Rose Roby is a Florida activist. Here she talks about the real and deep inadequacies of Obamacare and how it deepened an already existing crisis. She is correct in asserting it is not worth saving. The below is in response to an Obamacare supporter.
It GUARANTEED that millions of people would be left with no coverage. And it legally obligated the poorest Americans to pay a $600 fine every year they were too poor to buy the exchanges. It literally turns poverty in and of itself into an ILLEGAL act!
In states that took the Medicaid expansion, it left older people who struggle to find any work at all vulnerable to not being able to take part-time employment, which might at least provide a small relief to their poverty, because they would immediately lose their Medicaid if they did so. My best friend in NY has Medicaid and no ability to take part-time work because she's not well enough to lose her insurance.
It provided no protection against employers cutting hours to avoid covering employees. That your employer didn't do that is a very good thing indeed. There are MILLIONS of people who can't say the same.
The exchanges have been a total failure, with only 11% of those covered under Obamacare using them. They're too expensive and have crippling deductibles. Therefore, a vast majority of people who can't get the Medicaid expansion either because they live in a state that doesn't offer it (like Florida) or because they have "too much" money to qualify (see, having part-time work as an example of what counts as too much income) are left with nothing but a tax increase to the tune of $600 a year and risk of being imprisoned for tax evasion if they can't afford to pay it.
The insurance companies found their way around the "pre-existing conditions" rule by making it near impossible to find any doctors who actually take the plans. And more and more insurance companies are leaving the program, which means that the whole "competition" savings is nothing because many states have only one insurance company that participates in the ACA. Before long, they'll have none. There's NOTHING that was written into the law that prevented that from happening.
It got the vast majority of the Democratic Party to support a plan that came from the Republicans and was initially championed by Mitt Romney. Once it's dead and buried, perhaps there will be some call for Universal healthcare again.
So yeah, Obamacare deepened the crisis. You are free to oppose the repeal (which at this point, is all but a guarantee, given that Trump is President and the Republicans rule Congress). But you can call members of Congress and make your voice heard. There are plenty of people who feel the same way as you do. Obviously, I'm not one of them.
As I made clear, I won't lift a finger to save what I view as one of the most draconian federal laws I've ever seen passed in my lifetime.
References:
1-Healthcare (with many references)
2-Cautionary Tales by Jeff Roby
3-Jeff Roby on Strategy and Tactics
4-An Interesting Conversation on the Way Forward by Rose Roby
5-On Becoming Dependent Upon Incarceration by Rose Roby
6-The Democratic Party is the More Effective of Two Evils by Rose Roby and two others
7-An Interview with Don DeBar about Jill Stein's Strange Support of Clinton by Jeff and Rose Roby
8-We, too, are “Deplorables” (Part 2 of An Interview with Don DeBar about Jill Stein's Strange Support of Clinton) by Jeff and Rose Roby
