this post was submitted on 17 May 2026
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Obamacare was the implementation of a 1989 Heritage Foundation plan to implement an individual mandated health care system.
Also by no available metric did Obamacare "improve things". Healthcare costs rose significantly above the pre-ACA trend, bankruptcy increased, and health outcomes plummeted across nearly all metrics.
Didn't the ACA get rid of insurers denying coverage based on "pre-existing conditions"?
Yes but that was also a part of Romneycare, ie the heritage version implemented in MA under Romney being Governor
Sure, but you're assuming that "coverage" leads to better outcomes. I remember diabetes being one of the big ones at the time and is avery maneagble disease.
So, what was the hospitalization rate before and after? Did it decrease as was promised? Is diabetes unique or does this trend hold for the majority of those "pre-existing conditions"?
now they just deny coverage with AI generated reasons and force you to nag and beg for them to pay what they're obligated to. much better!
Hey, they were already doing that as their policy well before AI started helping them reject covering things their policy holders need
Yeah I edited in the old method after I posted. Don't want them trying to blame this all on AI.
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.
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.
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).