1040ez 2008: Fill & Download for Free

Failure. Anyone who says otherwise is saying “well it’s not technically the ACA’s fault” or is secretly hoping for the entire system to fail to make way for Single Payer.I have administrated multiple plans for multiple businesses. I have yet to see one person who’s plan has not worsened demonstrably and cost dramatically more. The government will trot out someone who was ambivalent about having insurance who eventually said “yes” after the subsidies kept increasing, and who now has basic coverage. Good for them. But for every one of them there are 1,000 who were dragged kicking and screaming into a plan that statistically will cost more and shorten their life.What I deal with everyday are employees who have seen their entire discretionary income disappear, all going straight to these new policies. Like Cash for Clunkers and every other anti-free market experiment that plays games with real lives, there is a wake of middle class people who are on the hook for these failed policies, some whose doctors went concierge or retired, and others who can’t afford to fill their prescriptions anymore.I can’t share any confidential information on anyone but myself, but in 2012 my family had a plan that was $1,200/mo. and had no deductible except for major surgeries. I had a $30 co-pay and that was it. So basically $14,400 in premiums plus maybe $1000 in out of pocket expenses. One good friend always praised his insurance company because he had three types of cancer at the same time, and the entire process, including hospital visits and flying back and forth to a specialist and surgeries, cost him $3. Enter Obamacare, and two years later my plan was $1500/mo, didn’t cover as much, and had a $3,000 per person per year deductible. Now I’m lucky that I work in a great law firm that pays 100% of our insurance premiums. Still what cost the company plus my family $15,400 now costs $1,500/mo + $9,000 family max out of pocket, or $27,000. And yes, that’s not moot—for the past 3 years I have hit that entire $27,000. Read: Obamacare was a $11,600 paycut for my family.You can say “well that guy must be the exception.” Yes, it’s high for me, but the national average is the ACA cost the average family over $4,000 per year (plus again plans that aren’t as good.)And the elephant in the room is always that the promises about being able to keep your plan or premiums and out of pocket expenses going down or the whole thing being designed to succeed in the first place—these things are increasingly looking like overt and intentional lies. The increased costs for filing your taxes if you have Obamacare (probably nationally averaging $120 more since you have to file an 8962, which for one disallows the 1040EZ.) The corrupt way the bill was passed, the dismissive backrooms of special interests and bourgeoisie… these things really catalyzed the loss of faith in the system that was already going on but has turned into riots in the streets as of this writing. Remember this 2008 ’til now depending on how you count it recession was always called a “crisis of consumer confidence,” and for the government to take that window of our vulnerability to transfer unlimited power to the most corrupt among us seems in bad faith. (Was that polite enough?)But I can’t just write an answer of everything wrong with it or no one will trust me. I have to put in some Pros, like… like… well now that I have a deductible with 100% coverage after that deductible is hit, I’m more comfortable going to optional appointments. That’s bad for the economy, but I guess good for me. And you can’t be canceled for getting sick, that’s good. But that’s as much as I can come up with…UPDATE 1: The news has been flush with stories of giant insurance companies getting out of the Obamacare market, and a few stories saying the nation may see its premiums go up 50% in 2017. So I called one of my friends who are senior executives in the health insurance world and asked him for the real story. He said “the whole plan, from before you heard of Obamacare, was to create cheap plans by fixing a price ceiling on everything, thus paying the doctors less, who would then evolve or die. Hospitals couldn’t afford to do surgeries in the hospital, they would have to build an offsite surgery center across town where it was cheap. What we didn’t expect was that they’d resist so much. More than that that so many doctors would quit. We’ve spent 5+ years telling hospitals that we’re not going to pay for their in-house labs or pharmacies, and again they’d have to build somewhere else so they could survive what we’re paying them, and rather than that they’re dropping us en masse.”UPDATE 2: Still five days after my answer, and I’m wondering if I just never noticed how much this came up. We got a letter from my primary doctor yesterday saying he’s closing his office and retiring because of decreasing insurance payments. He’ll still keep some patients a few hours a week out of a clinic two towns away, but that will be cash-only. Now that I type that, I realize I chatted with a dentist friend two days ago about not really “having a dentist” right now, because a year ago my dentist went concierge (doesn’t take insurance anymore.) Again, the important point is that Updates 1 and 2 are within a week of my answer, reinforcing my vote for Gigantic Fail.