This is a total misstatement. A plan could have been better prior to healthcare reform, but because the medical plan didn't provide coverage for braces for children (which you had covered through your dental coverage, at a better rate) it was cancelled. It is total garbage to say that a plan that doesn't comply with ACA is/was "not a good one."
I had almost commented on it but didn't. One of the principles of the ACA was built on was that younger generations would subsidize the health costs of the older generations. I'm not surprised that 23 year olds would see large increases, nor do I find it objectionable that they subsidize the costs of others. But, it doesn't speak to what I was asking for. If your premium went up x%, decompose the increase to the drivers. How much was due to increasing cost of medical services, how much due to coverages not offered before, how much to increased bureaucratic costs, how much to insurance company profits, how much to subsidies, and whatever else that may be applicable. Then, where things move a lot: why, is it related to the legislation, and is it justified. That a premium went from x to y isn't enough analysis to conclude anything. All that is hard, and I don't expect anyone will post it here (hopefully some industry association is doing this though). That's fine. Just don't be surprised if not everyone finds a cherry-picked statistic to be very compelling.
Well insurance company profits are capped, so stuffing their wallets isn't the cost driver. About 4.5% of plan increases is directly tied to taxes and fees from ACA before you deal with any benefit cost drivers. Edit: Healthcare industry trend (just basic inflation) is something like .25% a month (this varies by insurance company). The pediatric dental mandate is something around 1%. I think the internal number is something like a 9% rate increase keeps the insurance company profitable. Blue Cross is somewhere around 14% for next year in Texas (from ACA compliant plans to ACA compliant plans, no benefit changes, just the result of damage done their book).
Is this really your argument? You believe every political promise comes with hidden contingencies? This is why our government is so unpopular. Blind party supporters do not hold their party accountable for their actions. At least the conservatives are abandoning their leaders. Its time for you Democrats to do the same.
The idea that young people can afford to pay for older people's health care is a joke. I couldn't afford my own health care at 23 and it was cheap. There is no question that this will widen the gap between poor and middle class and make it more difficult to transition from one to the other. At some point you will go from government support to the burden of government mandated 3rd party insurance and you will have to choose to lower your standard of living to do it yourself. It is hard enough to make this transition when you can choose to have insurance or not. It is the insurance companies that have increased health care costs and now our government in all its wisdom has forced us to pay them whether we like it or not. Entitlements, defining the poverty line with a government ocean that has no bridges or ferry's and it just keeps getting wider.
Please keep in mind that the administration said you COULD keep your plans, but they didn't force insurance companies to let you. A lot of insurance companies are forcing individuals off of their old plans onto ACA plans because they need you to pay the higher premiums. Think about it. If the healthy individuals with low premium old plans just keep their current ones and pay lower premiums but all the new enrollments take the more expensive ones, there is an issue there. It doesn't make good business sense for the insurance companies to let healthy people keep their old plans necessarily. That can really damage their books.
There are a great many people helped by the ACA. Your refusal to acknowledge doesn't change that one, simple fact.
Of course it does, as all legislation does. I don't know a single person who ever claimed that the ACA was the be-all, end-all of medical legislation, but it was, without doubt or question, a step in the right direction.
Forcing people to pay for insurance they can't afford to use isn't helping them. I'm sure there are some people in the US that have been helped, but many many more have been hurt by it and the few freebies they tossed in don't offset that.
The fact that it doesn't help or hurt me doesn't change that so very few people were truly "helped" by being forced to pay for health insurance that they often can't afford to use. It just seems odd to me to talk about "who was helped most" by something that didn't truly help very many people at all. It's even more odd to claim that people who are now forced to pay for insurance are automatically helped by having that insurance even if they can't afford to use it.
Did some of y'all even bother to read what was posted in the OP? [rquoter]The biggest winners from the law include people between the ages of 18 and 34; blacks; Hispanics; and people who live in rural areas. The areas with the largest increases in the health insurance rate, for example, include rural Arkansas and Nevada; southern Texas; large swaths of New Mexico, Kentucky and West Virginia; and much of inland California and Oregon. Each of these trends is going in the opposite direction of larger economic patterns. Young people have fared substantially worse in the job market than older people in recent years. Blacks and Hispanics have fared worse than whites and Asians. Rural areas have fallen further behind larger metropolitan areas.[/rquoter] Some of y'all are going on like this is disaster for younger people when the very article says it isn't. Further it still seems like many don't understand how insurance works. Of course people with less risk pay for people with more. That is how insurance works.
Islamists and the Islamist's agenda is what is causing insurances rates to rise. Universal coverage is one of the pillars of the Islam.
The article says it's helping people simply because the number of uninsured goes down....well yeah, when you force people to buy something, more people buy it...that doesn't mean you've helped them though. When the difference is not paying for an insurance policy they can't afford to use vs paying for an insurance policy they can't afford to use, how is that better?
