He makes George W Bush sound like a Rhodes scholar. He seems to be backtracking from repealing ACA. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/03/30/democrats-aca-obamacare-popular-trump-repeal/ Trump — who as president pushed to kill the law and last November reiterated that he wants to “replace” it — has angrily countered on social media that Biden “DISINFORMATES AND MISINFORMATES ALL THE TIME,” and that all Trump wants to do is make the 14-year-old law better.
Obamacare was and is a disaster but the Republicans did nothing about it when they had many chances to. To make matters worse, many of them got elected based on promises to do so. I will not read the WP so I can’t speak to the article but at this point there is very little that can be done to repeal. Like immigration, both sides are quite comfortable screwing all of us with this bullshit. If the real intention of Obamacare was to get more lower income people insured, then there were many much simpler and far cheaper ways to go about doing so that would not have shifted so much of the burden one rung up the ladder onto the working class. Obamacare was a sellout. The democrats got three steps ahead on socializing medicine, the republicans got something to complain and campaign about, and the big healthcare and medical insurance companies got much richer. Well done boys and girls.
What exactly are you looking at for that claim? Most reports I see are expenses growing in line with history and more people covered. Costs are HIGH for sure. But they have always been high and growing and nothing Obamacare did made it cheaper or more expensive... just insured more folks.
Poor people have it subsidized. Rich people don't care what they pay each month. The burden and cost are at the middle. Medical debt is centralized in the Middle class, not the poor or rich. Percent of income spent on health insurance is far greater for the middle class. Insurance costs for the middle class are far outpacing wage growth. There are a bunch of studies on this, I just don't feel like digging them up on my phone. The goal of ACA was to get a lot more people insured, which I'm happy with and it accomplished. Unfortunately it came at the expense of the middle class
Here is a balanced assessment that says: "While the results vary from state to state, the overall numbers suggest that post-ACA premium increases have fluctuated but have been modest compared to those before ACA implementation." I think people confuse high costs with a rate of change. Did Obamacare Make Premiums Go Up?
The best analysis of the effects of the ACÁ is the Oregon Medicaid health experiment, which offered us a rare randomized control analysis of a government policy. If I recall correctly, this study found few significant heath benefits and increased costs, but it also found increases in happiness and personal financial stability. Oregon Medicaid health experiment - Wikipedia
Not sure why the rich “not caring” has anything to do with it, the rich also “don’t care” about petty little things like housing costs or automobile insurance or any number of things where it might be perceived the middle class is getting squeezed. That’s part of the perks of being rich. Sounds like your issue is with the wealth gap more than health insurance. But as it comes to healthcare, they pay for the care they demand/need just as the middle class does. Maybe “the rich” extract more in terms of vanity healthcare (think plastic surgeons in LA). But in terms of emergent care healthcare is a unique market in that there really is no bid/ask. It simply doesn’t function as any other market does, because for most aspects of healthcare there is no choice. This is why years ago I shifted away from the conservative “vision” (or lack thereof) of healthcare and opened up more to the idea of single payer. I thought ACA was an interesting middle ground. It’s clearly imperfect, but at this point when you see conservatives ranting about it it’s kind of like them ranting about the post office. They really have no solution.
I believe his point was that poor and rich alike are disconnected from rising insurance premiums because the poor receive government assistance while the rich can mostly ignore the increases as trivial impacts on their finances.
The Family Glitch was a huge issue for millions of middle class people who worked for small companies with high rates due to lower group members. The glitch only allowed the employees cost to count towards the exchange and ignored the rest of the families cost. It was a glitch that they didnt really foresee and should have fixed immediately. They finally fixed it, ..a decade later... but that was 100% screwing millions of middle class people. But in fairness, the republicans did as much to keep the glitch in place as anyone and Biden actually pushed the solution through... (Although he was a big part of the glitch existing in the ACA from the start. ) So...in other words...Both sides can wear that L.
