I was born, raised and live in the U.K. I am 24 years old. I remember, on the face of things, Obamacare being a step forward for the shenanigans which is the U.S. healthcare system. But, I often see posts stating it failed. Someone please explain 🙂
I hold our NHS in high regard. I cannot imagine a healthcare system which can leave people who have worked, paid taxes for 30 years+ and are all round good citizens in financial ruins. What exactly is Obamacare and why do people say it failed?
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My premium is 1300 a MONTH for a shitty plan. That is the main issue. I am only mid 30s. It was 500 before Obamacare with a much better deductible.
I can’t explain it but I just remember my already impoverished family have to pay fines endlessly when I was a kid because we couldn’t afford health insurance for me.
So that is at least one way it failed. Made some of the poor even poorer.
It’s a huge complicated mess of a bill, with huge compromises that some people hated just for doing anything at all.
It expanded Medicaid by giving states money to give Medicaid to more people. Some states just outright refused to do it, even though they were being given the money which was money their residents had already paid taxes on. Some states did expand Medicaid, the residents liked it, and they still reversed it. Some never expanded it at all.
But even with expanding Medicaid, people who made too much money to qualify (a lot of people) were left with choosing private options on the exchanges that ObamaCare created. One complaint has been that premiums have gone up. That is true. What is also true is that premiums have gone up more slowly than they had been going up before ObamaCare.
It made a horrible, balkanized system a bit better. For the people who got Medicaid, it made things a lot better, except a lot of doctors don’t take Medicaid (the government doesn’t force doctors to accept it).
It was a mandate that tried to socialize the insurance industry. It was meant to make everything cheaper and make it easier to get insurance if you have pre-existing conditions but there were a few issues, the most important of which as the fact that the way you paid was via an increased tax rate, and there were some issues opting out. A lot of Americans don’t much like taxes going up, so it kind of turned into a shitshow. Eventually Republicans gutted the system and it became kind of useless.
A law that:
Federally subsidized private health insurance.
Protected sick people from losing insurance.
Fined people for not having insurance.
Failed to cap market costs.
People got health insurance, people used health insurance, health insurance charged more and more making it unaffordable.
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