Comment by duxup

Quick summary: the US does not have anything approaching a modern healthcare system. (And likely will not for quite some time due to a set of structural factors.)

Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act or ACA) was an attempt to expand coverage and slow the rate of increase of costs. It did the former but less well with the latter.

One other thing the ACA did is stop the scourge of scam insurers. This is a thing where people would pay for "insurance" and then find out later that their "insurance" did not actually afford them any meaningful coverage. The ACA tried to close a set of loopholes and overall regulate the insurance market more closely.

Anybody reading this from outside the US probably lives in a place where low-cost healthcare is more accessible than it is in the US.

ObamaCare (actually the Affordable Care Act: ACA) is a band-aid solution. It's a way to at least ensure that everyone has a pathway to insurance if they have enough money. Basically, the government negotiates some plans with private insurers and makes them available to the general population.

It's subsidized, but the new budget has drastically decreased these subsidies and so the cost to enroll in the ACA is about to go up for people who want to get insurance through their marketplace.

Unfortunately not. It's still very broken, and next year it will be worse for a ton of people. I got AI to write a short answer for you:

> Short version: Obamacare never turned into “free primary care for everyone,” it was just a bunch of rules and subsidies bolted onto the same old private-insurance maze. It helped at the margins (more people covered, protections for pre-existing conditions), but premiums/deductibles can still go nuclear if you’re in the wrong income bracket, state, or employer situation. From an EU/Poland perspective it’s not a public health system at all, just a slightly nerfed market where you still get to roll the dice every year.

Obamacare failed at reducing costs. It mostly focused on insurance expansion and in consumer protections, not on dealing with hospital, drug, and provider pricing structures that actually drive the spending in the US healthcare system.

You comment sounds like snark but I understand if you don't know what Obamacare is.

(And I'm not an expert so hopefully people will correct any mistakes)

"Obamacare" was never healthcare for all. It is a GOP healthcare plan that heavily subsidizes private insurance. (Because free markets) And the current affordability crisis is the result of letting the government subsidies that help people pay for their Obamacare coverage lapse.

On a positive note: Obamacare (aka the ACA-PPP) did put some restrictions reasonable restrictions on the terrible things insurance companies used to do. For example, drop customers for "pre-existing conditions", impose lifetime payout maximums, etc.

They stripped it of most meaningful changes to get it passed. What it ended up being was kind of the worst of both worlds. A federally related marketplace for private healthcare insurance. They did however ban coverage limits on “pre-existing conditions”. Before Obamacare an insurer could whine that you had cancer before signing up and refuse to cover your cancer care.

> the previous administration thought everyone should be "temporarily" paying for her plan. Moving money from person A to person B obviously doesn't make anything cheaper

No, but it means I can't pay for a first-class ticket while someone else survives. I'll take that deal.

As a supporter of single payer(or really, anything else), I support this move. When half the nation is on subsidized healthcare they aren't so likely to care about costs.

Now, you have a lot more angry people, and hopefully that leads to real reform, because what we have now is unsustainable, even to upper middle class families.

when the gov foots the bill, there's no reason to have competition.

No, it definitely did not always cost $2k a month.

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