Health Insurance Rate Shock-California Obamacare Insurance Exchange Announces Premium Rates

[haele]

184. Allrighty then, just toss it all out and start over.

I can wait, I have insurance through my company. At least for the next three years or so.
Scrap it all, spit in the eye of the people who run the insurance and health care lobbies.

I don't care about myself, I can be a martyr - I'm not afraid to die (I am afraid of being disabled, though), I've done without health care at times in my life, been living in a van eating raman noodles poor before, and don't mind at all if I become crippled or develop something undetected because I've got all my quarters for full disability and a number to a disability lawyer if I need it. Now that I'm 50+, even less of a problem...I can wait until I start collecting early SS and Medicare, so long as they haven't f**d that up.
That's me.

Of course, I'll say the above until I get laid off, and am stuck with a truly un-affordable COBRA plan ($2K+ a month just for myself and my chronically ill spouse, $3K if we add the dependent grandchild that's covered under my current health care, as of 2011 when I last sat down with the benefits person).
Choose between $2K - $3K a month on the market or what the ACA gives me and my household - $1200 a month, $515 a month if we can include the grandkid. Guess what I choose?
Now that it's "We" instead of "Me" - What we had before ACA was un-affordable to me and to anyone else who was taking care of someone with serious or chronic health problems.
My disabled spouse can't go without health care, and neither can my stepdaughter (dependent under 25) and her baby (the other dependent) that we have custody of.

Nor will most of my neighbors, now lining up to sign on to Covered CA, who will go back to hoping not to get sick and treat themselves with OTC's until they have to go to the emergency room.

I know the for-profit health care system in this country sucks any number of scatological body parts.
I'm just happy some people who didn't have access to anything other than emergency room health care now have access to health care.
I'm pissed it's not single payer, that it doesn't make health care affordable for all of us, but at least some people will get it, and perhaps not die of undiagnosed cervical cancer in the emergency room before she's 55 and leave three kids and a husband, the way the working family across the street from me ended up last year.

You see, it's all about the hostages to fate, the family members, and how many hostages people are willing to give up. If I didn't have anyone that needed health care, I'd probably be just as strident about the financial/medical death panels and the incremental destruction of the middle class.
"How dare they call themselves affordable charging a couple over fifty-five $1300 for health care...." Really, they should have called it "Regulated Health Care Access Act" and stopped pretending to be affordable. It's not affordable (compared to Medicare?) if you have a pre-tax household income of $63K a year and/or are midway through 50 - which is about 25% of California.

I know they're playing one level of the working class people against the other. It's Jay Gould all over again. "I can hire one half of the working class to kill off the other half"...

We can do better, and I'm looking long out - hoping a very flawed ACA is just part of the incremental process that will be revised and re-tooled, just like Social Security, just like Medicare, just like the VA, just like all the other programs that go up and down depending on the whims of the electorate.
We've also got a really shitty value system in this country where people are judged on the money they make, and until we as an electorate take to the streets to change that, and take back the media in the process, we're not going to advance beyond where we are now, where those with the most money get to play gotcha with those with less, and turn us each against the other.

Got a problem with the ACA - vote. Agitate. Push. Move to change the morals and values of this country.

Because there are serious gaps, because it doesn't benefit you and me (except in extremis) it needs to be re-tooled. So many good programs over the years - education, civil rights, health care, financial reform - died because they were scrapped for being politically imperfect, a waste of time and money, instead of being re-tooled to fit the problem they were addressing.

Haele