Okay, part two of his reply...
Try answering these questions:
1) Can you agree that just because someone has health insurance does not mean that they can still afford their deductible, and having health insurance vs having no insurance changes nothing regarding their ability to afford healthcare? No benefit or harm of ACA
Sure, this is the corollary to our discussion above. Health insurance you can't afford isn't really any good to anyone, just like procedures that are too expensive aren't really any good to anyone, even if you've reduced the price of insurance or reduced the price of the procedure.
But the ACA did make insurance more affordable, for most people. I say "most" because it specifically helped poor people, and there are lots of those, and it did it by increasing the costs for rich people, and there are fewer of those. Of COURSE the rich people don't like it. But the rich people had insurance before and they still have (effectively more expensive) health insurance now, so really their only complaint is a financial one. Meanwhile, lots of poor people literally had their lives saved. I'm for it.
2) Can you agree that some people who had no health insurance can get partial subsidies, but still can't afford their deductibles and now are mandated to pay for an insurance that provides no benefit, but still can't afford the care because their subsidies are so high?
Is there a typo in this question?
I agree that some people get subsidies to make health insurance more affordable than it was before, but still don't buy health insurance. Is it affordable for them? That kind of depends on what their priorities are. The subsidies are income-capped so that you theoretically have a relatively fixed amount of money to live on, at which point your insurance is free, and as your income rises they take ever larger portions of that extra income to pay for the insurance, like a steep marginal tax rate. It's designed to be affordable, but we all know that you can be flat broke on $100k/year if you're bad with money. Lots of people who are both poor and bad with money, and who could get outstanding insurance for minimal cost, will not be able to afford that cost if it is more than zero.
To the second part of your question, no I don't agree that anyone was mandated to buy insurance. People are offered subsidized insurance (if they are under 400% FPL), and they were issued a slowly phased-in tax penalty for declining that coverage. Lots of people declined. This is just like the 10% early withdrawal penalty on your 401k, it's not "forbidden" it's just taxed extra. In some circumstances, the smart financial move is to pay the tax in order to do what you want to do. Government incentives are rarely truly "mandates".
3) Can you agree that many Americans had to change their doctors because their new mandated health plan is not taken by their physician?
The ACA doesn't control what doctors decide to do. If your doctor decides to decline an insurance company, you probably can't blame Congress for that decision.
4) Can you agree that some physicians refuse to accept healthcare.gov insurances because they are concerned they will not get paid because of the high deductible?
I've never even thought about it. Do doctors seriously consider denying treatment to a patient if they don't like the way their insurance deductible is structured? That's pretty shitty.
And to be clear, the deductibles on the ACA plans here aren't any higher than the deductibles on employer-sponsored plans of the same cost, meaning virtually nil if you have expensive premiums and several thousand dollars if you have cheap premiums. That's how insurance works.
5) Can you agree that a family of 3 making $110k/yr is now paying significantly more for healthcare compared to pre ACA passage?
No, at least not until this year when the Republicans started monkeying with the ACA. Unsubsidized insurance on the individual market was always expensive, even before the ACA. Costs went down for millions of people who live under the 400% FPL when the ACA was passed. Costs for everyone else continued to grow at rates that were about what they were before the ACA was passed, slightly slower at first and now slightly faster more recently.
I guess you can argue they are paying more because their premiums have continued to go up, as they have always gone up over time. That's not because of the ACA, though, unless you're blaming the ACA for not doing enough to lower costs. I'm not sure you can blame a law for doing something if the law was specifially designed to stop that same thing, but was only partly effective.
6) Can you agree that a man or a women over 45 does not require prenatal care covered through their health insurance and having it does not make their insurance better?
They may not need it, but it does make their insurance better. Their insurance policy isn't written for just them individually. I also don't need an annual ob-gyn visit, but my insurance still covers it because I'm part of a risk pool that applies to a million employees and some of them do need it. It also covers allergy testing, even though I don't have allergies. That's the point of insurance plans, they collective the risks of an entire population of people, and therefore they have to cover everyone's needs.
Otherwise, we could make insurance cheaper by excluding fat people from buying it, and not covering diabetes treatments. We could exclude women from buying it, and it would be cheaper for not covering pregnancy, and we could exclude old people from buying it and not cover Alzheimer's. The remaining insurance would be super cheap! For healthy young men! Because healthy young men don't have healthcare costs! Meanwhile, women would pay more and the elderly would pay more and the obese would pay more, and the insurance company would spend the same amount of money treating it all but they would have a harder finding customers because tons of old/fat/female people wouldn't be able to afford their remaining insurance. This situation is not better for anyone!
Should we induce 1 tax payer to have unaffordable healthcare so that 1 non taxpayer can have affordable healthcare? What about 1 tax payer suffer to benefit 10 non tax payers? What 10 tax payers suffer to help one non tax payer? Obviously life is not so black and white, but the concept is very important.
Is the concept "Should Americans take care of each other?" Because in that case, I think the answer is yes. Yes, American taxpayers should make monthly disability payments to people who are born mentally handicapped. Yes, American taxpayers should send veteran's benefits checks to our dying WWII vets who live in rent-controlled apartments. Yes, American taxpayers should provide health school lunches to kids from poor neighborhoods who don't get enough to eat at home.
This is what Americans do, we take care of each other. Some of us are unlucky, and needy, and deserve a helping hand. Some of us (like me! and you!) are lucky, and stupidly wealthy, and they deserve to have some of that wealth reclaimed and used to support the unlucky ones. This is the American social contract. If you come to America and become an American citizen, and life in America shits on you, then America will help you. If you come to America and become and American citizen, and life in America showers you with riches, America will take some of that wealth back.
Sol, why is it that you simply can't come to terms that the ACA is not perfect, has harmed a percentage of taxpayers and the law needs improvement on.
I don't need to come to terms, I'm way ahead of you on this one. I have not only recognized that the ACA has harmed some people (and helped many more others, which is the part you seem to be struggling with), I have identified who is in each group and estimated the cost/benefit of that exchange. I find the whole thing broadly positive for America, though bad for me personally.
And I think I'm also way ahead of you on the needed improvements. In the 56 pages of this thread we have identified specific problems with the ACA, and specific improved fixes for those problems, and specific alternatives to the ACA that we all seem to agree would be better, and a bunch of (GOP draft legislation) specific alternatives to the ACA that seem kind of counterproductive. That's why I started this thread in the first place, to discuss these kinds of specifics.
Personally, the longer we talk about this issue the more convinced I have become that a single payer healthcare system would offer Americans better coverage at lower cost than does our current public-private hybrid system. We tried the free market approach and it failed us. Then we tried the conservative's hybrid approach, and it was better but not as good as we had hoped. Every other western democracy (okay there are only 11 of them) in the world has some form of taxpayer supported universal healthcare, and every single one costs less than the American system for better outcomes.