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A middle-class family's only option: A $43,000 health insurance premium
- therobots927 11mo ago[flagged]
- _wire_ 11mo agoTrump Announces "Patriot Games" https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/18/politics/patriot-games-announcement-trump https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/18/politics/patriot-games-announ...
- RoadieRoller 11mo agohttps://archive.is/ybtU5 https://archive.is/ybtU5
- ggm 11mo agoI don't understand how this confers political benefit to the republicans or the white house. Can somebody explain a non conspiracy model how this helps them electorally running into the midterms? Is there some way aside from the obvious mistruths they can demonstrate its the democrats fault, and achieve some electoral advantage? Wyoming is extremely "red" according to Web searches (I am not an american) My default assumption here is, it cannot, and this is going to cost them seats.
- undeveloper 11mo agoAll indications show that this is absolutely terrible for republicans' self interest, and popularity. trump has gone from winning the popular vote ~~(over 50% voted for him)~~ (a plurality of 49.8% voted for him) to polling at the 30%s. The recent 2025 elections (an off-year, so a variety of smaller elections at the state / city level mostly) have shown democrats are absolutely performing much better right now. This is not contested by either party. > Is there some way aside from the obvious mistruths they can demonstrate its the democrats fault, and achieve some electoral advantage? You discount the skill republicans have at lying -- regardless, when people are feeling the pinch in their pockets, they will blame whoever is in power. Currently it is the republicans.
- sundaeofshock 11mo ago<<trump has gone from winning the popular vote (over 50% voted for him)>> Trump received 49.8% of the popular vote.
- undeveloper 11mo agoYou are right there. a plurality, then.
- kcplate 11mo agoI think you probably need to consider how many and who is affected and where their voting affiliations already lie if they even vote at all. My guess is this doesn’t help or hurt either party at the voting booth. If you are ACA aligned or participate in that program you probably already vote Dem or not at all.
- RickJWagner 11mo agoNot me. I’m right leaning, but use ACA in pre-Medicare retirement. I suspect a lot of FIRE people ( being excellent money managers / penny pinchers ) are in this boat.
- TimorousBestie 11mo agoI don’t get it. Is there some other wedge issue keeping you conservative? Us FIRE types depend on stable, consistent markets and positive (real) interest rates, and conservatives haven’t delivered on that in recent memory.
- RickJWagner 11mo agoMight be some confirmation bias at work in one or both of us. I tend to see conservative people in the FIRE space, seems you see the opposite. I’ll look more closely to get a better feel.
- kcplate 11mo ago
- KPGv2 11mo agothey've reached a local maximum and the only simulated annealing in their party (Trump) doesn't care about this issue at all.
- fluidcruft 11mo agoExtremely red states don't care. They won't flip at all. And none of the districts are even remotely competitive. Only the primaries matter. A cursory look says Wyoming has a population of ~580k and ~340k registered voters. The article says Wyoming has 46k people on ACA. Republicans win landslides in Wyoming (40%-50% margins) and 46k people is 12% of voters max (likely closer to ~4% at risk).
- ggm 11mo agoThanks. So, the upside is saving money, at the expense of alienating poorer voters in (this example) a state where their majority is so big they don't care.
- fluidcruft 11mo agoThe "upside" is national-level PAC money financing your campaign.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- TimorousBestie 11mo agoIt won’t even save money in the long run. When people don’t have access reliable healthcare, they tend to use even more expensive (for society) options like emergency rooms and grey/black market. People who become disabled or die from lack of healthcare don’t tend to pay much in the way of taxes.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- OutOfHere 11mo agoTo my knowledge, legal protections against unpaid emergency room bills not leading to credit harm or debt collection exist only in California and New York. Also, emergency rooms are very limited in the care they dispense - they don't dispense chemotherapies.
- RickJWagner 11mo agoI’m right-leaning, I agree it does not help Republicans. Also, propping up ACA ( I say this as an ACA user ) is not the answer, either. The subsidies were temporary, making them permanent only adds to the never ending flood of red ink. Healthcare needs a complete reboot. As someone on the right, I am open to a reasonable big government solution. ( After all, even Nixon wanted public healthcare. ). It’s long past the time for patching. We need a reboot.
- jmclnx 11mo agoYes, a "reboot" is needed. A bit of history from what I remember: Nixon's plan would have passed except for Ted Kennedy, he stopped it in its tracks. Then when the Clintons came in something flipped, the GOP was all against what Hillary was trying to push. I forgot what it was but I think it was some kind of single payer. So under Obama, the democrats took the Massachusetts plan created by Romney (GOP), which I believe the Heritage Foundation even endorsed, thus created the ACA. So here we are. Now I think we are in a sad place where for-profit healthcare is entrenched, bribing both side of the aisle to keep their profits high.
- dragonwriter 11mo ago> I forgot what it was but I think it was some kind of single payer. It was not, despite universal single payer having, at the time, outright majority support in polling. That’s one reason it lacked popular support on either side of the political spectrum. > So under Obama, the democrats took the Massachusetts plan created by Romney (GOP), which I believe the Heritage Foundation even endorsed, thus created the ACA. IIRC, it wasn't created by Romney, it was created by the insurance lobby and became a (rhetorical) Republican alternative during the debate over the Clinton plan; once that was killed, the Republicans didn't push it nationally (though I think Bush briefly, maybe only during the campaign, pushed a similar mandate-and-subsidy plan that was restricted to only including High-Deductible plans tied to HSAs.)
- _DeadFred_ 11mo agoAKA the typical doomer non-solution. 'If we blow it up, somehow a new, better systems will magically emerge'. If I went to management with the dev plan of 'throw all the source away, start over with a new stack, new devs, from scratch, but also I don't know what the new stack will be, and haven't found new devs' I would be called a moron. But if you are a conservative, it's somehow called rational policy and a plan and it's worth the lifetime lasting damage/potential deaths is will cause a shit ton of people and financial ruin it will cause many. Edit: Throttled so replying by edit. In the example below, Steve Jobs LITERALLY had a stack in mind, a plan, and people/talent lined up.
- danaris 11mo agoIt's not about politics; it's about ideology. They want poor(er) people to hurt, so that rich people can have more. It really is as simple as that.
- qcnguy 11mo agoIt's not about ideology, ffs get a grip. The US is bleeding out because its government spends so much more than its society can generate via taxes. Its has a debt of 38 trillion dollars. The subsidies were adding to that. People who say "we'd like to give you free money but can't afford it" aren't motivated by ideology, they're motivated by the money not being there. Borrowing just delays the inevitable and makes it worse - it's literally stealing from children and it doesn't fix anything. There are ways to fix US healthcare but adding ever more debt won't do it.
- danaris 11mo agoWhether or not that's true economically, the idea that what Trump is doing will affect that in any positive way is, at this point, not merely ludicrous, but actively in denial of reality. He is blatantly cutting spending on the many in order to give more to the wealthy few. Especially himself.
- gruez 11mo ago>They want poor(er) people to hurt, so that rich people can have more. It really is as simple as that. What about rest of Trump's policies? Are tariffs also a "so that rich people can have more" policy, contrary to the "globalization only benefit the rich" rhetoric of the 2000s?
- danaris 11mo agoNo: they're based on a specific set of lies he was sold back in the 1980s. There's a particular guy (I'm afraid I don't recall his name) who has been banging the tariff drum and claiming that they're some kind of economic panacea, and he apparently caught Trump at a very pliant time. (I've tried to find who it was again, but it's hard to search for simply "who convinced Trump that tariffs are a good idea?")
- _DeadFred_ 11mo agoFrom what I'm seeing it's 'Obama and his government intervention broke healthcare, we need the government out so that the system can fix itself'.
- maxerickson 11mo agoIt hasn't been Obamacare at least since the repeal of the individual mandate.
- BenFranklin100 11mo agoIt’s not pharma that’s driving rising medical costs, it’s hospitals: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-cancer-drug-markups/ https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-cancer-drug-markups/ Another contributing factor is that Americans consume a LOT of healthcare, often well past the point of diminishing returns: “Why conventional wisdom on health care is wrong (a primer)” https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/why-conventional-wisdom-on-health-care-is-wrong-a-primer/ https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/why-conventional-wisdom-o... Finally, basic preventative health care — at least for children — could save more than it costs when we take into account the overall economic effects of poor health outcomes. We should consider making it an entitlement.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- Eddy_Viscosity2 11mo agoIf medical care is a for-profit industry, wouldn't it be in their interest to reduce preventative care, especially for children, so they will have overall greater health care needs (and bills!) later on? Individual doctors and nurses etc may very well want people to get good treatment, especially children. But they are just the hired labor, the owners of the medical services and insurance industries just want the money and so likely lobby for the worse outcomes. It also has the bonus of further tying people to their employers who offer health plans making them more pliant workers.
- qcnguy 11mo agoNo, health insurers are motivated to keep their premium payers healthy and have a long track record of funding programmes to improve the health of the population. Think about how insurance works. Where I live they paid for the creation of outdoor gyms. > Individual doctors and nurses etc may very well want people to get good treatment, especially children It's individual doctors and nurses who are most incentivized to over-treat. They make more money the more healthcare is consumed. It's insurers who have an incentive to keep healthcare costs under control. A big part of the reason US health insurance is so expensive compared to the rest of the world is that Americans stage a massive freakout every time insurers try to control costs. It's a cultural thing and done by both Democrats and Republicans, look at how they call the UK's NICE committee a "death panel".
- johnwheeler 11mo agoIf you're 80 years old, you probably should not receive a subsidized hip replacement. If you can't afford it on your own, there should just be a palliative care mandate after some age. We shouldn't save the soon-to-be-dead at the expense of the people with a long time horizon. Or, we should pay doctors far less. I don't think they're multi-millionaires in other countries. Not all of them are in America, but many of them are.
- analognoise 11mo agoThis is such a painfully American response. Nobody can ever imagine a better system, even if it’s used in literally every advanced nation in the world. Nope, instead we have to let Grandpa die painfully to keep those stock prices up. I’m starting to think Capitalism as it’s practiced here is a death cult of some kind.
- johnwheeler 11mo agoWell, I mentioned palliative care, but in general, I agree with you. I would much rather doctors just get paid less. I took my son to the ER. He had a very high fever. They gave him a child's aspirin and me a $700 bill. I just don't know what the answer is. And really, if you go into a hospital, you get the sense that there's people basically taking advantage of subsidized health insurance providers and patients both. Health insurance in America is absolutely atrocious. Next to gun fanatics, it's the worst thing about this country.
- hermanzegerman 11mo agoYes, because the doctor get the majority of that 700$ Bill. NOT Also the ER is always going to be the most expensive setting to get care. Why not take him to a pediatrician, if there are no warning signs that he needs immediate attention?
- eitally 11mo agoBecause the instruction from most pediatricians is to send kids with persistent (not responsive to acetaminophen and/or ice bath) fever above 104F to the ER, especially after hours. Very, very rarely will you find a pediatrician available outside an ER setting after hours.
- k310 11mo agoIt's all about promises made to the industry, privatization of everything. Politics? We don't need no stinking politics because there are already US troops deployed in this country, and do you for one minute think that immigrants and non-white citizens are going to go through checkpoints at voting lines without harrassment or detention or arrest on Trumped up charges? Few states have vote by mail. Courts have not taken action to defend the constitution. In one particular case, quite the opposite.
- jmclnx 11mo agoIt is a shame for them, but this was predicated by my Father and Uncles in the late sixties when they were talking about a for-profit hospital operating somewhere in far from us. I overheard them talking in the kitchen when I was a kid. I never forgot. So here we are, yet the idiot US politicians still do not want real health care support for their constituents because they will lose their bribes. Edit: Now I am wondering if they were talking about Nixon's proposed plan. I had forgotten all about that plan until I saw a comment about it.
- franktankbank 11mo ago> Nixon's proposed plan I've got a suspicious feeling Nixon WAS in fact a crook.