It's a hard sell because most self employed and middle income people actually had reasonable insurance and then the ACA completely screwed them. Sure single payer and universal coverage would be great but how could you trust Democrats to do it when the last healthcare bill was basically one of the worst things to ever happen to the country. ~95% of people that don't work for insurance companies would be better off under the previous system. Just expand Medicaid to include people unable to get insurance due to pre-existing conditions and eliminate coverage maximums, or just say anything over 2 million in a year goes through Medicaid.
The ACA is just a huge transfer of tax payer money to insurance companies.
You miss the point. I find your 95% figure reasonable--but that's the very nature of insurance! The problem is you don't know if you're in the 95% or the 5%. Under the old system, if you were in the 5% you probably died.
Suppose you extend Medicaid to those barred by pre-existing conditions--net result is a whole bunch of money moves from the ACA to Medicaid. The spending doesn't go away--if anything it probably increases. This has been an expensive year, nearly 9k in insurance premiums and I hit the stop-loss at nearly 9k. Thus 18k out of pocket that would have been Medicaid spending under your system.
And note that killing those 5% appears to be a Republican *goal*. Eugenics.
Except that's why it isn't insurance at all, because people DO know. That's the idea of pre-existing conditions. People with pre-existing conditions don't need health insurance. They need healthcare. The whole healthcare masquerading as insurance is the problem.
>a whole bunch of money moves from the ACA to Medicaid
Not really, Medicaid pays very low rates for treatments. The "ACA" money just goes to insurance companies which are incentivized to pay high rates for everything because their profit is set as a percent of their expenditures by the ACA.
> Under the old system, if you were in the 5% you probably died.
This is also not accurate at all either, you just had to pay more money. You could still get insurance with pre-existing conditions, it just wasn't cheap. ACA plans though are now ~10-15x more than older plans and the deductibles are way higher with much worse coverage.
>This has been an expensive year, nearly 9k in insurance premiums and I hit the stop-loss at nearly 9k. Thus 18k out of pocket that would have been Medicaid spending under your system.
I don't understand this, are you saying you paid 9K in premiums and then hit your MAX OOP at 9K as well?
I'm not sure why you are translating that cost directly to Medicaid, but realistically your insurance actually paid more than the 9K right? But Medicaid simply wouldn't pay out nearly as much. But even then I'm not saying it would be cheap. It would just be far more logical than the ridiculous system set up to preserve insurance company profits. Medicare for all would be even better.
The ACA is just a huge transfer of tax payer money to insurance companies.