Why did the ACA force insurance on the populace rather than actually making health care affordable? People are still paying ridiculous amounts for even simple medications in many Healthcare places.
Our health care costs, including meds, have been #1 for many years, way before the Heritage Foundation first proposed a health insurance mandate, which became the basis for Massachusetts’ state program and the ACA. The ACA did not make pharma prices cheaper, but it didn’t cause price increases, either. In fact, one law that can be blamed for our high drug prices is the Medicare Modenization Act, passed in 2003, which barred the federal government from negotiating prices with drug companies. Yes, you read that right. The US Comptroller called the law the most fiscally irresponsible legislation he’d ever seen.Whether publicly or privately funded, the actuarial math of health car coverage remains the same. In order for very sick people to get the care they need, their costs must be subsidized by a large number of healthy people. That is true for employer-provided health insurance plans, individual ACA plans, and Medicare, which people pay into for decades before they start collecting benefits. A sustainable universal health care program must cover everyone. If healthy people opt out, that drives up the per-person costs for a sicklier pool of members. Every other OECD country has a universal health care program. Some are single payer, like in Canada while others are multi-payer with private health insurance mandates like Switzerland. All regulate the prices of health care goods and services more rigorously than we do. This will change only when enough of us hold Congress accountable for improving on the ACA.