I wish people wouldn't be so rude to those who lose out under the ACA. [View all]

[Nye Bevan]

I fully support the ACA, but there really are people who are worse off under it. In particular, healthy people whose income puts them just over the limit for subsidies will usually be worse off, because prior to the ACA they would be medically underwritten and be issued a policy with premiums that would reflect their good health. Or people who are eligible for subsidies but find that the narrow networks of policies on the exchange excludes the doctors that they want to stay with.

There are of course many winners, like people with pre-existing conditions and low income people who can benefit considerably from the subsidies (or who are newly eligible for medicaid in many states). But there is no need to be rude to those who are worse off under the ACA. The "cool story, bro" type responses are obnoxious, and I just juried a "fuck you" response to one of those posts.

As Paul Krugman puts it:

The Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, is a policy Rube Goldberg device — instead of doing the simple, obvious thing, which would just be to insure everyone, it basically relies on a combination of regulations and subsidies to rope, coddle, and nudge us into a rough approximation of a single-payer system. There were reasons for this, of course, mainly political: a complete displacement of the existing system would have been both too destructive of powerful interests and too radical for voters.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/24/obamacare-will-be-a-debacle-for-republicans/?_r=0

The ACA is hopefully an intermediate step towards the single payer system that most of us here want, and yes, it is imperfect, but it is a huge improvement overall compared to what we had previously. But given its imperfections, there are indeed people who are worse off under it, and these folks do not deserve the rude and skeptical responses that we see from many DUers.