What would you say to thousands of people with decent health whose premiums and deductibles have gone up and who are forced to keep paying it to avoid the penalty?
While it seems fair to subsidize the costs of your particular problem, does it also seem fair to ask of them to subsidize the costs associated with obesity and palliative care of the old?
These people do not have software developer salaries either. The income cut-off for being offered some sort of a discount on the plans is rather low, so it really eats into the budgets of their families.
Prior to ACA, people who were old or obese could still buy insurance. Prior to ACA, people like me who were cancer survivors could not, in any way shape or form, buy health insurance outside of government programs. If you are asking whether or not I believe it to be fair that premiums have gone up because in order to cover the uninsurable, absolutely.
And, to be clear, even now health insurance is not cheap for me. I did better in my business than I ever did before and I still budget for and spend 9% of my gross income on healthcare, which is split between premiums and my out of pocket max.
ACA is absolutely, positively not a perfect law. However, ACA has allowed me to start a business. ACA has given me the possibility of starting a family. I am not alone. If the cost of that is the requirement that I muster enough compassion to cover the costs associated with subsidizing the obese and old, then that is absolutely worth it.
I think it is fair to ask healthy people to subsidize health care for unhealthy people.
I think the best means of structuring society's relationship to medical care is to make it available to everyone within that society, spreading the costs across all parts of society.
That, to me, is the most sensible approach, even when some people pay more than they use, or some people use more than they pay for.
Pooled costs and guaranteed access to shared resources is one of the things that society is/does. Medical care doesn't seem different from roads, schools, police, the FCC, whatever.
Whether the ACA does a good job spreading the costs around or getting people access to medical care, that's a separate discussion. But whether it should at all, not a question for me. It should.
While it seems fair to subsidize the costs of your particular problem, does it also seem fair to ask of them to subsidize the costs associated with obesity and palliative care of the old?
These people do not have software developer salaries either. The income cut-off for being offered some sort of a discount on the plans is rather low, so it really eats into the budgets of their families.