29 ms·

Here's a counter-point, Mr. Altman: I have a pre-existing condition that prevented me from getting non-employer sponsored insurance. When the exchanges came on

• vinhboy 10y ago
  Are you saying that if Obamacare did not exist you would be better off?
  • kobeya 10y ago
    Yes, I wouldn't have gone down a road that was cut out from underneath me, and almost lost a marriage in the process.
    • colemickens 10y ago
      Oh come on, you've got to provide slightly more detail, because that just sounds absurdly hyperbolic and exaggerated.
      • kobeya 10y ago
        No, I don't have to vent my private life on the Internet.
        • colemickens 10y ago
          You just did, but in a vague enough way as to add nothing substantial to the conversation. Obviously, I don't think you're obligated to offer any details you don't want to. I guess I assumed you had a point and weren't just firing off scary sounding exaggerated anecdotes.
  • sremani 10y ago
    His point was what ever positive effects it had were temporary and those positive effects do not exist any more for most of the people.
  • MrZongle2 10y ago
    I know I can say it. Married, two kids. Everybody reasonably healthy, have a decent job. Healthcare costs have become expensive as shit because of the ACA. That's not a partisan talking-point: that's the bottom line in our household budget. The happy-face anecdotes the ACA's advocates trot out are lovely, but there are far more people in my position.
    • colemickens 10y ago
      How could you possibly just assert there are far more people in your position? There are tens of millions of people who had no access to health care that now have it. And can you explain exactly how the ACA has made healthcare unaffordable for tens of millions, since you assert more are disaffected by it than helped?
      • kobeya 10y ago
        And there are hundreds of millions of people who have seen their premiums and health care costs go up.
        • ceejayoz 10y ago
          As they did every year, pre- and post-ACA.
          • kobeya 10y ago
            Excuse me, "go up by a larger factor year-over-year than had previously been the norm."
            • kmicklas 10y ago
              That's not even true.
            • ceejayoz 10y ago
              Because they started lower, apparently. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/09/19/skyrocketing-obamacare-premiums-still-lower-than-employer-sponsored-insurance/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/09/19/skyro... > A new analysis from the Urban Institute found that the average unsubsidized premiums in the Affordable Care Act exchanges, commonly known as Obamacare, are actually 10 percent lower than the full premiums in the average employer plan nationally in 2016.
• jmcgough 10y ago
  If you were making that little money, you were likely eligible for Medicaid.
  • kobeya 10y ago
    Medicaid eligibility cutoff is based on the federal poverty level, which for a family of 4 is $33,465/yr. That's only slightly more than rent in a distant suburb of the bay area.
• noobermin 10y ago
  The ACA tamped down the second derivative of the premium increases, but not the first derivative. Your premiums would have been much higher if it weren't for the ACA, and it will likely continue to rise after the repeal.
  • kobeya 10y ago
    How? The ACA mandated cost-plus structuring for the medical insurance industry, which provides all the incentives for rampant healthcare cost (and by extension, premium) inflation.
• OmarIsmail 10y ago
  Do you know a large reason why premiums and deductibles hiked ? What I read, and I did read this online and haven't had the time to look for primary sources so please take with a grain of salt, but worth looking into is this: pre-existing condition check was a major risk to the insurance industry since nobody knew how much it was going to cost them. So the ACA told insurance companies we'll subsidize some of your costs until things settle down (this is different than subsidizing people's payments). However when it came time for the gov to pay, Republicans blocked most of the subsidy payments to health insurance companies (I think they only received 12% of the expected amount). And then because insurance companies didn't get that subsidy they obviously passed the cost onto consumers. And I'm sure whatever subsidy was further promised by the Gov they could no longer rely on so they priced that risk in as well.
  • rtpg 10y ago
    an important sidenote to this: the taxes for the subsidy payments didn't disappear. The republicans could have used money earmarked for this exact purpose and instead decided that the government should keep the money. They chose that health care costs should rise and taxes should stay up. And despite all of that, health care cost growth still dropped
  • timr 10y ago
    Moreover, health care costs have been rising for everyone in the same way over the same time period. I was paying for a small group plan (for my startup) for the last few years, and the per-employee cost was within a few dollars of identical to the equivalent-coverage ACA plans in California. Crazy, right? The GP comment is just another example of how there's a ton of uninformed anger on this issue. People are spitting mad because they're realizing that health care is becoming really expensive, and they think the ACA is to blame because they heard about the ACA last. The amount of actual understanding approaches zero, because few people pay for their own healthcare in the USA. I kind of want the GOP to just burn everything down and expose everyone to the full pain of this absurd system (in true, "free market" fashion). We'll have a political revolution overnight.
    • kobeya 10y ago
• dsp1234 10y ago
  The flip side of this, is that you couldn't have done this: "I decided to leave my job and get an ACA plan for my family, while trying to bootstrap my company." Before the ACA, because you couldn't have gotten any health care coverage at all. Thus after the ACA, you had an opportunity that would not have been possible (safely) previously.
  • kobeya 10y ago
    For about 12 months, but not anymore, which was my point.