Tens of millions of Americans are set to see their health insurance costs soar when subsidies under the Affordable Care Act expire at the end of this year. Health insurance premiums are expected to more than double or even triple for some 20 million people, pricing many out of healthcare coverage entirely. “We’ve done nothing as a country to control healthcare costs,” says Elisabeth Benjamin, vice president of health initiatives at the Community Service Society of New York and member of New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s transition team. She discusses how premiums will work, how to seek help, what to watch for in alternative plans, and more.
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so this is patently false. the aca had a three legged stool and one of the legs. the insurers. where required to use 85% of premiums for patient care and of the %15 left they had to pay their other costs. It effectively limited profit and encourage efficiency. They could not have pre existing conditions or lifetime caps and had to accept anyone and sell to the state exchanges. They also had a list of preventative services that had to be provided without copay and deductible and such. Similarly people were required to get insurance and providers were dinged if patients came back because issues were not fixed. It was not the best but it was certainly not a big win for insurers. The problem was the republicans pushed out the mandate in a way that also allowed for insurers to have plans that don’t cover the list of preventative services. Since that was the most unpopular part democrats did not fight it. Further they did not regulate ownership of providers and insureres and such which has been a big problem with places like cvs owning care, pharmacy, and insurance. That was a glaring miss. Further than that though is it will never have the efficiency level of a universal system that can set contract rates for materials and services.
FYI, the Center for Medicare Services has a 1 to 2% administrative overhead for traditional Medicare plans.
Medicare Advantage - which is parts C and D and are privately run have a 17% overhead which covers profits. (oh gee, that’s a shock)
The 85/15 was for the larger insurers, she smaller ones had an 80/20. The taxpayer subsidies were part of why Aetna stepped back IN to the ACA exchanges in 2022 after quitting 4 years earlier.
Nothing I wrote is patently false.
Private insurance CEO’s earn millions per year to run their respective companies while the highest paid Federal employee in the health system - the Secretary of Health and Human Services (Secretary Brain Worms) takes home roughly 275k with NO stock options or dividends on top of their salary.
The Administrator of CMS earns a tidy GS-10 income of roughly 220k per year. (This is currently Dr. Mehmet Oz from TV - who certainly is making a fraction of what he earned while a TV celebrity…)
98% of what is paid in on Medicare goes to cover the patient, unlike insurers like United Health that raked in 400 BILLION last year while paying off their C-suite execs multi-million dollar incomes and millions in stock options and the investors $8.18 per share for the year…
What part of this are you missing?
The middlemen HAVE to go.
its false in that you where suggesting it was a big win to the insurers but it was much better than what was before. You are comparing it to better things which I already mentioned would be even better (medicare for all which is the most commonly heard universal healthcare idea mentioned) but it was an improvement over what we had before.
Doesn’t change the fact that the country should have sorted this 15 years ago. It’s been a 15 year long lifeline funded by the taxpayers to a industry of middlemen that needed to fail.
Anything that extended the survival of the industry was not the answer.
I was uninsured up until a handful fo years ago, (the only reason it got picked up is that spouse is working for a European company with fantastic benefits and PTO - the US business community is so fucking uncivilized…) so the notion that no insurance meant no medical care was and is to this day, corporate propaganda.
Being uninsured meant you got treatments at cost.
It’s the collusion of insurers with the hospital corporations that jacked the prices up sky-high. Also the predatory nature of an industry that takes advantage of the ill and infirm who in their desperation CAN be squeezed for every last red cent that they have.
If the insurers were doing so poorly with the ACA in place, they’d have left the markets. They were given too much subsidies.
No CEO deserves to earn more than any of the top people in the government, esp. not when the public was mandated - in that they had no choice under penalty of law - to comply with purchasing the so-called “product”.
“Skin in the game”, as Obama phrased it, was all on the public. The CEO’s and investors weren’t suffering hardships or denials of claims. Personally, adter witnessing family that suffered under the BS of United Health and Aetna… Don’t fool yourself, what the law said vs. how the cunts used every loophole to fuck people - again - who had NO choice - under penalty of law to NOT continue to buy coverage after being told that the procedures they’d need wouldn’t be covered…
Nope. Nothing I wrote was patently false. The industry didn’t change one jot, they just offered up the cheap freebies as slick PR.
I disagree. I dealt with it before aca and aca was a huge improvement. I do agree that it would have been even better if we truly sorted it into a working system but your line of argument is the type of thing I see conservatives bring up to get rid of it with no intention of doing fixes just going back to the way it used to be. We should 100% be doing single payer universal healthcare but the aca half a loaf was better than the no loaf that preceded it.