The "Amerikaan" UNaffordable Care Act

[Trapezoid]

I finally gave in and suffered through the buggy MA health insurance website to get insured, after being uninsured for way too long. I make too much to qualify for MassHealth (hurray?) but the only other options were a lot more expensive than simply eating the yearly tax penalty for not having insurance. I'm young and healthy can afford paying full price for the occasional checkup, right? I even sprained my arm a couple years ago and that was still cheaper than having insurance.

Until earlier this year, when I had an overnight ER visit (thought I was having a pulmonary embolism but it turned out to be a complete false alarm.) The bill was not devastating, but awful enough to make me realize that if I were ever hit by a car or got appendicitis, anything requiring actual surgery, I'd be royally fucked, so, time to suck it up.
It is a frustrating process and for months I was turned off by stuff like open enrollment periods (I literally could not get insurance until a week ago) and activation dates. The insurance I picked doesn't kick in until January 1st. If I were hospitalized before than, what happens? Probably something terrible.

Thankfully MassHealth seems to be a great option for most of my friends. My girlfriend has it and pays very little. One year she made too much and was booted off of it, which is frustrating since freelance incomes can fluctuate wildly. But nonetheless, it's utterly ridiculous to me that other states didn't even have that option before.

[Ryan Timothy B]

Such a barbaric system.

[FamousAdventurer77]

I would rather be taxed and provided with adequate health care than be taxed because I can't afford inadequate health care.

Totally concur. Hey, my taxes pay for wars I don't agree with, politicians' salaries when a majority of them have vast incomes from other sources, said politicians' state cars and Cadillac Plan health insurance while my neighbors go bankrupt from medical bills, corporate welfare for large businesses who fucked themselves while small businesses are FOREVER hung out to dry...and all of us working stiffs who make less than $110K/year get really burned on paying for Social Security. Which was promised to our grandparents as tax-free money but that was a lie, and which our generation isn't even going to benefit from when we're old (all while we're not going to have the defined-benefit pension plans that many of our grandparents had, either.)

I'd MUCH rather have my taxes go to universal healthcare than many of the things my hard-earned money gets pissed away on.

The bill was not devastating, but awful enough to make me realize that if I were ever hit by a car or got appendicitis, anything requiring actual surgery, I'd be royally fucked, so, time to suck it up.

Yep. I debated dropping my COBRA because of how much the payments were killing me, until I got into a pit-related accident at a show in late 2011 (head injury.) I didn't require surgery, but all my scans, exams, and hospital admission fees would've cost over $20,000 at that fucking toilet North Central. My insurance picked up most of the tab, I paid less than $1,500 when all was said and done.
What clinched it for me was when my father was diagnosed with colon cancer. All his treatments would've literally cost over $1M, and my family is not the frigging Waltons. After that, I swore up and down I'd continue to pay for the plan as painful as it was.

We need universal healthcare like yesterday!

[Ryan Timothy B]

There's one good thing though with a system like the ACA. When things fail, they quickly get changed. It seems like it's one step towards a universal healthcare system (even though it's still shit) - or I'm dead wrong.

[monkey0506]

When things fail, they quickly get changed.

Hah. Funny joke. Not in Amerikaa they don't.

[Trapezoid]

Is that like, some Afrikaans joke?

[monkey0506]

Calling it "America" would imply that it's the same country that broke off from Britain 230 years ago.

[Trapezoid]

I would hope not.

[Eric]

Calling it Britain implies it's the same Britain that America broke off from 230 years ago. I prefer to call it Britain Bambaataa Planet Rock.

[monkey0506]

That's perfectly true, but I was referring to the historical state of Britain, so my logic holds.

[Snarky]

Calling it "America" would imply that it's the same country that broke off from Britain 230 years ago.

Calling it America implies that it's the land discovered/mapped by Amerigo Vespucci, i.e. the coast of Brazil. Because logic.

[dactylopus]

Call it what you will, that's not the point here.  The point is that this ACA is a broken piece of legislation attempting to fix a broken system.  It's hardly a band-aid.  Better yet, it's a band-aid that's covered in caustic toxins.  It may stop some of the bleeding, but the wound is going to get infected.

[Andail]

Call it what you will, that's not the point here.

Since Monkey persists in writing it "Amerikaan" for some contrived reason and making a deal about how  "America" apparently should only be used to refer to the region during the 18th century, I'd say it's a pretty big point. If it wasn't the point, the thread wouldn't have "Amerikaan" in its title, right? So I say let people address that too.

[monkey0506]

for some contrived reason

I can honestly say, I don't know that I have ever felt more understood.

[Snarky]

The law or the system it is trying to create is certainly far from perfect. A single-payer system would almost certainly have been better for the American people, but that idea was DOA due to the opposition on the right. The compromise you ended up with was an attempt to create something that would be acceptable to Republicans (indeed, that the Republicans had championed)... who ended up hating it and doing their best to sabotage it regardless. (What can we learn from this? Fuck the Republicans.)

Given this flawed approach, the attempt to provide healthcare to everybody does however require the individual mandate. Remember, the law says insurance companies cannot consider preexisting conditions in denying anyone insurance or setting their insurance rates (because otherwise, sick people would find it impossible to get insurance, which defeats the purpose). But that would mean lots of healthy people would choose not to buy insurance until they got sick. And that would be like selling lottery tickets that always paid out: the insurance companies would have to set the prices so high you'd basically be paying them just as much as for the treatment. The whole thing would collapse. Therefore, to make the whole thing work you have to tell people they must have healthcare insurance, even if they're healthy.

Paying insurance fees you can't afford sucks. Getting sick without insurance in America sucks worse. Being poor sucks in general. But hey, what could be more American than millions of people trapped in poverty, screwed over by a failed social system and dysfunctional politics?

[dactylopus]

If the individual mandate is to be seen as a necessity, then this whole thing should be abandoned.  They should really work to reform the entire health care paradigm.

(What can we learn from this? Fuck the Republicans.)

Indeed.  They are truly the ones standing in the way of progress.  Not only in preventing this ACA from going into effect, and not only in shutting down the government, but in denying the people of the only real solution available, which would be the aforementioned single-payer system.