this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2025
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A Boring Dystopia
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The big thing about the ACA credits that were approved during the pandemic was that small businesses and self-employed found them incredibly useful. Now that was not what they were originally for, but it has been an unexpected success. It has increased the risk pool and provided the ability for job creators to have insurance for themselves or their employees.
Republicans have seen this success and for the most obvious reasons are looking to end it, because any success by ACA threatens their narrative of the ACA being a failure.
This is a typical example of the different standards applied to Republican and Democratic initiatives.
Even the weakest Democratic compromise on healthcare reform has to have a specific plan and measures of success and meet them exactly, and even then have to overcome GOP propaganda to succeed - unexpected success like what you reference won't be counted or acknowledged.
On the other side, Republican initiatives can be nebulous and philosophically-based, to the point of delusion. Their policy to hand trillions over the last 30 years in tax benefits, subsidies and contracts to rich people and companies, not only on just the presumption they will stimulate growth, but despite evidence to the contrary, just persist based on nothing but dogma. Their healthcare plan is "no," which is objectively the plan nobody can say is likely to succeed.
Yet somehow people give both similar attention and credibility.
The 300% increase is because of Republican cuts from OBBBA. Republicans continually do things to reduce the quality and deliverablity of care from these markets. That's the thing, every "failure" can be traced back to Republicans enacting law that greatly affects the overall success of the program.
What's even more interesting is how flexible the market has been in spite of Republican meddling. But the ACA has offered new avenues for people to have insurance when their situation wouldn't have qualified them for such. This has provided a much needed peace of mind to a large segment of the population.
For all the things that Republicans tend to throw to deride the program, it continues to provide coverage for people in ways that lawmakers don't always foresee. And that has provided care to people who usually would not have care. Allowed people to go on to make small businesses that would not have otherwise taken the risk. Allow people to get regular checkups and routine care that would have otherwise gone without.
Republicans have a funny definition of success in the medical domain. Once that circles around dollars to care, when the goal should be amount of care. Or at least in my most humble opinion, we should look at the amount of care we provide to the population as a metric of success. To then toss dollars on top of that metric really begs the question of what is the worth of a person's life? Yes, the ACA lacks a single provider negotiated benefit. Republicans have sought to never allow that to happen. Don't get me wrong, that's a very clear loss for the ACA program, but again, that's at the behest of Republicans.
It all comes down to the fact that MAGA simply doesn't care at all about providing quality health care, they only care about increasing profits, which requires providing as little as possible, in exchange for as much money as possible. Quality of care doesn't figure into their calculations.
I kind of agree with you. I think people aren't seeing that without the subsidies, the 300% price increase is just the actual price. ACA did a lot of good things, but the real insanity is the government subsidizing ACA plans but not directly offering a public option. Frickin Lieberman