this doesn't really help you because they still get to decide if something is "necessary" as determined by your insurer's billing department/agency. If yes it applies towards your deductible/out-of-pocket limit, if no, then get fucked.
Obamacare is the whole reason I haven't seen a doctor or a dentist in 6 years now. I just cannot afford it. The irony of "affordable" healthcare. That whole thing was just a bail out for insurance companies.
Could you explain the mechanic behind this? Was trying to explain to my father how shitty obamacare is and how it was not a step in the right direction. (Not living in the US obviously)
It's about deductibles mostly. The deductible is how much you have to pay in a calendar year before the plan covers anything and that is several thousand dollars minimum. About 6 grand for an individual for the bronze plan I think. That's on top of the monthly cost, which is around $400, for a bronze plan individual. Of course, it's a sliding scale for plan quality with the monthly increasing and the deductible decreasing going up the scale from bronze to platinum. Fortunately, all plans have probably been calculated to fuck you over equally by a cadre of dead eyed actuarial freaks.
And that's not getting into out of network shenanigans, where they can charge you full unnegotiated price for like an anesthesiologist because they're contracted to the hospital but not in your insurance shit or whatever. I'm not even sure if that happens to ACA plans, but it probably does because why not, it was all for the insurance companies anyways
I think pretty much the only positive with the ACA is that insurance companies can't refuse to sell you or charge you more for having preexisting medical conditions, which is like the slightest alleviation of relentless barbarism
There's a reason why even the most dead-eyed Republicans and neoliberal demons still talk about protecting people with pre-existing conditions - it was absolutely relentless barbarism back before the ACA protections came into play.
Back when the ACA passed, something like 33% of Americans were effectively locked out of the private health insurance market because of a "pre-existing condition". Today, it's likely more like 40-45% of Americans. There's no way that the system would be sustainable if we got rid of those protections.
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).
Amazing how well it worked out for the right calling ACA far lef and socialist. People can’t imagine anything more radical
Aren't there 30 million people without insurance in the US? What do they think "universal" means...?
That nobody should be facing a medical bankruptcy without a lawyer on their side.
Single payer is literally universal healthcare though. But the ACA is not single-payer health insurance.
Somebody write a bot script that replies to anyone who says "you do realize" with "lmao" like the old Overton Window bot
I reflexively roll my eyes every time I hear "you do know..." because of that sub.
Universal healthcare means healthcare that anyone in the universe can have assuming they can pay for it. I dont make the rules that's what it means
Subredditdrama has been a joke for about 3-4 years now. Ever since Trump won their brains have been broken.
Can someone give me the tweet-sized explanation of the difference between single payer and universal healthcare? I thought single payer meant "you do business with the government or you don't do business in this country."
they're the same thing.
Single-payer healthcare is a type of universal healthcare[1] in which the costs of essential healthcare for all residents are covered by a single public system (hence 'single-payer').
i think sbeb has the right mindset and just fucked up what they meant to say. luka cola is a neo-liberal piece of shit.
They're not the same thing though. Single payer is practically universal typically (theoretically it doesn't have to be) but universal isn't necessarily single payer.
You're just arguing semantics at this point because you're asserting a different definition as the "true" definition.
What different definition, this is the definition... It's literally in the name...
Well, single payer basically means all healthcare is paid for by the state. Theoretically it doesn't have to be universal, just to be paid for entirely by the state, no private insurance shit. It's what they had in the UK before the tories pissed all over the NHS in 2012. Universal healthcare can be single payer, but it doesn't have to be. It can be a mixed system, where everyone has access to healthcare, but maybe it's your employer who has to pay for your insurance (unless you're unemployed in which case the state pays for it and other shit like that) and you have the option to pay for a private insurance etc. So it is similar to Obamacare in some ways, except it's actually universal and doesn't leave like 30 million people uninsured. It's what many European countries have pretty much. The best way to implement universal healthcare is via single payer of course for many reasons.
Theoretically it doesn’t have to be universal
Spoilers for when America puts in austerity measures to save costs by forbidding healthcare from being administered to misfits.
https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/kfzbmh/bernie_sanders_claims_that_joe_biden_is_not_doing/ggd7vge/?context=3
This is the same as when Biden says that he believes healthcare is a human right, but his healthcare plan still leaves people uninsured. If access to healthcare is contingent on anything, including your ability to afford it or your job, then it’s not a right, it’s a privilege!
