Obamacare's fatal flaw is that it let the health insurance industry write the law. Hopefully the next inevitable iteration will result in a truly "affordable" and comprehensive platform inclusive of vision and dental.
I doubt it as long as the only choices in every election are corrupt Democrats and corrupt Republicans.
Yes, I understand that in the past insurance companies could refuse to insure due to pre-existing conditions. I know we need to have insurance. I understand how insurance works and it is basically a pooling of risks. What bothers me is there does not seem to be any benefit to being healthy and a frugal consumer of healthcare services. And it seems to have gotten worse in the last several years. Some regulation of the private market was in order. But it really does seem like Obamacare gave the insurance companies more of an upper hand to screw consumers, the exception being the situation with pre-existing conditions. Unfortunately, as a business owner, we cannot even participate in a HSA like we used to be able to do.
This is exactly it. My job does not offer health insurance, so I used to pay for my own health coverage directly from Horizon BCBS. The premium was relatively affordable at $172 and it had no deductible and no copays. The reason it was so affordable was because it did not cover prescription drugs, which was fine with me because it has been almost ten years since I needed any prescription drugs. However, the "Affordable" Care Act makes it illegal to offer a plan that doesn't cover prescriptions, so that plan was discontinued and now the cheapest plan on the market for me has a premium of around $200 with deductibles of over $6000! The plans that are affordable are useless and the plans that are useful are unaffordable.
Another factor we have now thanks to Obamacare is that if you go without health insurance, you have to pay a hefty fine: 2% of your annual income, and I believe it goes up every year. I applied for a healthcare subsidy and was rejected because I'm not dirt poor, so I applied for an exemption from the fine since my previous plan was discontinued because of the law (which the website says is a valid exemption), but again was rejected because my income was too high for me to be eligible for an exemption. I met with two different healthcare marketplace enrollment assistants, and they agreed with me that since the only plans I could reasonably afford have such high deductibles that I would get no benefit from purchasing them, that the best option for me would be to just go without insurance and pay the fine. What kind of demented, ass-backwards reform is this? What the hell happened to "if you like your current plan, you can keep it?" If a Republican president passed this law, Democrats would be up in arms about how it makes healthcare more expensive.
Obama wanted a single payer system like Medicare. The Republicans would not let that happen and insisted on going through the insurance companies ,which have racked up record profits. If Medicare had been extended to everybody, it would have been a much more efficient solution though it would have killed the insurance industry.
This is the typical excuse from Democrats who refuse to acknowledge that their politicians don't represent them. "The people we voted into office didn't get us what we voted them in for, so it must be the Republicans' fault." Obama may have said he wanted single payer while campaigning because he knew that's what his constituents want, but he didn't push for it once he was in office, and he even let the public option get taken off the table. Early in his first term, the Democrats controlled the presidency and both houses. They could have passed any law they wanted, but instead this is all we got. Why? Because they are beholden to the insurance companies who fund their campaigns just like the Republicans are. If the Democrats didn't bring single payer to a vote during that time, then they never will. We would be much better off if the liberals voted for the Greens and the conservatives voted for Libertarians.
I recently just heard of these guys, and enrolled about a month ago:
Liberty Healthshare. It is a healthcare cost-sharing ministry, which makes its members exempt from the Obamacare fine even though it technically is not insurance, although it functions very similarly and is MUCH more affordable. The downside is that since it isn't insurance, it isn't governed by regulations that prohibit discriminating based on pre-existing conditions, and if you get injured doing something they consider a hazardous activity, like skydiving, they could choose not to cover it.
