Is Obamacare working ?

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it is a NON-system that needs to be crashed and remade from scratch, without any of the rip-off bs of the present [pre-ACA] non-system. no more allowing hospitals to charge 10 bucks for a phuqing aspirin tablet or cotton ball! no more "in network/out of network" crap. no more enrollment windows/exclusions. until that happens [likely never in America] ACA is as good as I can get and I will not gladly surrender it to trump and his minions only to suffer and die without affordable health coverage. the comfortable people defending the pre-ACA non-system never had to pay $300 out of pocket just to see a doc sans insurance [average rate] or $500 per month for a bare-bones comprehensive plan. and for those who say a catastrophic-only plan is sufficient, that is just being penny-wise and pound-foolish as it does nothing to make exorbitantly priced primary care any more affordable for the average joe, and any doc will tell you that primary care deferred eventually becomes mandatory tertiary care. that in itself will cause a death spiral for private medical insurance and fewer and fewer people have the money to chase fewer and fewer affordable plans. I am so sick of comfortably middle-class tools telling me I should support some social Darwinist like trump.

All of that still happens

Medicaid has been expanded a lot, studies show it is not much better than no insurance and there is a huge shortage

the system needs to be crashed and remade? talk about selfish, that's the purpose of the law? That's okay with you?

Obamacare has not made things better, it has made things worse

when i was on medicaid it was a HELLUVA lot better than nothing! to say otherwise makes no sense to me. it is the difference between being able to see a doc when you're sick, versus having to stay home and suffer. but the only way to squeeze the extreme greed out of the present system is to remake it from scratch. any lesser measures are mostly ineffective kludges with terminal greed contaminants gumming up the works. if anybody wants to call me selfish because I believe I deserve [as an American citizen] to be able to get health care now and then, then so be it! single payer NOW!! !

It's unfair to target the government in this particular matter when it's actually private insurers that are responsible for the high cost of health care. The government doesn't go far enough in taking power away from these private insurers, minimizing price gouging thus making healthcare more affordable. Simple regulations would go far but of course private insurers don't want that and will fight it and as long as the core issue isn't dealt with, prices will continue to rise no matter what. Insurance is pretty much a scam. If you go to the doctor all the time, it costs big insurance more than you pay in and since it's a business, they don't want that. This is a conflict of interest which is why there are always problems with health insurance. Years ago, insurers were losing so much money, they organized into cost effective HMOS and scaled down on what they covered. They pushed healthy lifestyle, like a restrictive parent, when people still wanted to smoke, sit around eating junk food without restrictions. Now, even the HMO concept is sagging under the burden of profits versus expenses. Whatever happens, it will end up costing everyone more money, that is a certainty. Since big insurance has so much power, they have pretty much made it impossible to access healthcare without them so they pretty much determine everything since they have no competition from individual buyers.

So to answer the question, it is working in the larger context because it would be worse if no one did anything since uninsured would still be accessing healthcare and not paying because the costs are prohibitive but it doesn't go far enough to put a cap on it so not having insurance would be an affordable option.

You can't really blame the insurers for the skyrocketing number of hip and knee surgeries.

And other costly expenses, like the new prescription drugs you see advertised during the 6 o clock news.

What law is going to keep costs down while providing vastly more services?

I blame them for the cost involved in treating patients. They have made it impossible for most to pay for Healthcare on their own because there's so much price gouging.
Laws capping costs would be a start. Tell the companies only a certain amount is allowable and they cannot charge more. This is in response to the obvious conflict of interest which legally should mean these companies are all null and void, anyway, which means they are really scams.

People are compelled to buy car insurance at the state level. Is that tyrannical?

It would have been worse if Obamacare was never passed is not a legitimate argument against Obamacare bieng a bad thing.

The poor can opt out of registering their car, or have none at all.

Obamacare forces poor people to buy something they may not need, and can't afford.

May not need? Can not afford? Now see, that's the problem with health insurance. It's expensive and not always practical.
A hypothetical situation.
What if you come down with an infection or need a blemish removed, hypothetically speaking? Without health insurance, it will cost thousands of dollars just to get a prescription, when you factor in trips to doctors and, perhaps, specialists. Antibiotics that cost a few dollars yesterday suddenly cost $200 per Rx and let's hope your bacteria isn't resistant or you will be paying for a second prescription and heaven forbid you need hospitalization! If another treatment is needed besides an Rx it will be even costlier! Say goodbye to your life savings!

And then on down the road, since you never received any preventative care screenings, your illness is in its final stages, when it's the most expensive to treat which they do but it isn't enough. Still, there's a $750,000 bill. Who will pay it? Before you got sick you never thought you'd need something like health insurance. You never counted on becoming ill.

These are typical of the types of situations uninsured find themselves in. Life is unpredictable.

Medicaid is working fine for me.

Ethically though health care should just be free. That would be even better. Don't ask me if this would work or not but common sense says that it should be. If we can't provide free health care to everyone as a country we are doing something wrong.

You're preaching to the choir!

I'm as poor as dirt, and I have to buy car insurance here in Washington state, so there's no opting out in regard to poverty, at least in my state.
And while you might be able to live without a car, you can't live without health coverage. Far too many people who had become excluded from coverage prior to the ACA due to poverty or preexisting circumstances either went bankrupt when a medical crisis arose, or they just suffered on, or they died. If you don't like Obamacare, fine, but before you dismantle it, have something legitimate to replace it with that will still give everyone coverage. No more of this Randian individualist horsesh*t preached by the right, where everyone either took care of themselves, or just got out of the way of the rest and died.

Eventually, most poor people are going to live without Obamacare and pay the penalty.

They are poor and can't afford it.

early count as of April 2016 shows "5.6 million people" paid the penalty last year, according to the IRS
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/27/us/ob ... .html?_r=0

Obamacare makes these 5.6 million people worse off.

Why steal from the poor?

ObamaCare is in its death spiral. They tried to keep the con-game running just a little while longer to get past the election, but couldn't even make it that far.

for those who say things along the lines of "Obamacare forces poor people to buy something they don't need and can't afford," i say- try seeing a doctor without health insurance and see what happens... [on average] 300 smackers right off the bat just for walking in the door. $3000 on average per ER visit. the whole purpose of insurance is the spreading of risk. it can't work if there is just cherry-picking of only healthy patients, that is just a money-churning racket. conversely, it can't work if everybody does not have some skin in the game. if there is gonna be a healthy insurance market, the abusive practices can't be tolerated AND everybody's gotta pay [even via subsidy] to play. and everybody gets sick sometime, nobody is immune to occasionally needing a doc's visit. and with the exchanges, the poor ARE SUBSIDIZED so the "can't afford" bit is not really relevant. the bronze plan is basically a glorified catastrophic plan but at least it only costs $35 per month which is about 1/15th what a similar unsubsidized plan [for middle-aged clients] costs up here in the great green northwest.