ACA had problems, but those problems could have been resolved. ACA was probably the best we could hope for, frankly, given how unlikely it is that single-payer would ever pass congress.
Trump doesn't care that ACA did help. He just wanted to get rid of it.
Unfortunately, health care in this country is largely profit-based, so when Trump, and republicans in general, started creating uncertainty in the health insurance market, of course they were going to react by raising premiums.
And Trump idiotically refusing to pay cost sharing reductions to the insurance companies - despite the fact that it will cost the government more in the long run* - dealt the death blow. Now health insurance companies have no choice but to raise premiums. Some health insurance companies had already done so due to the uncertainty of the market, others will follow.
This affects my family. My son is in the tech industry, and has a decent job. But since he is a contract worker, the health insurance provided by the agency he works directly for (not the big firm he is contracted out to) was awful. 600 a month for very little coverage. Through ACA my son was able to get much better coverage for 400 a month. For health insurance, that's reasonable. That policy has now jumped to 600 a month, which makes it unaffordable. The lowest level coverage he could get was now 380, and that would cover almost nothing.
My son is young and healthy. He is who the health insurance market needs to stay in the system.
He's decided to pay the relatively minor penalty and take the risk of going without insurance.
I assure you he will not be the only young and healthy person to do so.
The decision will most directly affect middle-class families who buy their own insurance without financial help from the government. Consumers who earn more than 400 percent of the federal poverty level — an individual with income of about $48,000 or a family of four that makes more than $98,400 — will likely see their costs for coverage rise next year by an average of about 20 percent nationwide.
People with lower incomes will be unaffected since the ACA, also known as Obamacare, provides government subsidies — in the form of tax credits — that ensure their out-of-pocket insurance costs remain stable. So when premiums rise, those tax credits rise in tandem.
"We now know what Trumpcare looks like, and it's pretty ugly," said Ezekiel Emanuel, an oncologist who chairs the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania.
"The people who are particularly going to hurt are the people who don't get any subsidies. They just have to buy their own insurance," Emanuel, one of the architects of the ACA, told Morning Edition on Friday.
*
Ironically, the decision to end the $7 billion-a-year cost-sharing payments is likely to cost the federal government more than making them — nearly $200 billion over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
That is because the ACA requires that premiums don't exceed a set percentage of a person's income. So as premiums set by insurance companies rise over time, the government has to boost its tax credits so the cost to the consumer remains the same.
http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shot ... iddle-clas
The republicans and Trump will succeed in destroying ACA, and they have no feasible replacement plan in the works.