I Reject Obamacare

There are some who are too poor to afford to buy health insurance on their own who are also not sophisticated enough to figure out how to take advantage of the premium tax credit. The current law says those people need to be fined / "taxed". Who does that make sense to? Repealing the "individual mandate" should be the very least Congress does to fix the whole Obamacare mess. Why are people against that?

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MarkPaul · 26-30, M

The premise of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is to create a large enough pool of paying individuals. Those who barely use their insurance or don't use it at all end up subsidizing those who use it a lot. It's the fundamental of insurance in general. For example, you don't pay your car insurance based on your own driving record alone, but a pool of drivers in your state. If you have zero accidents and never file a claim, your insurance doesn't get reduced. Instead your premiums get used to pay for those who do file claims (not to mention to cover the profit motives of the insurance company).

When you eliminate the individual mandate, you cut the pool of most likely individuals who are least likely to actually file an insurance claim. The people who are against doing away with the mandate are those who either need insurance to cover regular health care needs or those who care about those people. The ones who favor doing away with the individual mandate either don't have recurring health care needs or simply don't care about anyone but themselves (or their immediate loved ones).

GoodoldBob · 61-69, M

@MarkPaul In other words, if you eliminate the individual mandate you stop forcing part of the population to subsidize another part of the population.

If they are going to tax us they should come out and say so and not try to force people into a contrived and dishonest system

MarkPaul · 26-30, M

@GoodoldBob It's not contrived; it's how insurance works and it has been communicated that this was the reason for the individual mandate from the start. From a policyholder perspective, the idea that we are subsidizing other policyholders does seem unfair whether it is for healthcare, car insurance, life insurance, social security, etc.

The real problem is not necessarily the individual mandate; it's that we are being presented with insurance as the solution to healthcare. The "real" need isn't for insurance, it's for healthcare. The problem is, that gets to universal care, also known as single-payer which offends some as full scale socialism and others as simply too expensive and thereby impractical.

Reasonable questions for us to ask are, why does healthcare cost so much? Is it possible some healthcare companies are enjoying an obscene profit?