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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]What problems will ACA solve?[/quote]

Access to health insurance. The ACA will reduce the number of people who don't have health insurance.[/quote]

That has yet to be seen.  First of all, you have to be able to actually enroll, which is difficult to impossible at this point.  How many younger healthier people will just opt to pay the fine?  Second, many folks with non- ACA compliant individual plans have had their insurance canceled, only to find that the plans on the exchanges are much more expensive and/or have much higher deductibles.  Not to mention all of the folks who have their hours reduced below 30 hours, and dumped off their employers plan, and/or their employer has under 50 employees, and their insurance was non-ACA compliant, so they just stopped covering their employees altogether.

My understanding is that the "affordable" (subsidized) premium numbers being cited have high co-pays, which are not subsidized.  That's going to be a shocker for some low-income folks when they actually try to go to the doctor.

At the end of the day, there very well could be fewer insured people in the US when this is done.  [/quote]

At the end of the day, the next time it snows, the streets could burst into flames, but it is extremely unlikely.

It seems that you are looking for problems where they don't exist.  If young people pay the fine, then the number of insured people does not go down.  And what is the point of dropping the hours of employees who already have company-paid health insurance?  Not much, unless their plans are worse than the ACA ones.  And the bar is not especially high on the bronze and catastrophic ACA plans.

At the end of the day, it's really hard to imagine a world in which the government subsidizes a benefit and yet fewer people enroll.[/quote]

What you seem to be missing is that 80 percent of the people in America were satisfied with their health insurance when Obamacare was passed.  It was estimated that about 5% of the 15% or so of the uninsured had preexisting health conditions that made insurance too expensive.  In the attempt to get coverage for those people, and have it subsidized by healthy people, ACA imposed minimum requirements and new rules (employer mandates with a 30 hour workweek as "full time", minimum requirements for coverages for individual policies) on the 80% that were satisfied.  This is the only way the ACA will work -- if young, healthy people do not enroll, the costs for the pool that is left will skyrocket, and the entire thing will crash and burn. The bad web site just exacerbates this problem, as the sick will spend any amount of time to get enrolled, and the healthy will just walk away.

Hundreds of thousands (if not millions, the article just cites numbers from individual companies in a handful of states) have had their individual policies canceled.  As of Jan. 1, these people are uninsured unless they can get healthcare.gov to work or find insurance some other way.  So much for "If you like your insurance, you can keep it."

http://www.nbcnews.com/health/thousands-get-health-insurance-cancellation-notices-8C11417913

Yes, they may be getting "more" coverage, but they are also, in many cases, being forced to buy insurance they don't want or need (an 80-year-old has to buy maternity coverage, for example). The cheaper plans also have high deductibles and copays (see the thread on cost).  It's as though the federal government mandated that everyone buy a car, but outlawed Chevrolet's and required that people could only buy Mercedes.  Even if they provide a subsidy for the monthly payment to the truly poor and lower middle class, the middle class will be stretched, and the truly poor can't pay the maintenance cost on a Mercedes at all.  How many of the "insured" poor will still end up in the emergency room because they can't afford the copay for a doctor?

Finally, if you don't see the point of dropping the hours of people who already have insurance (at a time when the government mandated coverage make insurance more expensive), you must work for the federal government. 
[/quote]

Meant to add -- 75 percent of jobs added this year were part time.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/21/part-time-job-creation_n_3788365.html[/quote]

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