Quote:The fact that you're calling it affordable speaks volumes. It's not affordable, and it's not making anything more accessible, but hey, at least it's free, right? Oh, wait.
Ok, time to throw examples out there.
I
work with the ACA on a daily freaking basis. My job is to go to small businesses and help them analyze their current healthcare costs vs. what it would cost them (and their employees) to go on ACA plans. Want to know what my findings are 99% of the time? For companies with 101+ employees, forget it. The ACA is not an option for your company. For companies with 51-100, it could go either way depending on what your current plan protections are. For companies with 50 or fewer employees making average to above-average incomes for the area, the ACA is better almost 100% of the time. If the employees are making $100,000/year, then it's much cheaper for the employer to drop coverage and turn employees loose, but it screws the employee.
The ACA does not exist to help people with $100,000/yr. jobs who already have great benefits. Is that a design flaw? Maybe, maybe not. The ACA, as it exists today, is best-suited to help workers with income up to four times the national poverty level get better, cheaper insurance than what employers can offer for a group that size, and it's designed to--
through subsidies--facilitate access to healthcare for those who couldn't otherwise get it. It's also designed to eliminate the ability of insurance companies to say, "Nope, you've got a history of depression, so we're not going to cover you." To borrow a line from Obama, pregnancy is not a pre-existing condition. That's what the ACA accomplishes. It's not the ultimate solution to healthcare reform, but it's a start, and that's more than any far-right legislator has proposed in the last 239 years.
For a low-income family, yes, ACA plans after subsidies frequently are free, at least in the markets I deal with (Colorado, Dallas, Houston, and--you guessed it--Florida). Sometimes those plans are too expensive, and that's usually because the person applying for insurance is a 60-year-old lifelong smoker. The overwhelmingly vast majority of the time, in my experience, the ACA does exactly what it's intended to do. It lowers healthcare costs for the employer and employee while providing equivalent coverage. It's easy to look at the numbers you see on the first page of foxnews.com and parrot their crap about the ACA being a complete failure, but when you work with the ACA and you work with its numbers on a daily basis and see just how full of turd Fox News is on the topic, it changes your perspective a bit.
