MTZehvor said:
US healthcare sucks, but it's not simply paying a "little more" tax. Let's say you're a 25 year old, just out of college, and earning the median salary of $45,000 per year. The absolute cheapest plan on the ACA that you can pay for would cost $200.75 per month, or a little over $2,400 per year. That's with a $7,150 deductible as well. Factor taxes, housing, transporation, food, utilities, and other living expenses into that, and you have, according to Time Money, the average out of college student with around $675 ($8,100 per year) left to spend each month before healthcare. Now tack that $200.75 onto that, and you've instantly taken out nearly a third of your spending money that was left over (oh, and this doesn't even begin to consider paying back student loans, if you have any of those). Furthermore, this healthcare doesn't even particularly matter to you, except in the case of emergenies. You won't find many 25 year olds racking up $7,150+ of healthcare expenses in a single year. To put it simply, this isn't a smart decision for the "young invincibiles" crowd that Democrats were banking on to make the ACA a success. And it's not simply people being selfish and refusing to pay a "little more" in taxes; it's nearly a third of their average disposable income leftover each month that may need to go towards a myriad of other things, such as a new car, or paying off student loans, or whatever. And for those who make less than the median $45,000 a year, good luck figuring out how to juggle all that. A significant number of students will simply take the penalty and pay $700 per year than take the $2400 a year hit for healthcare they will likely never benefit from. And that's largely what's happened. The ACA isn't struggling because there's a whole bunch of greedy rich people up there who refuse to shell out an additional $200 for healthcare; those people already have healthcare and are already paying into the system. The ACA is struggling because it banked on convincing a large group of relatively unwealthy low risk people to pay much more for healthcare than they already were, and that's just simply not going to happen when their finances are tight already. |
Great summation in the final paragraph. In reality health care will never be good in America because insurance companies aren't there to help folks. They're there to get you to pay as much as you can in hopes that you never need them to actually help you. These companies used to collect thousands from consumers over a period of years and then drop them when they actually start using the services they'd been paying for. Now that they can no longer do this practice it's upsetting to these companies.
There are some good parts of the ACA but for the most part it's a problematic program. Much like Social Security in the early throws it needs to be tweaked and reworked to benefit the people on a larger scale. Scrapping it and not having a replacement is a terrible idea. Reverting to the previous system is also unwise.
PC GAMING: BEST GAMES. WORST CONTROLS
A mouse & keyboard are made for sending email and typing internet badassery. Not for playing video games!!!
