Worse or better with ACA?

Aside from the answer above, I don't know what else to say.

I looked at the marketplace a couple of times but I didn't find a better plan — or even one this crappy — that didn't cost more.

On the other hand, I have friends for whom the marketplace was a godsend because without it, they had nothing at all even if it cost a lot.

And four or five years ago, the company announced they were going to review every visit to the emergency room and if they thought you didn't need to go to the emergency room, they weren't paying for it. If you had reached your coverage point or traditional insurance, they weren't paying. If you hadn't reached your $3,000 yet, it wasn't counted toward the $3,000.

 

Another reason why I don’t want my employer involved in my health care.

 

The heart of ACA is the ban on preexisting conditions exclusions. Imagine losing coverage in one place and basically being denied coverage everywhere else because your kid needs kidney dialysis or something similar; what do you do then? ACA spreads that risk to everyone, socialist? Yeah but very limited. Alternative is “sorry you lost the genetic lottery”.

The real reason they want to repeal it is simply for its name Obamacare, they can’t stand it. A beacon of helping for which he spent huge political capital.

 

He didn't even call it that. The GOP branded it that way.

 

Agreed. Typical nonsense. They brand it thinking it’s awful, then when it’s good they try to repeal it because of their own branding.

 

Gonna be a wet blanket. I am happy for those who benefited from ACA. If it works for you, great.

In the years before its implementation, I paid out of pocket for insurance and office visits. Once The Marketplace was established, I had to pay much higher premiums with spendowns 5X what they were before. My providers required enrollment through ACA, so I ended up completely shut out of getting care. This was right in the middle of finding out I have a Windows 98 body in a Windows 10 world. My doctor is a friend's cousin in the U.K.

Right now, there is a conservative estimate of 250K+ without access to health care in Tennessee. When I have tried to explain this to people, it's usually the Democrats who say one of two things: "That's what you get for living in Tennessee." or "That's impossible. Don't blame anyone but your lawmakers." I guess they figure I was too busy clinging to my guns and my God to do anything. Actually, I was working in public health outreach during those years. That's right. I was making sure other people were getting the healthcare they needed while my state and federal government were letting me know I wasn't worth saving. #Me?Bitter?Nah!

 

Tennessee probably needed to expand Medicaid to realize any genuine benefit from the ACA.

Medicaid expansion: 3 deep-red states just did it. Why not Tennessee?

Even then, the ACA was always a half-measure.

It was an awkward legislative compromise that should have been a stepping stone on the way to universal health care, but got us no closer to single payer or Medicare-for-all or some hybrid of the German model. It did nothing to curb the costs of treatment. Because it relied on buy-in from the states - and was hostage to the same insurers as before - it rearranged the payments structure without doing much else. Costs continued to rise.

I'm glad we got the pre-existing condition guarantees, and that we expanded coverage, but beyond that it seems to have failed not only as a means to an end, but as an end in itself. A perfect failure not only of politics, but of imagination and empathy and community.

My coverage, and the cost of my coverage, has remained as complicated and expensive as it was before the ACA was launched.

 

The highlighted part was a step in the right direction.

 

The cost of medicine needs to be a thing that people know. That also would be a step in the right direction I had a recent surgery that cost $65,000. I paid $1,800. My insurance paid some and the rest just vanished.