I hadn't much really thought about this during the whole ACA rollout. Like many progressives, I have supported the Affordable Care Act primarily as a conscious act of empathy. The belief that ones station in life shouldn't be a gating factor in access to affordable health care. As a progressive, I am also dissatisfied with the ACA... I long for the single payer kind of system that allowed my mother-in-law to receive free treatment when she was injured in Northern Ireland a few years ago, or the kind of access to health care that my Canadian cousins have.
However, it was mostly an academic exercise for me. I have been employed most of my adult life, and always with companies that have "better than average" health coverage for their employees. To back it all up my wife, the nurse, gets health coverage through her employer: the State of Washington. I am golden until both of us are retired... It is extremely unlikely at this point that one of us, much less both of us, will lose our jobs in the near future.
More Below.
But my wife and I are both 50, and hope to retire sometime in the next 10-15 years. Last year we visited a financial planner for the first time, just to find out where we were on the whole "life plan" thing. We are both healthy (now) and would like to see a bit more of the world while we are still healthy. We laid out everything we had from savings and investments, to mortgage, debt and anticipated college expenses, and current "burn rate" (how much we currently spend month to month). The nice man made us a whole bunch of graphs that took into account various investment returns and best/worst case scenarios.
As countless people before us have probably found, in every graph there was a giant bulge in the anticipated required expenditures that started at whatever arbitrary "retirement age" we selected, and ended when each of us reached 65 years old. The bulge is HUGE. It is the cost of private health insurance that ends when we qualify for Medicare. That single line item dwarfs all other anticipated expenses. It looked like the game was rigged to ensure that it was nearly impossible for us to retire until we were 62 or 63 years old, just to maintain our current lifestyle, much less have any "extra".
Then the CBO report came out... you know the one. The one that said "The ACA is expected to cause 2.3 million people to leave the workforce". The one that the GOP seized upon to take that number out of context and use their spin machine to insinuate that 2.3 million jobs would be lost.
But no, the CBO was talking about me. It was talking about my family. What I have just realized in the past couple of weeks is that, thanks to the CBO and the ACA, I can almost certainly retire well before I am 65. I was not going to visit the financial planner this year... It costs something like $300-$500 a pop. I still might not. But I will definitely see him sometime in the next couple years... After they are used to seeing the effects of the ACA on people like me. But what I think it means is that the giant bulge will be replaced by a much smaller bulge.
I will (probably/hopefully) never qualify for a govt subsidized private health care plan. I am not a 1%-er... But I probably am somewhere between a 10%-er and a 20%-er. I have never worried about health care, keeping a roof over my head, or struggled to put food on the table. But I had the retirement-financial bulge. I had the uncertainty that said I had to keep working if I wanted to have health insurance or account for any of the worst case scenarios between end-of-work and 65.
In short, the ACA will probably allow me to voluntarily leave the work force, and afford private health insurance until I hit 65. I am not yet certain, but a boy can dream...