<p><pre><code> Before the ACA, there were a handful of ways insurers could balance their risk
pool. One big tactic was just to avoid covering sick people, filtering out
individual customers who appear likely to need lots of expensive medical care.
But Obamacare made that type of discrimination illegal: One big selling point
of the law was that everyone would be eligible to sign up.
</code></pre>
Companies that profited off of denying helping people with pre-existing conditions are finding they can't profit anymore? Allow me to play a little ditty on the world's tinniest violin for them.<p>The honest reality is that these costs did exist before, it's just they were paid by the sick in our society by dying, while the health insurance companies skimmed off the cream from the healthy. No free lunch, right? So this cost existed, only by law, it was pushed onto the healthcare companies after the ACA<p>It is quite bad though, as the article details, costs have reached 100% of premiums at least in NC it looks like. That is unsustainable, and since the ACA went ahead with requiring healthcare companies to help pull this off, without something like a public option to cover say the super sick, this isn't good news.<p>All around, this is a bad. But it's not like ACA made it worse, it just made the costs appear somewhere else, and as the article states, absent of any new policy, that cost will shift back to the sick who will have to die again.
As a self-employed developer I have an ACA plan and I can tell you first-hand it feels like a total fraud. I pay $300/month but also have a $6k deductible, which means the plan doesn't really pay for anything until I've already spent $6k out of pocket. I have no problem with a $6k or even $20k deductible because I work hard to remain healthy but then my premiums for what is essentially a catastrophic policy should be much lower (around $75/month). Fortunately I can afford the extra amount, but I can see how it would be extremely painful for a family at the median income. My MD friends tell me the economics are based on people who work diligently to improve their health subsidizing people who could care less and actively sabotage themselves (e.g. non-compliant diabetics who eat like crap and don't medicate...not even diabetics as a whole). Unless and until the conversation about personal responsibility starts it seems hopeless. Whatever Obamacare started out trying to be, it has been twisted into something else and badly needs reform.
I don't know anything about the details of this situation. But maybe someone else here does.<p>How is the US so inefficient at healthcare? We spend more per person (or per GDP?) than many (most?) other countries and we get less in return.<p>Where is this money going?