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Originally Posted by tw2113
I think that'd be an ideal situation overall. The routine stuff is covered out of pocket or with individual health insurance purchased. Catastrophe covered more universally. I would have less issue paying taxes towards ACA stuff if it was just for catastrophe instead of for everything.
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But its the "everyday" stuff that actually costs the system more? Too many people without insurance visit ERs at public hospitals for routine kinds of medical care because they don't have a primary care physician, they don't have their "routine stuff" covered at all by anyone. So who ends up covering the tab? Right. The tax payers as a whole. Do taxpayers honestly want to turn away uninsured, low-income people from hospitals? No. In fact, it hasn't even remotely been suggested, many of the Republican arguments against "Obamacare" is that current laws already more or less provide public healthcare. Of course the reality is that the ass-backwards approach of the current laws and funding make is WAY more expensive than it has to be. If the people who have to visit ERs and public hospitals for "routine stuff" had preventative care and access to primary physicians, those costs would actually go DOWN. Further, hospitals, doctors, and insurance rates would also as a whole drop in costs as expenditures decline.
If the ACA DOESN'T fund "routine care" and just wastes moneys on "catastrophic" care which happens rarely, the government would quite literally be throwing BILLIONS of dollars towards healthcare that the majority of recipients would never even have opportunities to use in the first place. They'd STILL be having to go to ERs for "routine" care, and they still would be costing the system and the taxpayers that subsidize it MORE money than if they just gave out public insurance.
See, in America we suffer from an interesting, self-defeating mentality behind our systems and structures. We believe in the myth of meritocracy, so we don't agree with paying for things like "welfare" or public health, and yet conversely we are not a bunch of heartless scumbags, by and large the majority of Americans totally support funding for the public need, they just don't ever really like to pay for it. We like to have our cake, but not pay for it after eating. Its why we have so much "national debt" because NONE of us are willing to contribute taxes to even cover our day-to-day expenses which is why our country has ran up annual budget deficits more years in the past 50 than it has had surpluses or even just pushed. No, we like programs like public education, military spending, and prisons, but we rarely are interested in putting our money where our mouth is. These are supposedly deeply ingrained "American values" and yet nobody tends to actually value or prioritize them.
So if Americans want to continue to have to pay higher rates by covering our public health issues with an expensive public-hospital-ER bandaid without actually just providing subsidized health coverage for those who can't afford it, then Americans will continue to have to pay MORE out the ass when such people get sicker than they otherwise could have been with access to preventative treatment and medicine. What leads to something catastrophic like a heart attack, a stroke, or cancer in middle-aged Americans? By and large not having access to or simply neglecting preventative treatment which could have helped prevent something routine from devolving into something catastrophic or directly life-threatening.