I heard that ACA was so affordable. Really? Insurance that won't let you go to see a doctor for a sprained ankle or a sinus infection unless you have met a $6000 deductible first? How is that affordable??
The original ACA could have been affordable, but was so altered and watered down by the Repubs (remember Sarah Palin's "death panel" zinger in 2009; a classic mis-truth accepted by many voters) it became an unwieldy hybrid of competing viewpoints.
Most people have NO IDEA how much good healthcare costs. The only way to make it affordable is to cover
everybody. You MUST have a solid base of healthy ratepayers in order to spread costs over the widest base possible.
Think of Henry Ford's original Model T. Up till then cars were expensive toys. The Model T was a generic, simple product ("any color you want as long as it's black") that utilized a mass production factory line: the greatest number of identical parts = lowest cost per part, which in turn equaled the lowest cost for the final product.
We belong to the Kaiser Permanente HMO system. They run their own hospitals and drug plan, as well as emergency, vision and hearing centers. It is a comprehensive healthcare system originated by Henry Kaiser (you might remember Kaiser Steel), a wealthy industrialist with strong Socialist leanings who believed in providing his workers with good healthcare and decent wages.
Kaiser HMO sells different levels of healthcare plans. My DH's employer buys one of the highest level (lower co-pays, more covered services for employees) plans. Every year during Open Enrollment the costs per month for the various health options - Blue Shield, Healthnet, Kaiser, etc. - are compared.
Our Kaiser plan for 2016 is $1,215 for a couple - PER MONTH. And that is the cheapest plan out of the ones offered!
Now, we're fortunate. We don't pay anywhere near that, as his employer covers most of the cost. But a lot of folks don't pay any attention to that little chart, so they think healthcare insurance is something that should be free or that you pay maybe $100 or $200/mo for.
IT'S NOT.
You
can get an ACA plan that offers good coverage. But you will pay for it. Insurers do not happily give away their money paying for drugs and medical tests for everyone. Federal death panels - ha! Palin's statement made me laugh.
Every insurance company has a medical director who heads a committee that is in charge of monitoring claim costs. Their entire focus is on keeping claim costs as low as possible. That form letter of rejection people get, denying a claim - there's a real person behind that letter, whose job is to use every legal trick possible to avoid paying an excessive claim.
IOW, every single insurance company has its own little "death panel". They also have a lot of very highly paid lawyers, who know that almost no one reads that miniscule fine print in their contracts. Thus, most folks who "think" they have great employee benefits, but never realize their annual drug costs may be capped at $5K or $10K, or maybe there's a lifetime cap on certain expenses.
I'm not dissing insurers. They perform a necessary task, pricing risk and trying to spread it out as widely as possible, so that they can make a profit for shareholders (you might be surprised how much of your own savings or retirement portfolio is entangled in insurance financial services) but still pay claims for policyholders.
It's simply that most people don't understand insurance. They look at high premiums and think it's a rip-off. What a high premium is, actually, is a "pricing of high risk". There is either too much risk based on the factors known, or not enough knowledge of what the future claims might be, to price a premium in the low range.
This is why, for example, when we bought long term care insurance 17 yrs ago, I told my DH the premiums were going to go up and we needed to be prepared to pay for that. I knew how insurance actuaries price policies, and the "hard" (e.g.; proven) stats they were using for LTCi were based on WWI and WWII elders. Those stats would not hold true, I reasoned, because women were no longer staying home, people were more mobile, birth rates had dropped, and life expectancy was increasing more rapidly than expected.
All those factors combined meant an aging population with fewer family to care for them, and thus increased need for services that are very labor-intensive. In an industrialized society, that = expensive.
17 yrs later, all those factors have indeed combined to make auto and life insurance cheap, but disability, healthcare, and LTC insurance expensive.
