alt Hacker NewsACA is garbage. It was created by the Heritage Foundation and started off being called Romneycare. It has worked terribly, and required what is an unconstitutional (in many opinions) fine for people who fail to be able to afford insurance.
The only reason anyone has any pleasant feelings about ACA is because a Medicaid expansion was passed at the same time. Of course I would prefer nothing. ACA stopped the momentum for M4A, as it was designed to do. Forcing the vote was a litmus test that Democrats purporting to understand this failed.
Replies
Didn't Trump get rid of said fine in his first term?
I appreciate you stepping in to be the perfect example of the kind of thinking I'm talking about. People like you are the real enemy of progress and we are very thankful that you are so politically irrelevant.
The ACA is not good. But it's an awful lot better than what we had before.
The problem is in the old days we had a fake "insurance". This wasn't a problem with cheapskates, but with how the industry worked. Companies would offer a plan for a little while, only let healthy people in, premiums were reasonable. Then they would offer something a tiny bit different, give it a new name. As time went on the people on the old plan would develop health problems, premiums were calculated based on what THAT PLAN had to pay out, so premiums went up. Healthy, jump ship to the new one. Not healthy, you can't. The old plan would soon go into a death spiral and you would be uninsured.
Thus anyone with a chronic health problem was stuck.
And they're trying to bring back the old days. Allow other health insurance to be sold, the healthy people will jump to it and the ACA will death spiral.
We did get the unexpected result of exposing the large number of people with "insurance" that was basically a scam. A lot of people didn't know they had policies that had insanely low limits or the like. I'm thinking of a post from back then, a student health plan that had gone up like 10x, "where's the difference?" And a bunch of people who couldn't understand even when I pointed out how the cheap version was effectively worthless for anything that needed more than a doctor's visit.