Is there any comparison of what the projected rate of increase would have been without ACA? For a lot of people, rates were already going up steeply.
And let’s not let Republican-led state legislatures off the hook, either.
Notice these are all states on the federal exchange – the vast majority refused to set up their own exchange. They also refused to promote open enrollment in their states, refused to hold accountable those insurers on the exchange who propose exorbitant rate hikes, and refused to expand Medicaid, the lack of which puts upward pressure on healthcare providers to raise costs to offset the cost of delivering uncompensated heath care service.
It would be interesting to see a comparison of costs in effect in Democratic-run states that are working to implement the ACA vs. those Republican-led states still fighting it.
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Fine. I’ll be anxiously waiting for this to happen. In the meantime, we’d better make the best of what we’ve got.
Private insurance companies had been jacking up premiums for decades. Employees didn’t notice because their companies subsidized the premiums. People in the individual market noticed though, and they began to drop out until over 40% of Americans were uninsured. Obamacare is the beginning of the solution, but nowhere near a complete one. Let’s remember the bad old days, when virtually unregulated health insurance companies were free to rip off their customers.
They could charge whatever the state health insurance board allowed (and of course the board was made up of health insurance lobbyists or sympathizers).
They could cancel your insurance at any time for no reason at all, or one they just made up; after collecting years of inflated premiums, they would wait until you made a claim, then pull the rug out from under you.
They had entire divisions of their companies that spent all their time figuring out how to deny legitimate claims, and that was a significant part of their profit.
Women could be charged more than men, just because.
60% of personal bankruptcies in the US were due to inability to pay medical bills.
That’s the short list.
The ACA was written with the involvement of private insurance lobbyists as a compromise with Republicans and Blue Dogs, who ended up rejecting it anyway (the traitorous bastards). Every problem with the ACA is due to pandering to private insurance companies. The solution to our national health insurance problem is to cut out the private insurance companies. Eventually, our Congress will have the right balance of members and do the right thing for us. Until then, we’ll be arguing about it, and people will be suffering, and private insurance companies will continue to twist our balls as they get richer.