So – when I was in elementary school a friend fell and broke his leg. Not a BIG deal right? I remember any number of my friends coming into class with a cast on; we’d all signed it, grimace at how much pain our friend was in and listen as they told slowly growing tales of the gruesome accident. But in the case of this one kid, his family didn’t have health insurance.
They sold everything, moving into a tiny apartment, struggling. They drained his college fund to pay for the medical expenses. We only REALLY knew about it because the kid’s younger brother was friends with my little brother and he was pissed because the parents had also raided HIS college fund.
With that as a terrifying example of one fall ruining a family’s Life through medical debt, I was always terrified to go without health insurance. Once I’d graduated college (my parents’ coverage stuck with me till I graduated, as I remember) I was teaching and had health insurance through my job – but when I quit that, I never had employer-provided coverage again –and so I’ve been buying my own since 1999.
The ACA is a big deal. It was when it went into play, it has been throughout its troubled existence and now, with its potential demise – it’s going to touch a LOT of Lives with its absence.
Have you ever had to buy your own insurance before the ACA went into effect?
Have you purchased from the exchanges?
Has your state opted in to the ACA? Or are your perceptions of the law mostly the product of a state that’s done everything they can to keep you from seeing the benefits of the law. I’m looking at you Maine, Idaho, Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska, Utah, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri, Tennessee, Missouri, Wisconsin, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina and VIRGINIA.
Fascist rob thinks that if your answer is “no” to any of the above that you really shouldn’t get to speak up on this subject.
Why? Because chances are your job has provided health insurance, or perhaps you never had health insurance at all – and when you looked at the ACA exchanges it came as a nasty shock at just how expensive it all was – not realizing that the exchanges and the ACA have made it SO much cheaper… or at least made it not get more expensive quite so fast.
Speaking of which – let’s talk about the nastier shock of having bought into the system for years, fighting through complicated terms and varied plans – NOT aggregated in some central website, but going from website to website, catalog to catalog – of staying healthy but often being afraid to use your health insurance for simple checkups and bad colds because you know you build towards a lifetime cap of usage (something gotten rid of under Obamacare) – and of slowly having the ever-increasing premiums eat up a larger and larger part of your earnings.
When I started buying my own health insurance I was paying something beautifully affordable. I was 24 – hale and also hearty – I think I paid something around $50 a month. Over the years, in my mid-thirties, still healthy, slowly increasing my deductible and reducing services and coverage to TRY to keep having health insurance – my service had been abraded to “catastrophic” care at ten TIMES the cost – closing in at $500 a month. I’d chosen to move out of the corporate world into the artistic musician one – and as my income had literally dropped by an order of magnitude, so my healthcare had increased by one.
I was contemplating dropping my coverage completely because I simply couldn’t afford it – eyeballing Congress dragging their feet on the Affordable Care Act… for me it came JUST in time. Barely. Mostly because when the Democrats WERE in control of everything, they immediately fell all over one another to fight with themselves rather than actually get anything DONE. By the time they were ready, it was under threat of an increasing incursion of Republican legislators – and rather than passing things the “normal” way, they had to sort of play games with the rules and shove it through via “reconciliation” and as a “tax”, forever tarring the hard-to-grasp 1500 page law with the added feeling of conspiracy…
Let’s not discuss the talk shows making things up about “death panels” and rationing.
And so the ACA has teetered and wobbled. The Republicans managed to gut many provisions that helped pay for the law and then scoffed as it tottered. Carving out the pieces of the law that made it sustainable, it was like someone giving a starving artist a Cadillac and then saying it’s THEIR fault it doesn’t run because they can’t afford the gas.
The Republicans have spent half a decade freaking out. State after state has opted out and Congress have voted almost 50 times to repeal the law, all the while undermining vast corporations’ ability to make as big a profit – meaning the pricing got focused on fewer and fewer of us . But still, people who were new to the fight didn’t realize how much better this situation was. It used to be that every MONTH I was getting a notice that “bad news, your premium will be going up” and up… and up… and up… at least this had slowed it down so they could only do it once a YEAR. Increases have been controlled by law (unless the state in play opted out, in which case you see HUGE premium jumps… cause the protections aren’t in play)… At least this had gotten rid of the fear that my insurance was a finite well. At least this had gotten millions and millions more people into the pool, able to afford preventive care rather than panic care…
Yes – money is being spent. Yes, I was REALLY disappointed that Obama didn’t attack rising health care costs and instead attacked rising health INSURANCE costs – which aren’t the same thing at ALL. Yes, it’s a hard knock Life – but now rather than have a plan of any sort, Congress is gleefully deconstructing something that 18 million people rely on… and so millions of families are stressed out because we have no insurance of insurance. I don’t know if my income next year is going to be just fine at the point it is or if I’m going to be suddenly making one third of what I need to cover costs… and there’s no way to plan for it, because the planners don’t have a plan…
I mean – yes, they HAVE a plan, but they’re not going to TELL us the plan. But it’s the best plan. And we’re just going to be so amazed by this plan. It’s a great plan. But it’s a secret plan. Wait till you see this plan.
Cause my health care should be like a fucking hotel. With a grand unveiling.
A friend of mine wrote “Ugh….pretty grim to think about needing to work a “job with benefits” and relegate your fabulous talent and passion for music and performing to Hobby status…” She meant that form her heart. She’s a believer – a great friend, a huge fan – someone who when I’m busily NOT believing in myself will send me some of just the right words…. But I think plenty of people would say it meaning “oh no, you’re gonna have to get a REAL JOB” – dripping with sarcasm – because damn it they’ve had to work their not-dream-job for their whole Life.
But it’s not like I haven’t worked hard for this. I’m back and forth on the “Living wage” concept – someone who works 40 hours a week at a minimum wage – DO they deserve to support themselves or should this be pushing them to work for something greater? That’s a very broad question and not really what I’m going after here. I went to college. I have a degree. Part of that degree was in small business and part of that small business education is about how you balance your costs, your bills, your income – and I’ve done precisely that… except there’s this thumb on the scales that keeps pushing, pushing, pushing – and no matter what I do that thumb could capriciously, and randomly, just push my expenses off into the deep, deep red simply because SOMEHOW America can’t solve the problem of affordable health care.
I don’t think that making the ACA a “tax” and still working through private health insurance companies was the right way to go. I think single-payer would’ve been far more Constitutional and a lot more fair – (though it’d have put a LOT of health insurance employees out of work)… but repeal and replace only works if there’s something to replace the repealed law WITH – and to just randomly scrap this huge piece of infrastructure so many people rely upon is dangerous.
Trump says he’s going to insure EVERYONE. That’d be amazing. But he’s not a messiah with healing hands, and he’s demonstrated time and time again that he’s not really a bridge-builder… so I have absolutely no faith that he’ll do what he says. He’s built a vast empire on screwing people over. I don’t know that that’s a viable way to handle health insurance.
Scratch that – health insurance companies have demonstrated that it’s TOTALLY the way to handle health insurance. I mean it’s not the way to handle AFFORDABLE health insurance for the population of the United States.
