Comment by slg
2 days ago
>Additionally, as somebody who was around pre-ACA, I can not tell you how much better, in every single way, the post-ACA healthcare world is. Pre-existing conditions? Access to healthcare as an individual? These are life-changing possibilities, especially for entrepreneurs.
The failures and politicization of the ACA have caused us to be a little too dismissive of its successes and popularity.
Protections for pre-existing conditions and allowing children to stay on family plans until 26 in particular have made an incredible difference in a lot of people's lives and are wildly popular. So much so that it would be close to political suicide to try to remove them as evidence by Republicans controlling all three branches of government including both chambers of Congress and there is no serious talk of repealing them.
There is belief among a lot of its supporters that universal healthcare would have a similar wave of support if enacted and that the opposition is mostly irrational political arguments rather than people's true feelings about an actual policy. This is why the "ACA" polls higher than "Obamacare" despite those being two terms for the same legislation.
ACA is horrible for the middle class. The only reason it retains any type of popularity is because the media refuses to associated ballooning cost to cost redistribution that it enables. Preexisting conditions? Middle class family picking that up. Subsidy? Middle class family picking that up.
This is unfair to the ACA and factually incorrect. ACA subsidies (median household size) [1] are designed to start above the 50th percentile (income) [2].
The details matter. If you're a single person living alone at an income of $70,000.00, you're below the median household income and "picking up" other people's subsidies, but that's not indicative of the country.
[1] https://www.healthcare.gov/lower-costs/
[2] https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/p60/286...
In a wealthy and civilized society we have a moral obligation to care for all of our citizens. Some of them have pre-existing conditions and can't afford to pay market rates, so the middle class is going to have to subsidize them one way or another. Whether that subsidy comes in the form of higher insurance premiums or higher taxes hardly matters.