Yes, @MaineLonghorn, $24,000+ to have medical insurance for 3 people sounds high to me too, especially if there’s also a deductible and high annual out of pocket max.
IF insurers lower rates for the healthier and charge more for the high risk like most real insurance many could be better off. The biggest weakness to the ACA was the clarity of the connection between overcharging the young for insurance they could often do without. Maybe the govt needs to absorb the risk risk group into another program. Then insurance could be more affordable for everyone else.
The same people who want to cut the ACA generally also want to cut mental health care for people on Medicaid.
“People who buy individual insurance and who have pre-existing conditions are better off now than they were”
Not universally true. I have been buying individual insurance for myself, my husband and later on our family since 2002. Two of us have preexisting conditions. Our options are much worse now than pre-ACA. The insurance is more expensive and the networks available are terrible. Specialists are almost impossible to access, which is very important for those with preexisting conditions.
As far as our family’s insurance experience, the ACA resulted in the costs doubling and access greatly decreasing.
That depends upon if you consider premiums of thousands of dollars a month “being able to buy insurance”. If you can’t pay for it, you can’t buy it. So having “access” to something too expensive for anyone to pay for is not having insurance.
You mean if we go back to what we had before, now that we have given free access to employers and basically everyone to mine our personal data?
Incognito windows do nothing but clear the data from your own screen. You can still be tracked everywhere, though I read that duckduckgo is a bit less invasive. I just read that Google has data trackers on about 75% of the web today.
We have always bought individual insurance as we have a small family business. We were happy with our plan and the Dr choices we had. With the ACA came higher premiums and a narrower network of preferred providers. The option is available to go to any Dr but we paid more for that privilege. Almost all my providers were on my insurance prior to ACA and are now out of network,even with the same insurance carrier. OTOH my youngest who lives in another part of Ca has better options for providers after ACA.
While I have less options post ACA my daughter who has a long list of preexisting conditions has more. She would not have been able to leave her corporate job and come to work in our family business. Prior to ACA she was limited to employment that provided group health insurance. While she pays more for her individual plan she has freedom to work wherever she chooses.
It’s a classic case of harming the many to help the few. We put a man on the moon. I’ll bet we could have helped with pre-existing conditions without screwing everything else up.
Bingo.
Yes, even tiny Maine managed to make insurers cover pre-existing conditions before ACA.
Is this a bash ACA thread?
“With the ACA came higher premiums and a narrower network of preferred providers.” Insurance is regulated by states. CA is one that did not do what it could have, to protect people.
Higher premiums and narrower networks were happening before ACA.
https://www.factcheck.org/2017/03/employer-premiums-and-the-aca/
“Still, the slow rate of growth was good news for premiums: The total average family plan cost increased by 43 percent from 2008 to 2016, but it went up more than double that rate — 97 percent — from 2000 to 2008.”
“The slowdown in premium growth, however, has been “significant.” The average family premium growth was 20 percent from 2011 to 2016, 31 percent from 2006 to 2011, and 63 percent from 2001 to 2006.”
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/071415/did-obamacare-make-premiums-go.asp
“While the results vary from one state to the next, the overall numbers seem to suggest that post-ACA premium increases have actually been rather modest compared to those in previous years.”
Except that’s the oppose of what we where told.
It weirds me out that my parents have that auto insurance device (Progressive I think) that monitors their braking and accelerating (supposedly not speeding, uh huh) and offers a discount for “good driving”.
No thanks.
{Attaches fitbit to dog collar and lets her go in the park} :))
{Raises hand} My family is SO MUCH better off than before. We have a much better, cheaper plan - we went without for a few years before ACA. We do qualify for subsidies so YMMV.
Honestly the data collection stuff was coming, ACA or no. There weren’t as efficient an widespread ways to do it before. Blaming ACA as @yourmomma suggests is like saying we had less air pollution when we got milk delivered to the door rather than buying it in the store. True, but irrelevant.
@tranquilmind " I just read that Google has data trackers on about 75% of the web today."
https://disconnect.me/ - free for computer browser, a fee for mobile, another fee for a VPN and 3 mobile devices. $35/year well worth it.
I use the free one as a Chrome extension. Thinking about the annual subscription though.
Driver insurance has access to your driving record and perhaps car registration and inspection data too. Rates should be set based on known risk–not feel good nonsense . For those unable to buy insurance due to pre-ex conditions there should be a govt insurance program.
Exactly. Data analysis can be beneficial when it leads to better protocols and practice standards for treating disease.
Interesting article in the Yale alumni news about lung cancer treatment in US and UK.
https://yalealumnimagazine.com/articles/4724-a-matter-of-survival?mod=article_inline
Then pretty much all of us will need that insurance. Because “preexisting condition” is defined quite broadly by insurers. Besides, driving is a privilege, and one can get by without a DL by using a service or public transport. Can’t tough it out if I need cancer treatment.
Not to go too far off topic but the data collection has been there for years and is quite surprising at what and how they can get the data. I worked for a company that wanted to do some target marketing and we purchased data on every household in the US that had a home valued at over $750,000 and/or a household income of over $150,000. Not too deep a dive. The report we received back gave the data for those households that included how much was spent annually on gifts, travel, home repairs, investments, art purchases, charitable donations, etc. Presumably much of this was pulled from credit card transaction data.
It was great for our purposes, we could reduce the potential target market to roughly the 10% of the households that best fit our strategy but from a consumer standpoint it was scary that all of that data was just at someone’s finger tips. We received names and addresses for everyone on the list and the bad actor could have used this is some very dangerous ways.