It has come to my attention that, even among those who should know, or assert they know a lot about health care policy and the market, many don’t know that people like me exist. But there are many of us, many with far fewer resources than I, who now have much more expensive, less effective, junkier, nearly unusable plans than we had back when our allegedly “junk” plans were outlawed. Again, we are not the only ACA story. But we are part of the story, we were sold a bill of goods, and we’re often overlooked.
There aren’t a lot of good answers, here. There are many reasons for that, which start in the mid-20th century with a fundamental distortion of health-care markets through wage-and-price controls, and then a tax benefit that incentivized employer-based health insurance. ACA was not a good answer. AHCA likely isn’t a super one either.
In any system, and any change to a system, there will be people who come out on both the good and bad sides of the deal. When Obamacare supporters denied this truth applied to ACA, it was wrong. There’s the possibility of marginal improvement to it, but not if you do nothing, as insurers and customers alike pull out of exchanges because they can’t afford to stay in them. Yet another major provider announced this week it will drop out of the Virginia exchange. Republicans were elected several elections over to address just this problem.
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