Has there ever been a more useless piece of major legislation than Obamacare?

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What exactly did it even do?

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The affordable care act made healthcare less affordable.

Exactly as it was designed to do.

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What exactly did it even do? Did it make anything better for anyone?

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It made everything way more expensive, added tons of red tape, and made insurance and big pharma companies rich as hell. It was a mass money laundering scam paid for by working Americans.

The Hussein insurance increase plan

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Absolutely. The people who weren't paying for health care before still aren't paying for it but they have much better coverage.

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Do they, though? By what metric?

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What exactly did it even do?

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robbed families of money needed for other things. robbed people of retirement spending money allocated to retirement accounts now paying for this monstrosity.

democrat bums now have better care and cheap on our expense. it is highway robbery and needs to be blown the frick up.

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Do they, though?

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Hell yes. Go talk to someone on a very low income and ask them what they pay for insurance if they have a plan. Don't interpret my response as a defense of obamacare; it was anything but that. I think it had two main goals:

Short term:
Transfer wealth from the wagon pullers to the wagon riders. If you had good coverage it's worse and you pay more, because they're using your money to pay for the free riders.

Long term:
Just frick up our system enough to where people ask for "free" national health care.

All of this was publicly known at the time, but Americans wanted their handouts more than their freedom, and they wanted to vote for the cool black guy.

The only thing i liked was extended the age children can be on their parents insurance.

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What exactly did it even do?

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It did a few things.

It shifted the curve for people not being able to afford health insurance upward. Here's how:

It made health insurance far more expensive by requiring companies to cover people who were already sick. This destroys the idea of it being "insurance" and it exponentially raises the costs. Costs were inflated for another reason, which I will get to in a minute.

Then they required taxpayers to "subsidize" (AKA, pay for) both the premiums and the deductibles for the inflated new policies.

So those people below that threshold made out like bandits.

Everybody else got raw dogged. Because not only were the rest of us forced to pay the increased premiums (and deductibles) for our own coverage, but also our tax dollars are now going to pay for the people who aren't paying premiums (or deductibles...more about deductibles shortly).

Everybody above the threshold is affected by this, but the group most notably affected is the group that is financially just above the threshold set. They could afford health insurance at the non-inflated prices, but they can't afford the new prices, and they don't qualify for subsidies.

Deductibles—people for some reason tend to only talk about premium increases while ignoring deductible increases. But the increases in deductibles have been as great or greater than the increases in premiums.

And remember, an increase in a deductible represents an actual health care expense that the insurance company used to pay for that now you pay for out of pocket. It's like denying claims without even having to go through the process of denying claims. They're pre-denied.

When I first started in health care in 2005 the average BC/BS deductible we used to see was $250. By. the time I sold my business earlier this year we would routinely see deductibles of $2,500-$5,000.

The other thing the ACA did, and the other reason that health care continues to get more expensive and we continue to consume more of it, is that it capped the profits that the insurance companies could make.

How does that raise costs, you ask?

Because it capped profits at a certain percentage. So the only way for them to increase profits is to grow the whole economic pie. And they have increased profits, you may have noticed since the passing of the law. Record profits almost every year except for during the pandemic.

Well, simple math. 15% of a billion is more than 15% of a million. People assume insurance companies don't want to pay for anything and try to avoid it.

Actually, they want to pay out a lot of money.

Sure, they act like they don't and they fight reimbursement for things, because they have to to maintain credibility and also to legitimately control the situation...they can't pay for EVERYTHING...there's not enough money to draw from to do that. They made that mistake in the 80s. So yeah, they fight some stuff on a granular level.

But overall, 30,000 foot view, they want to pay out a lot.

Because the more they pay out, the more they get to take in. The bigger the whole economic system becomes, the bigger that 15% becomes.

And it's your money they're taking in, and you're a captive customer base.

They raise premiums, what are you going to do about it?

Bitch and pay it.

And they know it.

So it's no problem for them to cover increased payouts. As long as they maintain reasonable appearances of responsibility.

Basically, health insurance companies wrote the ACA for Obama. It's possibly the biggest piece of crony corporatism in my lifetime.

IRA