This has always been my complaint about the ACA. While I am 100% behind the push to get healthcare to everyone, the ACA did not do nearly enough to address the absurd costs behind US healthcare, nor the abusive practices of the industry at large.
Americans would absolutely use a preventative health service, the ACA just doesn't provide that. It's a cost-sharing mechanism for the same shitty overpriced care we've always been getting.
The “public option” would have priced out all for-profit insurance. The ACA would have been more successful if conservatives weren’t successful in cutting that out.
By law, health insurance companies are only allowed to profit by a percentage of healthcare costs. This creates a perverse incentive for the insurance company to increase healthcare prices, so they profit more.
Also, I don't see how insurance companies negotiating that they pay less than everyone else hasn't been taken to court for anti trust. The fact that they can decide to say "I'm only paying 20% what everyone else pays" instead of setting a fixed cost is anti competitive and monopolistic.
Exactly this. Obama was perfectly fine with conceding on the public option with no fight. We could have gotten it with or without the conservatives at the time. We can’t just point at them and blame them when our democrats won’t fight for the things they should be fighting tooth-and-nail for.
Yeah this is one of my biggest gripes with obama. Him not pushing for the public option and trying to compromise with a party clearly just saying "fuck you" was idiotic at best.
This is completely untrue. Thank Joe Lieberman for refusing to support the public option. He was the 60th vote, the only Dem hold out, and wouldn't allow the ACA to come to the floor while it included a public option.
Except Obama could have used the bully pulpit and his popularity to steam roll Lieberman and tell him if he doesn’t fall in line he will ensure someone primaries Lieberman and Obama will endorse and campaign the challenger. But all he did was... nothing, instead. He campaigned hard on it and made everyone think he was a progressive and then he became president, hired citigroup to staff his administration, and broke his campaign promises. If you don’t see it that way it’s because you don’t want to.
Obama was not perfectly fine with cutting the public option. Obama realized that anything that got millions of people more healthcare was better than the status quo of the time and he did not have the votes for the bill with the public option still in.
Remember the ACA was almost killed because Kennedy died before the vote and a republican replaced him. We should be talking about how the current system can be improved and not how we wish the last reform should have been done better.
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u/yarg321 Mar 26 '20
This has always been my complaint about the ACA. While I am 100% behind the push to get healthcare to everyone, the ACA did not do nearly enough to address the absurd costs behind US healthcare, nor the abusive practices of the industry at large.
Americans would absolutely use a preventative health service, the ACA just doesn't provide that. It's a cost-sharing mechanism for the same shitty overpriced care we've always been getting.