There are certainly significant "positives" contained in the legislation known as the ACA.
Among them are the fact that there are no longer any Americans who can be told they cannot be insured due to a "pre-existing condition."
Many Americans who previously did not find insurance affordable now have subsidies to help them afford such. Due to the fact that such individuals number in the millions, it is not difficult to realize that many lives will be saved that would have been lost.
But the actual "reform" was much more of a give away to the biggest, already most profitable business in th USA, health care insurers, than being a net gain to consumers. For instance, many poorer individuals will strive to avoid using the insurance, due to the fact that for many folks seeking a cheaper premium, the deductibles are about half or one third of their income. ($ 5,000 is a lot of money if you make less than $ 60,000. And with rent and groceries and housing prices extremely high, that $ 5,000 deductible is a lot even to someone making $ 60,000!).
Let's look at one facet of what the public wanted and then explained that they wanted in almost every poll taken between 2008 and Dec 2009, an important facet that was not realized - the public option... According to the second article I link to in this OP, "This latter provision, one of the positive elements in Obamacare, was not forced upon the insurers; they themselves had proposed it. If they had not agreed to accept patients with pre-existing conditions, the law would have had to include a “public option” to guarantee that such patients could access health insurance, thus creating public competition that would give at least some consumers a non-private insurance option.
"Whether a public option would have constituted a meaningful alternative that competed with private companies would have depended partly on the details of its design; it is certainly possible that it would have served as a place for private insurers to dump
sick customers, making it expensive and unsustainable
(especially if the already-insured were not given the public
option, as seems likely). "
13
Edward Luce, “Gloves Off in Health Reform Battle,”
Financial Times
In any case, it would inevitably have been inferior to a
system. See Physicians for a National Health Program,
“The
‘Public Plan Option’; Myths and Facts,” available at
http://www.pnhp.org/change/Public_Option_Myths_and_Facts.pdf
.
Just who were the "stakeholders" that the Obama Administration was catering to? The following URL has an excellent thesis regarding the ACA, and defines the word "stakeholder" as used by the Administration. (Wanna guess the meaning of the word "stakeholder?" Let's just say it is not you or me.)
http://www.academia.edu/7048015/Healthy_Wealthy_and_Wise_How_
Corporate_Power_Shaped_the_Affordable_Care_Act
From the above linked to thesis:
(4)
The subsequent process by which the reform was shaped is
much clearer: the administration invited the key corporate
powerholders into the policymaking process from the
beginning. In the words of White House communications
director Dan Pfeiffer, the Obama strategy was to “bring every stakeholder to the table.”
(10)
Journalist Ryan Lizza makes clear that “stakeholder” referred to capitalist interests and not the general public, noting, for example, that Obama “sent his toughest political operatives — like Rahm Emanuel and Jim Messina — to cut deals with the pharmaceutical industry and hospitals.”
(11)
One major agreement that derived from this process of
negotiation promised the health insurance industry tens of
millions of new customers, who would be forced by the law to
buy plans from private insurers. In exchange, the industry
agreed to provide coverage to patients with pre-existing
conditions.
(12)
In another major negotiation, administration operatives and
Democratic Senator Max Baucus (Chair of the Senate Finance
Committee) gained assent from the Pharmaceutical Research and
Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) to the proposed law by
renouncing the government’s power to negotiate drug prices
and import lower-cost drugs.
(13)
The final product was generally deemed “a good deal” by industry
insiders (the opinion of the senior vice president of PhRMA, which actually bought ads supporting the bill).
(14)
Except for the five biggest private insurers (Aetna, Cigna,
Humana, UnitedHealth, and WellPoint), most major players in
the healthcare industry supported the reform or at least did
not actively oppose it. This assent from the industry
— a reversal of its decades of vigorous opposition —
resulted from from the shaping of the reform into a familiar
form of corporate welfare: “a big injection of public subsidy to
expand the overall size of the US healthcare market,” as the
Financial Times noted.
(15)
The corporate welfare aspect of the bill can be clearly seen
in the negotiations with America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the main health insurers’ lobbying organization.
Though AHIP never formally endorsed the bill, it agreed to
the basic framework and did not mobilize its legislative weight against it. The law’s central component— the individual mandate
in exchange for “no pre-existing condition exclusions”—
was precisely what AHIP and the right-wing Heritage
Foundation had previously proposed, and which
