My health insurance is going up, and we're changing from BCBS to Continental (Aetna). Thanks Obama.
Old rate - $373 or $8,952 yearly
New rate - $464.95 or 11,158.8 yearly 3k deductible for family.
So much for health insurance being less than $2,400. That is for Laurie and myself. I'm sure we'll see posts from others with the same thing.
I straight up had my health insurance taken from me when my employer, who for all intents and purposes provided me with excellent health insurance, was forced to drop their entire part time worker base when the new government regulations on what constituted the governmental prescribed definition of 'health insurance' wasn't met.
January first of the year that that shit went into law I was dropped and forced to go to a, how many millions did they spend on that Healthcare.gov website back then? 30 million, 60 million, more? Which didn't work, and I must have created something like 15 accounts on the site (when the process failed the account name was registered but wouldn't allow you to access the sight from that user account, so you had to make a new one), just to SEE what I was being offered under Obamacare.
Turns out I was being asked to pay something like $500 a month, which I was paying somewhere around $100 for my previous insurance out of each paycheck, and that was for the "Bronze Plan", which had me somewhere around a $2500 deductible on pretty much everything.
At which point, unless something catastrophic happened, which thankfully didn't, I might just as well pay out of pocket, because I couldn't afford what was being offered. Unless I was cool with eating nothing but canned catfood and top ramen for the rest of my fucking life. So I said fuck it, and didn't sign up.
Then they started charging me an annual fee because I wasn't paying for the insurance.
And the quality of offerings has declined year after year in the wake of this shit.
This is the kind of shit that happens when the government tries and strong-arm an entire industry to their will. It does nothing good for anyone. Employers can't offer it, so they won't, and the only groups that are offering it are offering it at prices that no reasonable person can afford, and it leaves millions upon millions of working Americans who are just barely getting by to pay more into a system that offers little to nothing in return.
Even in countries where government run healthcare is the norm it's so fucking obvious how downtrodden the people are in the wake of it. The taxes in countries that do this shit are unfuckingreal. One of the strengths of America has always been it's ability to allow free markets to riddle this shit out. Yeah, it's not a perfect system, it's a persistent work in progress, but when it's left to do what it does best, it finds solutions that eventually pan out for everyone.
And everyone that points out the fact that these CEOs make millions of dollars - honestly, who gives a shit. If the Walmart CEO makes 20 million annually as his salary, and you say, "But that money should go to the hard working employees!" - okay, great, Walmart has somewhere around 2.1 million employees, if you took that 20 million and gave it away to all the employees and paid this guy literally nothing for what he does, then you just gave every Walmart employee an ANNUAL pay increase of $9.52. Congratulations, you helped no one.