Tero wrote:Affordable or not, they were insurance plans. Those people had nothing available. Nothing is not a choice. Turning down an expensive plan is.
This is absurd. The only people who had "nothing" available were, arguably, those with preexisting conditions (but, even that is not accurate, as there were options for many with preexisting conditions). However, that was not a large portion of the uninsured that were covered by Obamacare. Nobody is going to take that away.
The unaffordable bit is that what Obamacare did was make it a law that everyone in the US must be covered by insurance, meaning you either have to (a) buy it on the open market, (b) buy it in the exchange, (c) get it through an employer, or (d) get it through a government program. Obamacare is not government provided healthcare that can be taken away.
Obamacare provided subsidies for a few people - these subsidies are partial payments of a person's premium, depending on income (from just above Medicaid qualification up to about below middling income. It does not apply to the 85% of the population covered through some sort of employer provided health insurance plan. That's why so many people don't think it's a big deal - they're not the ones paying directly if they have employer provided health insurance (at least they don't pay for it all).
Obamacare doesn't help most of the "uninsured" because most of the people who were uninsured were making $50,000 to $75,000 per year and chose to not buy health insurance. Now, the insurance they weren't buying before is costs three times as much as it did, and they aren't eligible for subsidies. That's why only 10,000,000 give or take people signed up through the exchanges. The IRS penalty is very small, so it makes no financial sense for these folks who didn't want to pay for insurance before to pay for it now when it's three times as expensive. The big hit for those people will only come when the penalty for being uninsured is really high.
This law did not help the poor, because the poor could qualify for government provided health insurance through Medicaid, and the working poor who didn't qualify for Medicaid used to be able to buy policies for $150 per month per person. Now, those same policies are either unavailable or $450 per month. I know this - I know from whence I speak.
The Affordable Care Act is a failure. It is a monstrous waste of money and it made everything more expensive. It is not justified by saying that people with preexisting conditions needed help. Those folks could have been helped at a fraction of the trillion dollars spent on Obamacare.
“When I was in college, I took a terrorism class. ... The thing that was interesting in the class was every time the professor said ‘Al Qaeda’ his shoulders went up, But you know, it is that you don’t say ‘America’ with an intensity, you don’t say ‘England’ with the intensity. You don’t say ‘the army’ with the intensity,” she continued. “... But you say these names [Al Qaeda] because you want that word to carry weight. You want it to be something.” - Ilhan Omar
