Is Obamacare working ?

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I usually don't agree with Gov Asa,but I've got to give him a thumbs up for this.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/03/2 ... link_id=12

^^he's fighting a losing battle against a legislature full of randians for whom compassion is a dirty word.

I basically support Obamacare and could give reasons why it may be a better direction for the US than Single Payer, although I won't.

However, I have a different view of an ideal health care system, which would be a market-based system combined with mandatory catastrophic health insurance. Catastrophic health insurance already exists, or has existed. Before Obamacare, many young professionals who did not get health insurance from an employer would have it. This means that one typically pays out of pocket for medical expenses (and budgets for same) just as one pays out of pocket for one's transportation expenses, but would be protected from the sort of "catastrophic" health expenses that would otherwise lead to financial ruin. This would lead to competition for patients among providers with the potential for improving service and value through the usual market mechanism. This is in fact happening to some extent in the US. There are competing clinics operated by pharmacies and retail chains such as Target where people can go for immunization etc.

Such a system will never come about because too many special interests would stand in the way. Obamacare is complicated, expensive, and bureaucratic, but it offers the best realistic opportunity to improve access to health care in the long run, given political reality.

IMHO there is no justification for a routine [uninsured] doctor's office visit costing more than [the equivalent of] 20 automobile oil changes in my little town.

It hasn't saved money, costing taxpayers $110 billion or so a year. It hasn't allowed people who liked their plan to keep their plan – some 9 million now don't have private insurance at all, thanks to the ACA; 5 million have lost employer-provided insurance, and 4 million have lost other individually-purchased plans. Millions of others are now paying more and getting less and/or have extremely high deductibles. (Figures from the CBO.)

So judging by the promises originally made about it, the ACA has been a resounding failure. If the real goal was to reward the ruling party's most loyal supporters, and also move the country farther along toward fully socialized medicine, it's been a ringing success!

i for one can say it definitely helps the working class.

"socialized medicine" is pure evil. Better to let people suffer and die in the street.

It’s official: Double-digit rate hikes for Obamacare

The average increase in premiums is 25 percent but it varies greatly between states. Indiana is down by 3 percent, Arizona's premiums are going up by 116 percent.
Premiums to Skyrocket for Some Obamacare Customers

Jacoby, you should not have been so anti Clinton, The White House was reading .

The fact that the question must be asked in my mind concludes that it at the very least imperfect and not working to the expectations of the people.

Could it be improved? Possibly, but not by the current administration.
Could another democratic president fix it? Yes, but I am extremely doubtful Hillary has shown any indication or plan on how she would achieve that.

whatever increases there will be seen on the exchanges will pale in comparison to when the rump gets elected and brings us back to before PPACA, premiums will skyrocket and they will dump high risk patients off the rolls, resulting in a private insurance death spiral acceleration.

That's nonsense that Trump would cause prices to skyrocket, doesn't make any sense. The mandate has to be voided, this whole idea that getting more people insured would lend itself to better health outcomes is just bonkers and the studies have shown Medicaid barely being better than no insurance at all, the problem has never been lack of access to coverage but rather the exorbitant price which Obamacare has done nothing to address. Nobody is passing up health coverage for any other reason except cost and this law causes costs to rise, it's a bad law and should be repealed. You can keep what little good has come from the law and scrap the rest, the cat is out of the bag with the Medicaid expansions and I don't believe that ending pre-existing conditions or allowing children to stay on their insurance longer really incur that much more additional costs. You can't mandate people have to buy private insurance and watch the rates literally double, that is tyrannical.

People said it at the time, the law was meant to crash the US healthcare system and it seems like it is succeeding.