Self-Employment - Ny State Of Health: Fill & Download for Free

Simple answer, folks. I am self employed. Before the Affordable Care Act, my insurance premium was $1,800 per month for one person. After the act was passed, my premium went down to $750, just by purchasing it through the state pool, for the same coverage. I am diabetic, and with the act, I cannot be denied coverage. Of course, there are things that could be better about the ACA. More ease of access, lower costs for medication and specialist visits, a real, single payer health care system instead of the half & half thing we ended up with. But that’s because the Republicans have been blocking all related legislation intended to fix the problems in the initial legislation. Not because the act itself is a failure.I know people are concerned about rising costs. This is a state issue, since each state has a great deal of control over how the act is supported. in some states, the increase may be as high as 34%. In NY, we are looking at 9% increases. That still leaves me paying considerably less than I did before ACA was passed. Some states, it’s much higher. So get out there, people, and lobby your governors and state legislatures for a better deal.

First of all, don’t forget that a substantial majority of Americans get their health insurance through their employers. While changes to Obamacare impact the expense to the employer for these plans, it doesn’t change the nature of health insurance for most workers. That’s true whether you’re a at-will employee of a large corporation, a union worker, or even a public-sector worker.Same is generally true for the elderly - Medicare continues unchanged, even if Obamacare collapses. For the poor on Medicaid, the details differ State by State. If Obamacare is defeated, it would be up to the individual States to decide how to proceed, and no doubt there would be a lot of Congressional work deciding if (or how much) to subsidize the States. Since the most dramatic impact of Obamacare was to force millions more people onto Medicaid, this would be a serious issue in some states. Places like NY, CA and IL would need to decide whether to keep these millions of people covered, and if so, how to pay for it.This leaves the pool of people that buy individual insurance as the likely victims of any changes in Obamacare. These are largely self-employed people, or workers at small businesses that do not offer health insurance coverage for their employees.I have personal experience with this, as I’m a self-employed person. As anyone that’s experienced it would tell you, Obamacare caused an explosion in premiums for these workers, especially the more affluent ones. In my case, my premiums increased 450% since Obamacare, and my deductibles climbed over 600%. People like me welcome the dismantling of Obamacare because the most common impact it’s had on us is that we can no longer afford health insurance.Folks that earn less and are buying private insurance under Obamacare currently receive subsidies from the taxpayer to lower the cost of coverage, but this is really a losing game from a cost perspective. Like all wealth redistribution programs, money is lost at every step of the way to do administrative and bureaucratic overhead. On average, every time the US government takes a dollar from one person to give to someone else, the government needs to collect $1.69. Ridding the nation of this would be a net positive, even if we ultimately find some other way to subsidize those that aren’t poor enough to go on Medicaid, but are too poor to afford health insurance.But really, all this is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic…the real issue is that in our government dominated system, the free market can’t solve our healthcare problems. Administrative cost skyrockets, and before you know it, we get to the point where we are today, with per capita healthcare spending at $12,000.The only way to have sustainable health insurance markets is to get the ugly hand of government out of the equation to the greatest extent possible, and then let innovation and competition find better answers. The whole focus on “replacing” Obamacare reveals that this isn’t the intent of anyone in Washington, so regardless of whether you like “Trumpcare” or “Obamacare”, we’re guaranteed to fail.

I’m surprised that no one has mentioned the vast and well funded insurance lobby, which has been funding politicians to oppose a sensible national health plan for the US for at least the past twenty years. They ran dreadful, scare tactic ads when the Clintons first attempted to reform health care, telling people they wouldn’t be able to choose their doctors or have access to needed health care. Go back and search for some of the commercials they ran, if any of them are still out there. A lot of the anti-socialist rhetoric comes from the insurance lobby.Socialist is one of those words left over from the cold war, that most Americans just don’t get. They happily collect their unemployment benefits, SSI, and social security, but deplore “socialism.” And they have been convinced that government can’t do anything right, even though most, if not all government programs manage to operate pretty efficiently.ACA is far from perfect. Everybody knew that when it was passed. The Democrats proposed several fixes, but were blocked by the Republicans t every turn, even though they had forced the legislation to conform more closely to their original health care reform package than anything the Dems originally proposed. many of the issues arise form the way the plan is administered by individual states, rather than by the federal government. With 50 different state bureaucracies deciding how to implement the legislation, some of them have done a much better job than others.Speaking strictly from personal experience, my insurance under the ACA is a definite improvement over the previous situation. As a single, self-employed New Yorker, the cost of my individual plan went from almost $1,900/month to $750. That’s a huge savings for almost the same coverage, inlcuding $10 co-pays and prescription coverage. this year, while some people were experiencing high increases, the cost of my plan went up $50. So NY seems to be doing an okay job managing the insurance pool. But I know that in some other states people have seen 30% - 40% increases, either because of the way the state administers the pool, or because insurers are pulling out due to the expense.So, is ACA a great piece of legislation? Absolutely not. But it is fixable. Would we be better off expanding Medicare to the uninsured population, perhaps with some incremental, income based costs to consumers? Yes. But it’s not going to happen under the current administration.