Q&A of the Day – What Comes Next for ACA Polices
Each day I feature a listener question sent by one of these methods.
Email: brianmudd@iheartmedia.com
Social: @brianmuddradio
iHeartRadio: Use the Talkback feature – the microphone button on our station page in the iHeart app.
Today’s entry: Submitted via Talkback: This is Chris from Northeast Florida. I feel like the federal government is holding my health care hostage, being the federal government is the one who eliminated my private insurance that I had with Humana when the Affordable Care Act was passed, which eliminated private insurance plans, forcing everybody to go with a group policy. My current employer's insurance is around $1200 a month for just health insurance, not dental. I use the Obamacare insurance, the Affordable Care Act, because I have to. They forced me.
Bottom Line: You’ve raised a great point that dates back to the original Barack Obama lie that under the “Affordable Care Act”, “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor and if you like your healthcare plan, you can keep your healthcare plan”. The first of many lies made by President Obama and Democrats was so pervasive, Politifact cited 37 times Obama made that statement publicly in attempting to rally the support for the ACA to get it through congress – and it was Politifact’s Lie of the Year in 2013.
While lying about what the plan really was or what it would do was bad enough, what was worse was the effect that it had on many who had what amounted to truly affordable healthcare plans at the time of the passage of the ACA – like the listener who submitted today’s topic. Due to coverage mandates under the ACA, over 4 million Americans were legally forced off their existing health insurance plans when the ACA took effect. And what was the effect? Far less affordable health insurance options, without extremely large subsidies for exchange-based policies.
Much has been made over the years of Florida, having the highest number of participants with ACA plans, with a total of 4.7 million Floridians enrolled in an ACA policy currently. That’s not just by chance. The listener from North Florida who shared his story of losing his preferred insurance, due to the passage of the ACA, is far from alone because Florida was the state most impacted by the law. More Floridians were forced into new health insurance plans than residents of any other state. It’s the inconvenient truth that state and local news outlets always overlook when talking about how many Floridians are using exchange-based plans. The answer is far more than originally preferred to be. Which, btw, on topic as the next phase of the ACA debate in congress will be about whether there will be an extension of subsides, get ready to hear that there’s been a recent report that shows up to 2.2 million Floridians will no longer be able to afford the Obamacare plans if the COVID-era subsidies come to an end.
The bottom line is that the mess that’s been created within the health insurance system is what happens when free markets and competition no longer exist – independent of government mandates that are put in place. The best way to fix the mess is to eliminate the mandates and to get government out of the way. As I said during the debate about the ACA – the biggest failure of all is taking the biggest obstacle to lower healthcare costs – health insurance companies, and mandating that all Americans have coverage that meet the federal government demands or be forced to pay higher taxes in the form of penalties.
As I’ve always stated, consumer price transparency in healthcare would solve the crisis in costs. Health insurance, for most people, should be no different than any other insurance – something you only use when there’s an emergency or a major medical need. If your car breaks down, you take it to a mechanic; you don’t file an auto insurance claim. If you get into an accident, you do. If you need a new floor in your home, you go to the store, you don’t file a property insurance claim. If we treated healthcare the same way – which btw, increasingly many people do – a la the significantly increased presence of urgent care facilities in recent years – our total cost for healthcare would be significantly less than what we currently see.
Consider this... Currently the average cost for an exchange-based policy for a family of four is $27,025. How many families come anywhere close to needing/using $27k+ in healthcare per year? It’s outrageous! So is this...$24,863 dollars of that cost is currently paid for through subsidies – meaning by those not using the ACA policies. It’s a wildly overpriced, bloated mess that’s unaffordable and unsustainable – yet but it does serve the Democrats goal of a government takeover over healthcare...a la socialism – which is the point here.
The best outcome overall for the most people would be an end to ACA subsidies, the fraud that is Obamacare collapsing under its own weight, promoting an end to government mandates, with a model going forward that prioritizes direct consumer transactions for healthcare except for emergency and major medical needs – when a claim would be filed a la all other major forms of insurance. This would force price competitiveness into the healthcare system, put consumers in control, and would dramatically reduce the overall cost of healthcare.