D.WARD, do you realize you are asking for a reply from someone who has you on ignore and has no interest in engaging with you?
He sees the conversation. I canāt help he got his feelings hurt.
Youāre being told the Astros won the World Series and asking ābut what do you mean āwonā?ā
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Iām being told a lie with nothing to back it up to prove it is not a lie and is true. Your reading comprehension is lacking.
Itās not just that the ACA made coverage cheaper, it made coverage available when it otherwise simply would not be available.
When I was still in Panama and prior to the ACA I priced insurance and, being just a random, sole idiot paying for himself, the coverage I could find was prohibitively expensive, so much so that I decided to just pay for everything out of pocket in Panama, which was doable for me there unless for some horrible reason Iād wound up having to spend weeks in the hospital.
What I pay now for my son and me, a significantly older version of me, by the way, is less than I would have paid only for myself pre ACA. Hopefully that helps nail down the elusive meaning of the eternally confusing word cheaper.
But thatās not the important part. Iāll be 56 in a week, and I have some relatively minor older guy health issues that are pharmaceutically controlled. I use a broker to select and buy my plan, and when I first sat down with him a year ago he assembled my information including my current prescriptions, fed it all into the machine and it spat out all the plans I could use. The only plans available to me are plans via the ACA. Those plans by design must include anyone seeking coverage. Insurers outside the ACA simply will not insure me at any price. Iām in my mid 50ās, I know for a fact that there is nothing seriously wrong with me, I could go out right now and run five miles with zero issues other than the crushing boredom of it, and outside the ACA I canāt get insured.
I consider that, to quote our current President, a big fukkin deal. Not just people like me with minor, annoying things I need to stay on top of, but people with extremely serious conditions can always find coverage, and, crucially, they know that their insurer can no longer throw them out of the coverage the day before their first chemotherapy session.
Obviously Medicare with no age restrictions is what the country needs, but until the idiots in this country decide to elect the requisite number of sane people to enact this sort of thing, the ACA will remain a critical program that has transformed the landscape in a positive and even life saving way for millions of people.
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How quickly people forget āpre-existing conditionsā exclusions, no mental health coverage and insane application forms that were actively designed to engender mistakes that would render the policy voidable in the event you actually tried to make a claim.
Oh, and if you did make a claim, here comes the non-renewal notice, making whatever you now know you have a pre-existing condition and thus excluded by any future policy.
To be fair, the majority of Americans didnāt have to deal with this because they were all negotiated away under their employerās group policy. But for those who did not enjoy the benefit of a scheme designed to shackle employees to corporate jobs via health insurance - lest little Tommyās chronic asthma or grandpaās Alzheimerās be uninsurable without it - Obamacare was a literal life-saver.
Fun Fact: the ādeny all claimsā protocol of the evil āGreat Benefitā insurance company in Grishamās āThe Rainmakerā was based on American General, a Houston-based life and health insurance company. They actually got caught doing exactly that. They were bought by AIG so time ago (because of course they were), and still occupy the erstwhile American General offices on Allen Pkwy at Waugh.
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Chris Christie is right. The cognitive dissonance in MAGAworld is stultifying.
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When we moved to Arkansas in 2006, we tried to buy private health insurance but there was only one insurer who offered coverage at all ā BCBS. They immediately turned us both down, and one of the reasons they listed for my wife was āchild-bearing age.ā A functional uterus was considered a pre-existing condition. They turned me down because I had a āprocedure.ā They never said which one.
So then the only option was to apply to the state pool for uninsurable people, which was run by guess who? BCBS. It was insanely expensive, and on a telephone townhall I told our U.S. senator at the time, Mark Pryor, how expensive it was. He said he knew, because HE was in the uninsurable pool when he was Attorney General of Arkansas, because of a previous cancer treatment.
We finally got good coverage when my wife got a state job. I canāt imagine what it would have been like going through Covid, and then open-heart surgery, if I had still been in the uninsurable pool.
Oh, and guess who runs our decent state employee health plan. BCBS.
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We watched part of the clown show debate a couple of weeks ago and Christie came off as someone who would be a pretty formidable opponent for Biden. I wouldnāt let them man watch my cats for a weekend, but heās no dummy and no maga.
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Speaking of AIG and moviesā¦
Bonus Fun Fact: the insurance company that failed to respond to the real life kidnapping upon which the movie āProof of Lifeā is based wasā¦
They are the Ferengi of the insurance world, swarming over areas where they see profit and running away as soon as claims start showing up.
This culminated in their greatest feat of all time, backstopping the reckless lending that resulted in the 2008 meltdown and then refusing to pay the claims, forcing tax payers to bail them out.
They tried to hire me once at 25% of my current salary. Not +25%ā¦x 25%. They bought me lunch and threw out the offer, which I was able to politely decline with a straight face. The person trying to hire me was shocked that I would turn down such riches, suggesting to me that they screw their employees pretty hard too.
Yeah, I donāt like AIG very much.
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You are who the ACA was designed to help.
Meanwhile, conservatives - who only understand something when it happens to them - see their corporate health insurance deduction going up every year (which it was going to do anyway) and think the ACA is bullshit.
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Oh, and I completely forgot about lifetime benefit limits on private insurance policies. What kind of Soylent Green, forced euthanasia, dystopian bullshit was that?
But death panelsā¦amiright!
Stephen Hawking was born, raised, fell chronically ill and went on to live a long and very productive life all under the auspices of the UKās much maligned national health service. What if heād been subject to a lifetime benefit limit?
There was no sub-plot about his family being crushed by medical costs in the Hawking biopic, because thatās only a thing in America.
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Yes, we would have jumped on ACA immediately but luckily we already had state insurance by then.
The health insurance industry is the most ridiculous thing Iāve ever seen. My experience with BCBS (again, the only option in Arkansas at the time) went from:
When I needed private insurance: āOMFG no, youāre a wreck, we wonāt cover you at any cost.ā
When I applied to the state-subsidized uninsurable pool: "OMFG look at you. Weāll cover you because we have to by law, but itās going to cost an assload of money, there are tons of deductibles and exclusions, etc.
When my wife became a clerk in a state park: āOMFG you need so much help! You need yearly exams, a knee replacement, and even open-heart surgery. No problem, we got you, weāll call once a month to make sure you are keeping up with physical therapy. Donāt forget your Covid shot.ā
All experiences were with the same company, and the only difference is that my wife started working the front desk at a state park. Thereās no rhyme or reason to it, but thank god we have the ACA now for people who need it. Which can be anyone at any time.
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It makes no sense, unless you put on your sunglasses and the see state-business partnershipās vested interest in keeping the plebs shackled to their corporate jobs.
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I read a quote in the New Yorker a few years ago that stuck with me: "You canāt get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding itā.
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When I retired from AT&T I was fortunate as a CWA Union member to be able to participate in a group plan that was one fourth the cost of what I knew one of my self-employed friends was paying for basically the same coverage. Hell, I pay almost as much per month for Medicare Advantage as I did for that group policy.
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Itās not even that complicated: thereās no compassion for the plight of others. The struggles of other people are their own fault, until the same struggle is visited upon you, then itās something that is real and needs to be addressed goddamit!
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Unbelievable wading through some of the ACA misinformation BS that spew from Democratsā mouths. Thanks to the ACA, you paid a penalty if you didnāt have insurance. You also could not use whatever doctor that you preferred. Healthcare options were slashed. Insurance premiums, deductibles and copays skyrocketed thanks to Obamacare. Basically, you are paying more for less coverage. Obamacare does not allow patients to buy insurance across state lines, which would have dramatically increased competition and lower costs. It does not allow small business-associated health plans. It limits low-cost health savings accounts options. We have spent hundreds of billions of dollars already and we have massively increased the size of the federal budget. We have subsidized insurance plans to get Americans to sign up for Obamacare. We have penalized people if they donāt buy Obamacare. That law was, however, repealed. We still have almost 1 in 11 Americans without insurance. Obamacare was a huge failure for the American people.
You simply cannot have profit be the overarching goal of the payer of peopleās medical bills. Every other developed nation has figured this out.
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Thatās because sooner or later it will be unprofitable to treat almost anyone.
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