When people HAVE to get a subsidy in order to buy it, it's unaffordable.
He's fallen into the "Obamacare = healthcare" fallacy. But if you want to back someone who doesn't know what he's talking about just to make your boring little speech again, feel free.
Okay, you may have a point that obamacare is not healthcare. But the non-market based 3rd party private "healthcare" industry is not healthcare either, even if it is 14% of the total US economy. Even 3rd world countries do better than this regularly on their national healthcare systems. It is amazing why Americans are so eager to price themselves out of even getting as little as a twisted ankle fixed at some doctor. American people = hacked ATM's?
Okay, you'll have to explain what you mean by " the non-market based 3rd party private 'healthcare' industry." Doctors and hospitals? Help me out here.
The way I understand the history of US healthcare, the system was purely market based before the Nixon administration, that is individual buyers and insurance providers made deals directly with each other, to cover their doctor, med, and hospital costs. Then employers jumped in an created the modern world of group insurance. In this new system, the buyers and the insurers don't make deals with each other, but the 3rd entity, such as the employers do the negotiations. Small and medium employers are mostly pushed out too, and all prices are set by the biggest ones, including large government agencies. This is then not a market economy, because the demand side is not directly interfacing with the supply side.
Ah, I see. Thanks for the clarification. I'm not plugged in to how employers negotiate with insurers; I only know that group plans purchased through an employer used to be far more affordable than an individual trying to find a plan with premiums they could afford.
This is why, when an employer suddenly decided to drop their insurance plan (something the boo-birds want you to believe suddenly magically happened the day after the PPACA was implemented, but in fact it's been going on for decades), employees suffered sticker shock.
Under the PPACA, premiums are based on income (with a choice of tiers from a choice of private insurers). So, yes, the insurers do benefit, but they're constrained from the kinds of shenanigans (denial for preexisting conditions, lifetime caps on benefits, etc.) that drove many Americans to bankruptcy or neglect of care and early death.
Even its most ardent supporters will tell you the PPACA is ungainly and could have been far better. But know that any ignoramus who says "Nothing was wrong with the old system! Let's go back to the old system!" is either sucking the corporate teat or living in Mom's basement.
