>> the ACA has helped millions
There is no evidence at all that suggest your comment is true.
Surely, sweeping legislation of this nature has helped someone. But you must weigh the damage done by the program against the good it has done and the damage has been great. People are getting lesser quality of care, because of higher premiums, higher deductibles, crowded doctor's offices, transition to mid-level providers, massively higher drug prices, having money taken from them by IRS, increased taxes, and the list goes on.
You can't just say, "People are helped" and stop there and consider your comments reasonable. They aren't unless consider the downsides which are, in the eyes of many or most, far worse than the upside is good.
Most importantly among the downsides is we cannot begin to afford it.
Even those who are now receiving Medicaid benefits are often not better off than before. They have welfare benefits, that costs money. But that may or may not translate to better health or even better health care. It will, however, prevent them from being charged a penalty by IRS.
You and many others have made a very common mistake with Obamacare, which is to judge the program by its good intentions rather than by its actual consequences. As Milton Friedman often pointed out, this is one of the great mistakes made by the public which leads to government programs that don't work very well.
The truth is all of the gain in the number of people covered comes from the Medicaid expansion, which does not automatically translate to better health care or outcomes, and often is worse than before (many of those people actually had insurance before getting slammed into Medicaid, but their policies were killed by the law).
You can continue to delude yourself in support of disastrous liberal policy but the reality is whatever it is replaced by is probably not going to make it worse. I don't know if it will be made better by whatever eventually happens, it probably is not going to get worse. |
