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Breaking down the illusion of a 2 party system
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 17 May 2026
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Wrong. The number of insured people went up. The uninsured rate dropped to a historic low of 7.7% by 2023. That is a tangible improvement in the lives of millions of Americans.
What good is insurance with a deductible I cannot afford to pay? Mandating people buy shitty insurance is not the win you think it is.
Just because you don't have insurance doesn't mean more people don't have insurance. Obamacare didn't create high insurance prices. That was happening no matter what. Also remember that Republicans tried to repeal the ACA more than 70 times and stripped several elements from the plan, so of course it isn't working as well as we would want.
I didn't question whether more had insurance. I questioned the quality and utility of the insurance they were forced to purchase by penalty of fine. One of the elements the republicans stripped was that fine, which existed entirely as a handout to insurance companies who swore up and down that having to cover preexisting conditions would bankrupt them unless you forced everyone to buy their "product". (Not that the republicans did it out of any altruism or anything, they just wanted to use that as part of a ploy to repeal the ACA entirely, which failed)
Republicans stripped the fine because that hurt the ACA. Insurance depends on healthy people paying in to cover the sick. The bigger the pool of insured, the lower the costs for everyone. This all falls apart if young, healthy people just chance it and skip having insurance. If you make people pay a fine even if they don't have insurance, this removes the incentive to skip getting insurance (which keeps prices down).
You are assuming that having insurance is correlated to physical or financial health and is therefore an improvement.
Rationally that makes sense, that's what it's supposed to do. Empirically the data shows an overall negative correlation between private healthcare rates and general healthcare outcomes.
It's true that the uninsured rate went from 17% pre-ACA(2010 when it was signed) to 10%(2016 2 years after it was implemented at an uninsured local minima) which is ~18 million people. However in that same timespan average annual health expenditures, for the entire US population, doubled from $1600 per person per year to $3200. Pre-ACA trend would've resulted in ~$2200.
That's a difference of ~4.87 trillion dollars stolen by "healthcare" corporations from individuals over the last 14 years.