[wittynickname]

Originally Posted by speede5

One of these days all these celebrities will figure out people care more about putting food on the table then all the social causes. They live in their perfect worlds not worrying one iota about how to pay for their utilities, health care, etc. All while collecting their millions.

I don't have any love for Trump but the last people I'm interested in hearing from are all these celebrities. I want to hear how policies directly affect the middle class on down.

Heard some interesting 1st hand stuff on the weekend about how some friends of mine, and their employees have been almost crushed by Obamacare. They voted Republican even though they think he's a complete tool.

They are middle class family, and had a gucci healthcare plan before Obama, $4000 a year for amazing coverage, which has increased to $8000 a year, and has a $4000 deductible. Their for profit health care system can not handle the legislations of Obama's plan and it is crushing people.

To the americans on this thread, what are your experiences with healthcare?

Before the ACA, the only people with access to "Gucci" healthcare plans that were in any way affordable were people working for huge corporations. Being a woman, working for a small business entirely employed by and with women, our healthcare costs in the five years before the ACA went up 10-30% a year. (We were all of child-bearing age, and insurance companies take that into account. The year we had an employee have a baby, next renewal our plans all went up 30%.) The year the ACA went into effect, my boss discussed it with all of us, and we decided to swap it out and she continues to pay us an extra sum on our paychecks--and we each just shop for our own insurance via the marketplace. I make far too much to get any kind of subsidy, but I'm still paying $80 a month less than what our group plan would've cost back in 2010 (and I can only imagine that plan has gone up dramatically since then.)

My parents in the early 2000s simply didn't carry insurance, my dad is self-employed, owns his own business, so there's no "employer match" for healthcare costs. For him and my mother to get insurance in 2002, it would've cost them $1300/month (both had pre-existing medical conditions), which was just unreasonable. Now my mom has a plan through the ACA and my dad has hit an age where he can use Medicare, so they're now both comfortably covered for health insurance for a fraction of the cost well before the ACA existed.

Stop blaming the ACA and poor people for insurance costs. Blame insurance/pharma/etc lobbyists, and blame the legislators who allow them to continue bending Americans over the barrel.

The ACA is far from perfect, but 20 million people now have insurance that never had insurance before, people who were unable to get it due to health problems now have insurance. There are literally people who would have died before the ACA came into play, due to a lack of access to affordable healthcare. We need to fix healthcare in the US as it's still horribly broken, but pulling the rug out from millions of people is not the way to do it.

Originally Posted by PepsiFree

Someone posts clip from 3-hour, televised award show attended almost entirely by celebrities, watched by millions of people, and featuring the same number of speeches by celebrities it features every year.

Response?
"Nobody cares what celebrities have to say!"

... sure. Meanwhile, a billionaire celebrity is days away from inauguration.

Sounds like we're overestimating Americans a little bit.

Exactly, all this whining and complaining about "I just wish celebrities would stay out of politics" rings pretty hollow when you consider the current President-Elect is currently executive producer on a reality TV show.

Originally Posted by HockeyIlliterate

I have not had any direct non-monetary experience with the ACA, as I get my health insurance through my employer.

That said, my share of the health insurance premiums and drug costs have been going up every year (and without any wage increases in the interim), and the list of fully covered drugs seems to be reduced each year (although I don't pay too much attention to this). The overall deductibles have been steady, but my employer is really pushing people to stop using a PPO and instead use Health Savings Accounts and a High-Deductible Health Plan. From what I can tell, only young and very healthy employees are going that route.

On the monetary side of the ACA, I'm extremely displeased with paying an additional Medicare tax and the 3.8% tax on my net investment income, both of which are imposed as a result of the ACA. If the US wishes to provide access to health insurance to everyone, then everyone should pay something for that access---this "just tax the "rich"" stuff is nonsense.

You do realize that many of the people benefiting from the ACA are people who cannot afford healthcare any other way? Like full stop, without the ACA these people are relying on emergency room visits for their healthcare needs as they do not have the money to afford it. You have people in this country who regularly are deciding whether to buy groceries, put gas in their car to get to work, or buy their medications? Because they can't afford all three, due to wages in this country being so obscenely low that even someone working full time often can't make ends meet.

Either way we as a society are going to pay for these people to obtain healthcare. We can pay a small fee toward medicare so they can have access to preventative measures to screen for cancer early, to catch a cold before it becomes pnemonia, to give them vaccines so they don't get the flu and end up hospitalized--we can pay for the lower preventative costs, or we can pay for their ER visits when they have pnemonia, when they have stage 4 cancer, when they have the flu so bad that they're on death's door.

Access to healthcare is treated as a privilege in the US and that's incredibly appalling to me. People will cling to their fricking firearms as a Human Right, but if you're accidentally shot by someone, who cares if you have any ability to treat it?