
Quoting
Taxing Matters
I too am self-employed and pay my own insurance costs, and it is significantly more than I paid when I was covered by group insurance through an employer. That is not surprising since group insurance is cheaper for insurance companies to manage and the risk models are more favorable for group insurance. But I will tell you that the ACA requirement to insure all people with pre-existing conditions and that effectively spread the risk of insuring me out with everyone else by the insistence to price premiums the way the Act did that eliminated surcharges for pre-existing conditions meant that for me the ACA was a huge benefit for me. I was finally able to be free to pick other insurance companies if I wanted and my premiums literally dropped to 60% of what they were the year before the ACA applied.
I do know quite a bit about the health care industry and I am not a fan of some of its practices. But I do not go so far as to call those practices “corrupt.” Don’t assume I don’t know about it just because I don't share your same opinion of it. Healthcare in the U.S. is expensive for a lot of reasons, more expensive than in most other advanced countries. And it is not just because we don’t have single payer/government provided healthcare system as do many advanced nations. But as long as most people do not pay out of pocket for the actual cost of their care they have little incentive to push to change the system to something else. When your co-pay is $25 and your employer pays a good chunk of your health insurance premium you don't truly understand what that insurance is costing you — without that insurance the employer could pay a lot more in direct salary. Few people look it at that closely to realize that. Whether that something else we would do would actually be better, well, that would depend a lot on what we ultimately decided to do. I have had some experience with one other country’s nationalized health care system, and I wouldn't want that for the U.S. either. We could easily make our system worse, not better, if we aren't careful.