Previous to Obamacare, there was no requirement for you to have health insurance. If you were unemployed or lost your job (and your health insurance with it.
If you were self employed, you didn't have to have health insurance. Some health care businesses might refuse you service without health insurance but you weren't fined for not having a health insurance card.
After Obamacare, there was the "mandate" that required everybody have health insurance or you would be charged a fine. (I'm pretty sure Trump used an executive order to drop the dollar amount of the fine to zero dollars... so there is that). This didn't matter if you just lost your job or couldn't get a new job or couldn't afford health insurance AND rent/mortgage/food/other necessities. Now there were supposed to be "subsidies" to help us poor folks pay for that mandatory health insurance but... that essentially is just going straight from government tax revenues into the revenue streams of the health insurance companies.
So, in essence, health insurance companies suddenly found themselves with something like 30 million NEW customers!!!!! So extra revenue from people who didn't want to get hit with the penalty, the subsidies the governments provided so that us poor folks could "afford" to buy in to a plan, and (at least in the state where I live) the Medicaid expansion is managed by private insurance companies (so they're probably getting paid extra money as a subcontractor on top of the subsidies to get more people enrolled in health insurance plans).
Adding some more info to this bit'o'thread...
Previous to Obamacare, there was no requirement for you to have health insurance. If you were unemployed or lost your job (and your health insurance with it.
If you were self employed, you didn't have to have health insurance. Some health care businesses might refuse you service without health insurance but you weren't fined for not having a health insurance card.
After Obamacare, there was the "mandate" that required everybody have health insurance or you would be charged a fine. (I'm pretty sure Trump used an executive order to drop the dollar amount of the fine to zero dollars... so there is that). This didn't matter if you just lost your job or couldn't get a new job or couldn't afford health insurance AND rent/mortgage/food/other necessities. Now there were supposed to be "subsidies" to help us poor folks pay for that mandatory health insurance but... that essentially is just going straight from government tax revenues into the revenue streams of the health insurance companies.
So, in essence, health insurance companies suddenly found themselves with something like 30 million NEW customers!!!!! So extra revenue from people who didn't want to get hit with the penalty, the subsidies the governments provided so that us poor folks could "afford" to buy in to a plan, and (at least in the state where I live) the Medicaid expansion is managed by private insurance companies (so they're probably getting paid extra money as a subcontractor on top of the subsidies to get more people enrolled in health insurance plans).