Quote: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.

 

I work for one of the largest consulting firms in the world that deals with this and was actually involved in helping congress deal with the regulations once the law was passed.  I'm not parroting anything from any news network.  I deal with this on a daily basis.  Feel free to PM me if you'd like to know my qualifications. 

 

The costs were artificially low to begin with.  The insurance companies have pretty much all been promised bailouts once they start losing money.  You seem to be ignoring the double digit rate increases that are happening around the country as insurance companies submit their premiums to the states.  You also conveniently leave out a a few things about that more affordable coverage, including the ridiculously high deductibles that are attached to many of those low cost plans. 

 

That's just the tip of the iceberg, but hey, you're the expert.  I'm just getting my info from Fox News. 

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