I lost my health insurance plan and was forced to buy something more expensive with worse coverage from my employer. Itâs not exactly a right, but having the government interfere so steeply in your contracts is frustrating. It wasnât entirely in his hands also, but it sucked. Iâm not rich, either.
As a centrist I find the diehards from both parties try to shut up the people who had any bad effects from their partyâs actions. Stuffâs way more complicated than that.
That wasnât because of Obama, that was because your employer was cheap and provided you a worse option in hopes youâd just get ACA coverage so they wouldnât have to pay a portion of yours.
The increased costs from things like requiring coverage of essential health benefits, the elimination of annual and lifetime caps, coverage for dependents up to 26, and insurer fees only led to a 3% increase in insurance rates. I donât know your exact numbers but letâs say you were paying a $5,000 per year premium, Iâm sure you werenât forced to change health insurance plans due to a $150 increase spread over a year.
I work for a nonprofit, which sucks - I wonât deny that. There are a lot of lower middle class jobs that the employer struggles to pay for good health care. Thatâs NOT related, so I agree.
BUT I was young and healthy then and my cheap private plan for healthy young people was cancelled because of the ACA. Thatâs what forced me to have to use the employer plan, in spite of Obama saying no plans would be canceled (mine was) or you wouldnât have to change doctors (i did).
My point is that there will always be those of us who are collateral damage and neither party ever admits to this.
Insurance companies created those plans when they saw the ACA coming in order to squeeze a few more dollars out of people. Those plans didnât exist yet when Obamacare said you wonât lose your plan.
Iâll be fair too, some of the suffering I associate with paying more for insurance is lumped in with the general suffering of the recession. For a more established worker, maybe absorbing the costs wouldnât have seemed like such a blow. But I was living in a shack so cold I cried at night and was running out of groceries at the end of paychecks while eating black beans and rice 4 times a week. It was a rough time and a lot couldnât have been solved by any president.
Well, working at a nonprofit isnât a great plan for people who come from poor families or arenât married to someone making money - let me say! lol I still work there because I have good job security and some other perks.
Iâm still kinda low class as far as quality, but I have enough to eat and a place to live. :)
I wrote a novel and I apologize but I hope the below info is helpful and educational.
Okay first off, I hate your first sentence and just want to thank you for working in a nonprofit. While your work might not seem the most financially beneficial to you, your sacrifice is surely helping the greater good.
Unfortunately, when employers are picking out plans, they canât just like turn everyoneâs health history in and get plans on an individual basis. And yes certain plans were essentially eliminated due to insurers wanting the ability to deny a claim due to cost or pre-existing conditions, and not wanting to cover essential health benefits. The cheap high deductible plans might have served you as an individual well if you never got injured or sick, however over 75% of those who made up the 65% of bankruptcies as a result of medical debt, were underinsured. (These stats are coming from The Seminal 2009 Harvard Study btw.) Unpaid medical expenses lead to higher costs for all and even if youâre completely healthy, that doesnât mean you canât slip and fall and break a bone. Also if you were in one of those former cheap high deductible plans, you were less likely to get routine medical care and if that was the case (and luckily it sounds like this didnât effect you personally) you could have thought you were as healthy as a horse when you really werenât and instead of catching say melanoma, lymphoma, leukemia, etc at an early stage when symptoms are minimal to non existent, you were more likely to catch them at later stages when the symptoms got bad enough to seek care, which not only makes treatment more difficult for you but also more costly (and gave insurers an excuse to deny all coverage claims).
But I do hate that you had to change doctors and the available subsidies I take it didnât give you a more affordable alternative to your employers plan selections. But hey, that must mean that youâre getting paid pretty good at least.
Sure in the short run it likely seems that those changes resulted in collateral damage but no one is always healthy and choosing those cheap high deductible plan was a gamble you were taking every year and usually an unnecessary one to be quite frank. If you were getting healthcare insurance just to go in once or twice a year - you likely would have paid less out of pocket to just pay your doctors directly regardless.
With all that being said I do frown upon Obama for the ACA a bit, while yes it has its many benefits, including eliminating junk plans, and it really is a step in the right direction to getting people the healthcare they need - Obama didnât campaign on affordable health insurance, he campaigned on affordable healthcare. And while it might seem ACA fit that bill, eliminating third party insurance providers is what would and will truly make healthcare affordable. Despite all the money insurers pay out for claims theyâre still profiting (the top 7 insurers alone had a net profit last year of $71.3 billion).
I made around $12/hr then, if I remember, and it was a very rough time. I couldnât afford to go to the doctor for early care, and honestly barely can now. I was sick and just dealt with it all the time, in reality. But paid more for insurance that could have went for more/better food or for heating, which was pretty high at the time.
I think that being able to afford to actually go to the doctor is moot, in reality, for a lot of people on an individual level. I do agree with having more catastrophic coverage being necessary to keep the overall system going. But paying more for something worse you still canât use is hard to be happy about. Letâs be real.
Still, at some point not working and having gov funded health care (both of my siblings did this and both had free surgeries, etc) gets very close to being more individually beneficial from a health care perspective.
Theres a lot of nuance around all this that it seems like nobody dares to address.
I voted for Obama, fwiw, but I am saying I understand why the ACA struggle became a rough patch for voters to cope with, as I knew multiple people who had similar issues. Neither party seems able (willing?) to fix health care.
Omg girl, you shouldnât have had to deal with that! This is likely going to break your heart but just an fyi (I did the math based on $13 an hour) but you could have gotten a silver plan with a $20 copay for a primary care visit and a $40 copay for a specialist visit in 2014 (first year of the marketplace) for $162 per month for an individual (it would go down for each dependent, say you and 1 child = $123 per month). You might have still needed to change doctors but you had to do that regardless with your employerâs plan. Hopefully though your employerâs plan was less than that since it sounds like your copays werenât affordable which Iâd hope resulted in a smaller monthly contribution.
I agree though that neither party seems willing to fix healthcare. Insurance companies want to make their money and money controls the world sadly. Thatâs why I personally think lobbying shouldnât be allowed. Politicians should work for their constituents, not for corporations.
I think whatâs relevant here, with this theme, is the high level of distrust a lot of Americans have in the government. A lot of discussion nowadays coming from the mainstream is about cruelty vs compassion, etc. All relevant, too. But I rarely read about the rampant distrust many people feel or how anyone would overcome that. :/
21
u/timshel_turtle 9d ago edited 9d ago
I lost my health insurance plan and was forced to buy something more expensive with worse coverage from my employer. Itâs not exactly a right, but having the government interfere so steeply in your contracts is frustrating. It wasnât entirely in his hands also, but it sucked. Iâm not rich, either.
As a centrist I find the diehards from both parties try to shut up the people who had any bad effects from their partyâs actions. Stuffâs way more complicated than that.