So what is the answer for health care?

[gimmethesimplelife]

I am a little disturbed today as one of my goals is to start a business online and hopefully make more money than I am now. If I can pull this off, I will no longer be eligible for Medicaid and will have to purchase insurance on the exchanges. Not a big problem there until I opened up the Arizona Republic today and found that premiums are slated to be rising over 10% on the exchanges in Arizona next open enrollment reason, and I understand that deductible for silver plans can be 6K plus annually for individual plans. OK, we all know I can go to Mexico and get around this - no use playing that broken record yet again - how about people who don't want to go to Mexico (or some other country) or who live too far away or who face a life or death situation and are tied down to US health care by reason of not being able to travel? Not all of these people have 6K plus to burn through. So, really, despite some improvements I'm not seeing the problem solved. I don't know - can this ever be solved or do we just accept being vulnerable to US health care more and more every year, with more and more people knuckling under to medical tourism, being forced to for economic reasons?

I don't see any alternatives domestically, I really don't, though I do believe that some people have come out ahead due to the ACA. Definitely not all though, and I am starting this thread to see if anyone believes there can be any answers other than continual erosion (AKA the status quo). Rob

[bae]

I think the government should just pay for everything we need and want.

[iris lilies]

I think the government should just pay for everything we need and want.

While Alan has already shown his resistance to that, there are enough of us to confiscate his money. Shouldn't be a problem.

[catherine]

People here in this country are so eager to tear down landmark architecture like Grand Central Station, and pave Paradise to put up a parking lot, but for some reason, no one wants to clear-cut our current healthcare system and rebuild it in a way that makes sense for everyone.

[gimmethesimplelife]

People here in this country are so eager to tear down landmark architecture like Grand Central Station, and pave Paradise to put up a parking lot, but for some reason, no one wants to clear-cut our current healthcare system and rebuild it in a way that makes sense for everyone.

I couldn't agree with you more. Rob

[awakenedsoul]

Rob, I think you could do it. It's about $600.00 a month of savings for a year. I have the Silver Plan, and I pay $120.00 a month. (I receive a subsidy.) My deductible is $6,300. It takes discipline to have savings and not touch it. If you own a business, you have to set aside a certain percentage for taxes. It becomes one of your expenses. Living simply cut my yearly expenses by $10,000. a year, making it easy for me to set aside what I needed for savings.
You already have cut your expenses to the bone. I think if you set goals for income, (say a gross income of $30,000. for the year?) and have more wiggle room from achieving them, you would do very well.
When I look at the big picture...(all those years I paid Blue Cross and never got sick or needed medical attention,) and then what I received when it was my turn, I feel like it was totally worth it. People go bankrupt over medical bills. I like knowing that if something unexpected happens, I can write a check and pay the bill. It's just peace of mind.

[Lainey]

I think our country will be forced to adopt the more commonsense regs of other 1st world countries. For example, there's going to have to be some limits on things Medicaid and Medicare will cover. Or there could be age caps on certain procedures. It's one of the better ways to prevent these ever-increasing premiums that we're all going to be paying.
Half of the households in this country gross less than $55,000/year. Workers are now expected to self-fund their retirement (no more pensions), and now self-fund first-dollar medical care to the tune of thousands of dollars per adult, along with paying everyday basics like housing, transportation and food, and it's obvious that something needs to change.

[oldhat]

Not a big problem there until I opened up the Arizona Republic today and found that premiums are slated to be rising over 10% on the exchanges in Arizona next open enrollment reason, and I understand that deductible for silver plans can be 6K plus annually for individual plans.

You might want to wait until you really see what premiums are going to be and what deductibles are...I've heard that in a number of instances early reports about these things are often inaccurate.

That said, the ACA is clearly a far from perfect solution to US healthcare problems. Medicare for all (aka single payer) is still what we need. That wouldn't be perfect either, but it would reduce costs overall by removing the massive, and massively inefficient, middleman known as the insurance industry.

The ACA could be working much better, of course, if Republicans everywhere weren't working full time to throw sand into the gears. I think that as more and more people get used to the idea that healthcare reform is here to stay, the obstructionists will back off and we may even see legislation to fix the ACA's problems. Given the political climate, this is likely to take years, though.

Yes, lots of people don't have $6K to throw around. But it's better to be $6K in debt than hundreds of thousands of dollars.

[SteveinMN]

Single-payer health coverage is the way to go. But America loves way too much our 30-year experiment with social Darwinism -- and I'm afraid American Exceptionalism would not be able to take the blow.

As long as we have people who are unwilling or unable to envision lives different than their own, the odds of this happening are astronomical.

[Tradd]

Something's got to be done to control the costs, period.