Part Three
Nope. Before you would have had your great coverage when the medical disasters hit until time to renew, at which point you would have had a MASSIVE premium increase are been dropped entirely… just in time for the cancer to be found, probably. At which point you would have had to pay “retail” for everything out of your own pocket, or beg some charity to cover you, and probably been in crushing debt for the rest of your life.
What, you think that the paycheck my private employer hands me every week is something NOT earned? That a private corporation is just giving me money? You are so funny!
The money I get in my paycheck is every bit as earned as yours. I pay all taxes I am legally required to, just as I presume you do yourself.
I paid premiums for many years while I was healthy. My premiums paid for other peoples’ maternity and labor costs even though I never had children myself. For that matter, some of my taxes go to public schools I have never needed for children I never had - but I don’t begrudge them that, because an educated populace is to the benefit of society. I also believe treating the sick and caring for the disabled is beneficial to society even when there is an up-front cost. It is sure as hell cheaper to pay for a poor diabetic’s insulin and glucose meters and regular checkups, even over decades, than paying for amputations and dialysis.
How will it NOT help you? You’d have health coverage that could never be cancelled. It would probably be more like how I pay - a percentage of your income rather than fluctuating premium costs.
Heart attack AND cancer? Really?
Unless you’ve paid millions in premiums to Aetna no, it wouldn’t have made any difference at all. Your husband would still have cost more in healthcare than you have ever paid in over a lifetime.
Also, you don’t seem to understand how insurance works. You don’t have some sort of “account” with Aetna that you pay into, with the money waiting for you - oh, no, over the years your premium was paid out to doctors and hospitals and yes, insurance company employees. It was out the door long ago. When your husband became ill it wasn’t YOUR dollars that paid for him, not mostly - it was the premium dollars of people who stayed healthy that year being paid out for his benefit.
Yet, if we truly had universal health coverage, a national health service, you could not be locked out in that manner.
Do you take a tax deduction for your mortgage?
Do you take advantage of every tax loophole available to you?
Do your parents collect social security instead of you paying for their food and housing?
Then you’re no different from anyone else who receives some benefit or other from the government.
Fact is, during the time your husband had his heart attack and cancer treatment he was taking more of the insurance company than you folks put in. How is that different than taking advantage of government benefits and tax loopholes? No one broke the law, right? So they’re just using the system to their advantage. And if that’s OK for the wealthy and the middle class why wouldn’t it be OK for the poor?
Well, strictly speaking, mom and dad aren’t paying for any of it because they’re dead and have been for some time. The last 8 years of his life my dad paid no taxes because his income was low enough he didn’t have to (he lived with my sister and thus had no housing or food costs).
My in-laws by and large don’t pay taxes because they’re mostly con artists and druggies - frankly I wouldn’t shed a tear if most of them were locked up. In fact, quite a few of them have been locked up for years at a time. Yes, I do realize that there really are some low-lives out there but they’re a small minority, much more common are people such as yourself in desperate straits.
My sister, the one who speaks to me, is a doctor. She also, oddly enough, would favor a national health system. Granted, her income might go down slightly but she deals every day with people in catastrophic situations that could have been prevented if they had been able to get smaller problems dealt with early. And situations where it’s a great catastrophe that couldn’t have been prevented but is now crushing entire families. Yes, even middle class families and upper middle class families because, outside of the 1% no one can afford truly major medical issues out of their own pocket.
In other words - the exact same situation this nation has “enjoyed” since the late 1930’s. The only thing that has changed is which group of people you yourself now belong to. You are no longer among the young and healthy, and never will be again.
Yeah, it sucks - I’ve been there twice, once during the 1990’s and again in 2007. As I said, this is nothing new and your situation is nothing special. This has been happening to people for decades in the US… but it doesn’t happen in the UK or France or Canada or Germany or Australia or New Zealand… Gee, maybe they’re doing something better than we are…?
Well, of course he was talking about percentage brackets. The point still stands - why should a rich person pay half the percentage of someone middle class?
While I favor a progressive tax rate I’d settle for a flat rate if everyone really did pay the same percentage - which yes, would mean that Warren Buffet, in absolute dollars, would pay more than his secretary. But they’d both pay 10% or 20% or whatever the percentage would be. EVERYONE pays X percent, regardless of absolute amount of income… which, hey, is how I currently am paying for MY health coverage. In theory, if I was self-employed and paying a fixed percentage of my income and was both healthy and successful I might wind up paying more in absolute dollars than strictly speaking my premium, but so what? It’s coverage that could NEVER be taken away.
Right now we have, in practice, a regressive tax system - the more wealth you have the less you pay in percentage of your income. How is that fair? Why should the wealthy pay less than the poor? THAT system takes from those with the least and gives to those with the most. Why are you in favor of that? Because, I assure you, if you’re “middle class” you aren’t one of the parties actually benefiting from that.
If the wealthy own half the wealth why shouldn’t they pay half the taxes?
OK, the 1% actually own more like 40% of the wealth… but why shouldn’t they pay 40% of the taxes, then?
No, it hasn’t. You only think it did because you didn’t have major health problems in your family until recently.
Until the ACA the pattern was - pay for health insurance. Get sick/injured - the health insurance pay (you hope - they’d try to wiggle out of it if they could) until it’s time to renew. Then your policy is cancelled. Too bad, so sad, go hold a fundraiser for your cancer chemo bills or your transplant or your dialysis. Can’t pay? Just crawl off into a corner and die.
What do you think the bet was on “who would, and wouldn’t, become ill”? The only way for the health insurance companies to consistently win (and they had to, to stay in business, even as a non-profit) was to drop the severely ill and injured like a hot potato.
Medical debt has always been a problem. It’s been the leading cause of bankruptcy in this nation for years, LONG before the ACA came along. You just didn’t notice because you personally weren’t affected.
Good luck with that!
If you move to a foreign country as a foreigner you most likely won’t be able to get on their health service (my spouse wasn’t able to do that when he lived and worked in England, he had to purchase private insurance). If you’re sick and/or elderly they probably won’t want you as an immigrant unless you’re crazy wealthy (like, in the 1%)
And… this makes you no different than millions of other people who have had to give up their house to pay for medical costs. Or lost their house due to crushing medical debt.
And… in the 1990’s we were quoted insurance premiums that would have been twice our gross income - when we were both working and bringing in middle class incomes.
This is not a feature of the ACA - it’s how health insurance has been in the US for decades. You just didn’t notice because you weren’t personally affected.
We’re not squandering money here, either. My car is 15 years old, my truck 18. OUR housing costs are a third of what yours are. Yeah, I get it, we struggle, too. Except in absolute terms we have less money overall than you do but that doesn’t make us less deserving. In part, we have less money because for decades we were paying $1200/month in health insurance premiums - back in the 1980’s and 1990’s, not just now. All the problems you are currently having my family has struggled with for decades.
Again, it’s not the ACA doing this to you, it’s the overall jacked up “system” doing this to you. You would have had the same, or worse, problems if the ACA had never been passed.
No.
We were never able to buy a home. We were never able to secure a loan, first due to medical debt then, we we paid that off, we had to choose between medical coverage and paying a mortgage. We were never able to invest much in retirement funds because we needed to pay for the health care premiums NOW, we had to pay co-pays NOW, not in 10 years when this or that investment might pay off. And we were still entirely dropped twice in those years. High medical costs have followed us for 30 years - actually, nearly 60 for my spouse. Again - your situation is nothing new and nothing special. It affects millions of people.
They also get something for those taxes - like universal health coverage that won’t bankrupt them or force them to give up their house or move elsewhere. Also better unemployment coverage, paid parental leave, and a bunch of other stuff Americans have to pay for out of pocket - IF they can.
So… either pay private companies (IF you can) or pay taxes to the government to provide services. Those are you choices. Or you can do without. Do without health coverage, fire protection, police…
Unless you live in Indiana not one dime of your taxes have gone towards my healthcare - so don’t blame us for your problems. The subsidy on my health insurance is paid by my state, not the Federal government. A state, by the way, which is very much a red state and not one of those blue liberal ones back east. You could move to Indiana, wait six months to a year for legal residency, then apply for the exact same program we’re on. It covers the self-employed as well as the poor, you’d don’t have to be destitute to qualify. You will, however, have to live without health insurance for a bit, which may or may not be feasible depending on how much monthly medical maintenance would cost your family.
Again - it’s not Obamacare that did this to you. This sort of thing has played out in the US for decades. You’re not a special case and the ACA did not do this to you.