This is one thing I don't understand - how so many people are so vehemently against ACA.
Well, Brit, maybe I am just a fucking nuts American, as you say, but I paid $450 a month for insurance with a $1500 annual deductible just a few years ago, before the ACA, to cover my entire family. Now, I have the cheapest plan available, with a $12,500 deductible, an HSA eligible plan, meaning I pay the first $12,500 each year, and for that I pay $1026 monthly. A plan like my old one would be over $2000 monthly. Even my current plan is going away. It is not available in 2017. My insurance company can't make money at that rate. In 2017, the absolute cheapest plan available is $1380 monthly, a 35% increase for
worse coverage. It goes up from there, i.e., each plan is successively more expensive. Comparing prices for 2017 is pretty easy, because in my geographic area, there is only one plan left, thanks to the damn ACA.
It does not take a Nobel prize in economics to realize that the premium for a person like me (inhumanly low cholesterol with good ratios, such an absurdly healthy diet that friends and family poke fun at it, and intense gym sessions 6 days a week) would rise if the government mandates that anybody else will pay the exact premium I pay, no matter their state of health, no matter the preexisting conditions. Every fat slob with diabetes or pre-diabetes pays the same as me. Aids patients pay the same as me.
What idiot thought that would be a good idea?
I was against the ACA before it passed, because it was blatantly obvious what was going to happen to anybody with half a brain. Now that I have had to suffer the consequences of others' delusions for a few years, yeah, I am "vehemently against ACA."
Do you still not understand, or do you at least halfway understand, even if you somehow think this is for my own good?
Health insurance went from something I did not think about very much to a burdensome, oppressive monster. It is by far my largest bill.
The saddest thing is that the people so strongly against it are the ones to benefit.
Benefit?
That, and the guns. Those two things basically take me from "yeah, I kind've get the US, sort've" to "you're all fucking nuts".
Since I used a gun when two armed robbers confronted me and my wife last year, I just have to say that maybe the one who is nuts is the one who does not recognize my or my beautiful wife's right to exist and defend our lives as we see fit. What is "fucking nuts" about not wanting to be at the mercy of violent criminals?
Is everybody in England so blind to other points of view?
Try opening your mind a little. There is a whole big, wide world out there. People in that world think differently from you, and they are not "nuts" for doing so.