The ACA (Obamacare) Has Performed As Predicted

I’m glad you are Canadian Ian. If you were American you would not have survived long enough to be running this website.

I used to wonder why the majority of large US corporations didn’t support single-payer, when a little higher taxes would likely be cheaper for them in the long run than having to individually negotiate ever-more-expensive health plans for all their employees every year.

It also, theoretically at least, puts them at a disadvantage vis-a-vis international rivals who don’t have to pay employee health care because it’s covered by their respective states. Chomsky used to make this point.

I said theoretically because the reality is obviously more complicated. Most of these companies don’t in any way aspire to be “U.S.” companies anyway. They are solely profit-making entities at this point, and the highest profits are to be made on a global scale. “Externalities” are also much easier to hide when things are global.

Then there is the, ahem, larger goal:

“People, governments and economies of all nations must serve the needs of multinational banks and corporations.” – Zbigniew Brzezinski

I have had ‘Obamacare’ ever since it became available. I’m actually very happy with it. It is far better than having no insurance and much better than the crummy insurance plans you could buy as a self employed individual before it. And the insurance premiums I pay are very subsidized by the government. In other words, the government pays the insurance company a lot of money whether or not I get sick. I know it is not perfect. People need health care rather than insurance policies after all.

I am curious whether other actual people who do get their health care insurance through this system feel the way I do.

Here is an article about how keeping health insurance tied to employment has made working class/middle class Americans so humble, obedient, fearful. it helps to explain why a general strike would be very unlikely here.
https://dissidentvoice.org/Feb07/Zingh13.htm

One other thing Obamacare achieved, through the actual process of crafting and then passing/enacting Obamacare, was to poison the whole Health Care Reform well so thoroughly that it won’t even be tried again for decades.

I am very lucky in that Obamacare did not destroy the employER based health coverage I already had and still have.

>I am curious whether other actual people who do get their health care insurance through this system feel the way I do.

No, I went on it and it sucked entirely compared to any employer-based insurance I ever had.

I appreciate the responses. Personally, I think this country could and should have a medical payment/provision system such as the UK or Canada has. Yes I know they are different systems in many ways.

But the Obamacare act did have a positive impact on me and my circumstances- so it would be very ungrateful for me not to note that. The cancer surgery and treatments would have bankrupted me in 2018 had I not had Obamacare. Assuming I could have got that care in the first place.

Maybe I’m just part of a small group that saw a benefit from Obamacare. But I think it also expanded Medicaid for many millions of people also. So it is not such a small group that benefitted.

But then someone pointed out how tying health insurance to employment is yet another cudgel for disciplining labor, and then it made sense.

It’s misleading to refer to administrative Non-Essentials in administrative-heavy corporations as labour. Astrid is not labor. “She” is a PMC Non-Essential, just as Yves is/was, so to refer to them as labour is insulting to Essentials everywhere.

This Non-Essential class, which is prodigious, is effectively tangibly worthless. They are welfare queens. They provide less than zero value and yet they are paid a handsome stipend in the form of a salary that is akin to extravagant and gratuitous welfare.

You could jettison 80% of these bullsh*t Non-Essentials today and the corporation would still function as it does, maybe even more effectively and efficiently, and it would be much more profitable. Silicon Valley knows.

So, why do corporations do it? It’s called social control. It seems insane because it is insane. The price of social control is to steal the value produced by labor so the wealthy elite can live like royalty and their PMC minions can have their money for nothing and their chicks for free.

Remember, this is beyond single payer at this point. Universal Healthcare like the Canadian model or better is what is now needed. M4A is just glorified Obamacare because it still allows the insurance companies to continue their profit seeking. There can be no more healthcare insurance companies. They are long past their shelf life. Talk about Non-Essentials.

This insurance is new to the exchange for Georgia this year. Take a look at the BBB complaints. It’s clearly a criminal organization as most healthcare insurance companies are these days. It’s legal predation and even if it’s illegal what they’re doing, no one is policing them. They’re in bed with the various state insurance regulators. You just knew this would be the end result of the ACA. A quarter measure meant to extend the life of failed healthcare insurance business models.

Bright Health

Here’s a taste — just the tip of the iceberg. Biden and tghe Dems have done nothing to right the sinking ship. I see no evidence that the Biden admin has reversed Trump’s cuts to the ever important Cost Sharing Reduction (CSR) subsidies. The CSR is in large part what made healthcare affordable by lowering deductibles and copays. Think of how many people are, and will continue to, die early because of this. More than are dying from COVFEFE-45. Many more, in fact. But hardly a peep from the captive corporate media.

There’s a reason why you probably never heard of this company. They are so inept at what they’re supposed to do that they SHOULD be ignored. I have been battling with them to cover a claim for a mammogram since January! In case you didn’t know, mammograms are a COVERED procedure through the Affordable health Care Act aka Obamacare. Add that to the fact that their premiums are double what I was paying last year. So I’m paying way more for waaaay less service and coverage. What a disgrace. I know that insurance companies are ONLY in business to make money. At least some of the others put a little effort into trying to work with their clients.

Churchill remark: “Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.”

It might be apocryphal or a paraphrase but it does carry something about the American character.

Universal Healthcare, under one of many forms, is the best, possibly the only, workable result. But, being Americans, we just can’t observe effectiveness and copy the form. Not if it wasn’t invented here. So we have to two-step our way around the bush while feigning disinterest in getting to where we all know where we are heading.

No Obamacare, the ACA, isn’t the desired result. It won’t work in the long run. But it does move the debate. The idea more coverage is better is pretty well established. Many who were previously uninsured are now insured with subsidies. Which built up a constituency that will resist any return to the old ways. Many of these are not working people. A lot of theme are very old, disabled, living on SS. This dilutes the idea that insurance is best delivered through employers. The ACA is a step in the right direction and a stepping stone to the plan we need.

For all its weaknesses the ACA was a tremendous advancement. Presidents going back to Nixon realized the need to address healthcare issues. It has been a millstone around our collective necks. Holding back economic social and technological progress.

If it works to get us to the next step, and on to UHC, it will have done its job brilliantly.

Thinking more about it I’ve decided that the single most important thing about the ACA was that it weakened and defeated the pan-institutional logjam using the weak and nearly insufficient tools available, and did it in such a way that return to the previously ossifies system is largely impossible. For the first time in a century things changed in a significant way. We are moving.

Which is why conservatives despise it viscerally.

ACA was sold as being a step, with a public option possibly being the next step. But competition in our form of capitalism is often considered pure concentrated evil. Of course, no matter how much you try to demonstrate the success of health care systems in practically every other developed nation to the naysayers, they’ll always steer the discussion back to Venezuela. Always Venezuela. And when you state that the health care system in Venezuela is among the most advanced in South America, you’re told to move there. And then the singing of the American National Anthem begins. I always hate that part.

“The reason Americans don’t have it is that part of the rich don’t want it, because it makes some of them wealthy, and they can afford to pay the inflated prices, so it isn’t a personal problem to them.”

In addition, access to health care has become a coveted status symbol.

What it also means is, every single day I have remaining that I can still breath and think, I wish death upon the rich and their PMC minions.

In 12 years I’ve seen the doctor which that provider gave me exactly once, a physical reserved a month in advance. Every other time he’s been at least a couple weeks out no matter what my concern. And then a nurse practitioner is suggested who’s either incompetent and/or a gatekeeper to an in-house specialist. Double dipping. American capitalism at its finest.

Maybe this belongs in the preparing for bad times thread, but medical care costs are sure to skyrocket cost during bad times. An American man will surely need to know his limitations. Mine is high bad cholesterol, a tendency for overuse injuries and the potential for arthritis. For starters, I read the side label of every box I see in grocery stores and damn near every one is full of poison. Fortunately, I don’t have a taste for rich or exotic foods and can stick to superfoods with the occasional splurge day. I wonder about reasonable naturopath alternatives who I’d rather be my gatekeeper.

It’s perfectly emblematic of late stage predatory capitalism, isn’t it? Peaky Blinders swaps a blue collar for white. Thomas Shelby and Co. have gone legit.

The Times’ Investigation Into How Companies That Harvest Body Parts Upend Death Investigations

Companies that harvest human organs, bones and other parts have moved into government morgues across the country to gain access to more bodies. In some cases, procurement teams are taking body parts before coroners are able to conduct an autopsy, even in the midst of sensitive investigations such as possible homicides. The procurement companies say there has never been a case in which a death investigation has been harmed by the procurement of body parts. Yet, The Times found more than two dozen cases in which investigations were complicated or upended by procurement, in just two Southern California morgues.

@Plague Species,

I have chronic kidney disease, now stabilized at partial function level. How did that happen? Possibly years of borderline high blood pressure, neglected due to borderline depression.

But also possibly, and quite likely actually, the slow steady consumption over 3 years or so of a couple of kilograms of ibuprofen. Why? Because I was repetitive-motion injured at work and the philosophy was to keep the working wounded working, so Ibuprofen 600mg 4 times a day was prescribed for several years to contain the pain enough to keep working. And when my hand-arm system failed so comprehensively that I needed months of medical leave and hand-arm treatment, keep eating the ibuprofen all through that too.

When I told the expert senior attending nephrologist about that , he said that . . . . oh yes, that much ibuprofen could really do it.

I remember a conversation with a pharmacist co-worker only a few years ago where he was reminiscing about how his fellow pharmacists were talking many years previously about the rise of mass consumption of mass quantities of ibuprofen by the public. They were all predicting to eachother the rise of mass quantities of kidney failure all over the public, and the rise of mass dialysis. And sure enough, after some years of mass-ibuprofening of the public, the rise of dialysis centers all over everywhere began rising.

I myself offered to another other different pharmacist my personal suspicion that the rise of mass treatment of tens of millions of Americans with statins would lead to mass dementia throughout tomorrow’s population of old people. What did I base that on? Statins prevent the production of cholesterol so effectively that I suspect that cholesterol will be stripped out of wherever it is in the body to send it to wherever it needs to be . . . . in bodies rendered borderline-defficient in cholesterol by a steady diet of statins. And that includes stripping cholesterol out of the myelin sheaths which insulate every neuron in the brain. And that pharmacist said .. . . ” interesting. It could happen.” So there is my prediction. Starting in 20 years or so, mass dementia way beyond anything happening now.

When I was offered statins and urged to take them, I declined the kind offer and resisted the urging. For that reason among others.

Another cause of so much high medical costs in America is the mass deprivation of foodborn nutrients through the mass feeding of nutrient-free virtual-vegetables and petrochemical GMO shitcorn and shitsoy derived ” phake fuud produkt” to the mainstream public. The American public is distinctly unhealthier than other national publics, though some other national publics are racing to catch down to American levels of anti-health through anti-nutrition. Coca-Cola in Mexico, for example. Rising obesity and diabetes throughout the world. etc.

Jerry Brown

have had ‘Obamacare’ ever since it became available. I’m actually very happy with it. It is far better than having no insurance and much better than the crummy insurance plans you could buy as a self employed individual before it.

The only good thing you can say about Obamacare is that it’s a HUGELY expensive way to give some people real insurance at a cost of subsidizing our bloated insurance- and medical industrial complex. Before Obamacare, private plans offered to individuals were a scam—they were happy to take your money as long as you made few claims, but the month after you got a cancer or other severe health problem diagnosis, and you’d be a cost rather than a revenue source for the insurance company, you’d get a letter from your insurance company “friends” cancelling your policy. In my state the R government allows for non-Obamacare plans, and a Trump-loving person whose beat-up pickup truck is plastered with Trump stickers brags about how cheap his non-ACA insurance is.

I’ve tried to tell him the first time that he or anyone in his family really needs it, it will go “poof”, but to know avail. What’s frustrating is that I’m sure he knows that is exactly the way that both the car and homeowner’s insurance works–make claims, and you’ll see your policy cancelled–but to no avail.