This deserves a separate response. >> Was my family being scammed when we were paying $600 per month for excellent insurance? > Thinking that $600 a month for

This deserves a separate response. >> Was my family being scammed when we were paying $600 per month for excellent insurance? > Thinking that $600 a month for health care is OK is your mistake. What? That is what we were paying. If it cost more, we would have paid more. Not sure how you magically reach this conclusion at all. Explain? And then Obamacare tripled it? Even worse, our healthcare costs, adjusted for income, was roughly at the same ratio for DECADES before Obamacare. When our cost was tripled, our income did not double or triple. Also, our $600 per month also meant that others were paying a lot less. Smaller families or individuals. > The average American was already paying through the nose back in 2010, compared to other developed nations. First of all, stop comparing nations. It's nonsensical. Even worse if we are talking about averages. You cannot apply the average to the population. You learn this in a first year course on statistics. What matters is the probability distribution. The average is so flawed that nobody who understands statistics would dare use it for serious comparisons or decision making. Politicians and those who don't understand elementary statistics love it though. Probability distribution is a far better metric, even if the distribution is divided into a (sufficient) number of bands. Here's real data from 2022: https://i.imgur.com/18ea7xB.png https://i.imgur.com/18ea7xB.png This chart represents ten insurance premium bands and shows the probability distribution. The average (which is an average of averages) is somewhere around $22K per year. This is meaningless. It is easy to see that approximately 75% of insured pays over $20K per year. In a prior comment you called my situation an "anecdote". Sorry, 75% isn't even close to an anecdote. It also shows that somewhere around 50% pay between $14K and the average of $22K. And only 6% pay less than $14K (and we don't know what that distribution looks like). With approximately 300 million people covered by various forms of insurance, the above means: 225 million pay over $20K per year 150 million pay between $14K and $22K per year 18 million pay less than $14K (no info on distribution) If you look at wage growth in the US, adjusted for inflation, the easy conclusion is that the cost of health coverage as a percentage of real income has increased year over year. This is not a good outcome at all. I have to go back to Obama's promises. He said --on video, multiple times-- that the average family (yeah, I know) would save $2,500 a year. He lied. This problem isn't a simple one. It is made far more complex by government players who are too busy fighting each other rather than doing good things for the nation. We have been promised better healthcare and education for decades. What we have to day is worse on almost all fronts. This needs to change.