@His_Highness I absolutely understand your frustration with the ACA. I have read your complaints and I don't find them unreasonable (for the most part). You are one of the (many) folks who have been damaged be the program and you need relief. There are many flaws in the ACA that need to be corrected to make it what we hoped it would be. But your suggestion that it is a terrible program that should never have been put in force and implication that it provides no benefit to Americans is false on its face.
There are millions of people that have health insurance in this country now who never had it before. Many many of those millions now getting healthcare had previously been denied coverage because the insurance companies thought they might lose money on them. God forbid they should include people in their programs that would actually cost money to care for. How anti capitalist.
Prior to the ACA, for example, I was considered in uninsurable person. Because of my medical history and because of the medications I’m on the insurance companies were allowed to say I couldn’t have insurance even at high cost. My state created a “insurance of last resort” program but with that program they were allowed to charge me whatever they wanted to, so as a single person I could get insurance at about $1100 a month which I was unable to pay.
The ACA made it POSSIBLE for me to get insurance that I could afford to pay for. Even though it is not yet actually brought down the cost of care in America, the program helps by paying a portion of my premiums so they don’t end up being a ridiculously high proportion of the money I make. The LONG term goal of the program is to reduce the actual COST of care, but the short term goal is just to make it accessible. We are still working on the short term goals as well.
Now, the Republicans want to kill the ACA. They’ve been trying to kill it since the day it was born. They have voted to kill it more than 60 times. They have no concern for the people who can’t afford insurance for whatever reason, even though many, possibly more people who benefit from Obama care are Republicans. But they are mostly poor Republicans, so they don’t really matter. And if they are able to destroy Obama care than those millions of people who have it for the first time will lose it again. And poor people will go back to dying off like they’re supposed to.
Far be it from me to try and understand how Republicans feel but it sure looks like Republicans believe that if your employer doesn’t provide you insurance and you can’t afford to buy insurance on your own or the insurance companies don’t think you should be able to get it, and you don’t have the hundreds of thousands of dollars it may cost to get the medical care you need to survive, then you should just be allowed to die rather than the country making any effort to supplement your medical costs. If genetics or an accident or anything created a circumstance in which your health is jeopardized than that's your problem not ours. And you shouldn’t expect any help from your government.
The Democrats, on the other hand, want to fix the ACA. They recognize that with any major new program there are flaws and errors that occur that can’t be anticipated and must be fixed after they are found. There is no huge government program that has ever gone into effect that was perfect on arrival. That’s just not possible. We still make changes to medicare and social security and the VA program, for example. So everyone knew things would come up that needed to be addressed, and the assumption was that the government, knowing the above, would be cooperative in making changes to make the program better and help reduce its costs. Instead the Republicans have done everything they could to kill it including eliminating the risk corridor program that helps protect insurance companies in places where the percentage of people with expensive care was higher than other areas of the country. The image we’ve been seeing of insurance companies fleeing states is a direct result of the Republican effort to kill the program, in this case by refusing to protect insurance companies hurt by the ACA. And those optics have helped to make the program look bad, again by design.
But the Republicans don’t want to make any effort to fix the ACA they just want to destroy it. For whatever reason, and you will have to make your own assessment as to what those reasons may be, the Republicans just think your well-being is not their problem. Of course that’s not just medically, they think all of your problems are your problems and your own fault and government isn’t supposed to help you with them, but that’s really a bigger conversation; we’re just talking about healthcare here.
So,
@His_Highness, I have to ask you, do you really believe that this solution to medical care in America is to completely destroy the ACA and to go back to a time when people were uninsurable and only wealthy people could have insurance if their employers didn’t provide it? Is that really a solution in your eyes? Or do you think that the idea of health insurance for all is a good one and that maybe we could make an effort to repair this program and make it work for everybody, including you? Is it really appropriate for the wealthiest country in the world to make no effort to make sure that people who can’t afford the ridiculous costs of healthcare in this country are not just left to die or forced to go in to excruciating debt and eventual bankruptcy?
Somehow I don’t think that is what you believe. But that is what you get if you shut down the ACA, because there are no alternatives proposed and the Republicans aren’t even interested in creating them. There is no reason to kill this program other than Republican fuckyouism, and I really don’t think that should be part of the American social compact.
The program is flawed, and needs to be repaired, but it is absolutely essential to the American efforts to create some level of fairness in our medical and mental health care philosophy in America.
