comment.