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

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It was a mass money laundering scam paid for by working Americans.

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What? Read Flats post below yours. If it was a money laundering scheme then so is every other federal program, including building a wall, mass exportations of illegals, etc.

Everything the federal government does will be accompanied by massive fraud. It’s true of every program I mentioned in this post, and it’s true of the ACA. But the ACA clearly delivered massive benefits for some Americans at the expense of most other Americans. It was intended to help the poor who could not afford health care, and that’s just what it did.

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It gave free health care to millions of people. How could you not know that?

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Yeah, pretty much the same people who had it "free" previously.

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the metric that they had no health insurance before and now they do.

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But do they? They don’t. They have charity hospital……but now that’s what we all have,

My wife's former plan would now be considered a platinum plan and costs 4 times as much. The bronze plan is like what used to be a cheap high deductible catastrophic only plan and it costs as much as a full coverage, low deductible plan before Obama that is if you work for a living.

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What exactly did it even do?

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In exchange for obligatory preexisting conditions coverage allowing people to hop in and out of coverage, and heavy regulation, It tremendously increased the cost of healthcare insurance and gave carriers monopolies in many geographic areas.

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

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There are several very popular things it forced upon insurance companies. These things also drove prices up.

Ability to Stay on parents insurance till your 26.
No more lifetime maximums.
No more denial for pre existing conditions

It also created market places to get and compare the insurance across providers easier.

Of course all those benefits got rolled right up into the insurance cost calcs and prices got higher.

As a physician, it was frustrating to have numerous people come in with their shiny new Obamacare card and no idea they had a $6,000 deductible. Then guess who they got mad at (hint: not Obama).

It’s pure and simple communism. Another Gubment handout to the permanent couch class.

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Well, they had some free healthcare if they wanted to go wait in a Charity Hospital emergency waiting room. That’s something you can call free health care but it’s not like what they now have.

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1. Any ER. Any ER is required to give them care.

2. You'd be surprised by how many people who could have easily qualified for completely subsidized taxpayer funded health insurance were simply too lazy to fill out the forms to apply for it and still just go to the ER (any ER) for "free" health care services.

3. Health CARE and Health INSURANCE are not the same thing. Although politician's deliberate efforts to make people conflate the two have been nearly 100% successful.

Having a policy means bupkis if you don't have the $5,000 cash to pay the deductible. So just like I posted upthread, people at the lowest end of the scale made out like bandits. Taxpayers pay both their premiums AND deductibles.

People just above that threshold usually don't have the money to cover the deductibles, even if they have money for the premiums.

So again, all the ACA did was shift the curve upward. There are still tens of millions of Americans who can't afford care, even though they have insurance.

Because now both the care AND the insurance are significantly more expensive post-ACA.

The statistics make it look like the ACA cut the number of uninsured people in the country in half, but I'd bet an honest analysis that looked at people being able to actually afford care—whether insured or not—might show a net negative effect. At best I would predict a wash.

But yeah, it's different people. If that shell game impresses you.

really, all it did was made insurance companies cover pre-existing illnesses. That caused rates to skyrocket. It certainly hasn't made healthcare or insurance affordable.