Want to write this to address the comments I see that the AHCA would benefit or would have benefited rich people. Well I’m fairly well off and I looked and it wasn’t going to help me at all financially. (I spent a day looking through general ledger payments and old health plan benefits documents).
I’m wealthy because I have a business. It’s not huge but it’s big enough where I and my employees have a group plan together. I’m not positive healthcare is a right but I am positive that if someone comes to work everyday I have a responsibility to make sure if they get sick they can see good doctors. As a result I fully fund a PPO policy for all employees. It’s the same one my wife and kids and I have.
Before Obamacare it got bad. Premiums were going up over 10% a year sometimes 20%. In order to keep insurance cost anywhere in the realm of manageable we eventually worked up to a $7500 dollar deductible and coinsurance on in network hospital visits. I told everyone if they had something big happen to let me know and I’d cover some of their deductible and coinsurance for them. It was the only way it could remain manageable.
Even then it was a nightmare to manage. With premiums soaring I shopped around a lot but it was hard to keep track of. There is no more terrible feeling than switching plans or insurers only to find that one of your staff has a condition or medication or treatment that isn’t covered anymore. Doctors you could have people check and under a PPO they were pretty broad except maybe specialists. Be able to know in advance coverage on everything else? No way.
When Obama got elected things immediately started changing. The insurance companies were clearly scared. They started lowering prices to stave off reform. Once Obamacare passed it dropped like a stone. It dropped enough where 10 years later I’ve worked us back to a $2000 deductible plan with 100% coverage in network and low out of pocket maximums. Total cost? Adjusted for normal inflation it’s less than what I was paying for the terrible plan 10 years ago.
What about the taxes? Well they are substantially less than what I ended up bonusing out to people to cover their deductible. They are an order of magnitude less than the increased premiums I would have paid if cost had stayed rising at their normal rate.
The defined benefits make it much easier to compare plans. Other than medications it can be pretty much done on a single sheet of paper.
I’m also no longer financially discouraged from hiring women. Prior to Obamacare your employer would get cost broken down by each employee. A healthy young woman in my office was listed as costing me twice as much as young man her same age who smoked. While I wouldn’t let it affect my hiring decisions, I find it hard to believe other employers wouldn’t take into account a 4-6k a year difference in benefit cost between hiring a woman or a man. At low and lower middle class levels of pay that’s a 10-25% difference in employee cost.
So don’t make the mistake of assuming that getting rid of Obamacare would help the rich universally. The ones with no employees or who don’t buy their employees insurance, sure, maybe, but not those of us who actually employ people everyday in decent jobs with decent benefits. We were as fed up as the rest of you. Remember the big shift in corporate support towards Dems 10 years ago? It wasn’t just about LGBT rights, it was because benefits costs were so out of control managing it was harder than anything else for anyone running a company .
Edit:
Rec list Wow thank you!
So here’s my math to show people what I mean.
I have 400k-800k in taxable income a year so the 4% or so tax costs about 16k-32k which is directly comparable to income. If I have a terrible year and break even and live off savings it doesn’t cost anything, unlike healthcare.
However here is what my healthcare cost was in 2008 and what it would be like now if I still had 10-20% yearly increases. For ease 15% increases
Base Year $50,000
Year 2 $57,500
Year 3 $66,125
Year 4 $76,043
Year 5 $87,450
Year 6 $100,567
Year 7 $115,463
Year 8 $133,000
Year 9 $152,951
Year 10 $175,893
Instead our plan costs 60k a year now under Obamacare and is a better plan. That’s about a 1.85% average yearly increase over ten years
Even at a 10% yearly increase that 50k plan would cost 130k a year today.
So by my math Obamacare is accountable for over a $100,000 of my income today even after paying the increased taxes.