I don't discount YOUR experience, but it's not eve

I don't discount YOUR experience, but it's not everyone's experience.

WTF do you say to someone, who couldn't get coverage for
something serious enough to disqualify them, who is now
covered, treated and....alive?

Do you seriously believe that's NOT happening?

I did experience the job interruptions and the non coverage, I was lucky....healthy and physically fit. I knew people not so fortunate....injured or diagnosed before being reemployed.

Tough shit for them, huh?

Now I'm on Medicare and I'm watching the bullshit 'donut hole' shrink on it's way to expiration by 2020. Not a big deal for me, now, but a huge fu*king deal for many people I know.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/21/obam...32070.html

Quote:

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4. Politics is a huge factor.

The most telling sign about the influence of politics is that even among Americans surveyed in the non-group market — the roughly 10 percent of the population most directly affected by the ACA — partisanship was the most important driver of opinions on the law, according to a regression analysis that researchers at the Kaiser Family Foundation performed for HuffPost.

Overall, 64 percent of Democrats in the non-group market rate the ACA favorably, compared to just 19 percent of Republicans. Once the Kaiser researchers controlled for party affiliation in their analysis, none of the other factors they tested — including demographics, health status and the characteristics of their insurance — turned out to be significant predictors of a person’s overall ratings of the ACA.

This is consistent with other survey results, including a detailed poll from Vox several months ago that documented widely different perceptions among Democratic and Republican respondents.

5. But partisanship alone isn’t the whole story.

Powerful as it is, the continuing partisan divide cannot tell the entire story. If it did, then the health care law would have a net positive rating, since more Americans identify or lean Democratic than Republican. When Kaiser researchers — again, at HuffPost’s request — tallied more than 8,000 interviews they’d conducted over the course of the year they found that intensity of opinion is much stronger among Republicans than Democrats and that Republicans are more likely to rate the law unfavorably than Democrats are to rate it favorably.

6. If it’s health care, people assume it’s Obamacare.

So what’s the mystery factor? The best guess is that people are holding the law responsible for all of the problems of the health care system — including those like rising deductibles, narrowing hospital networks, or even long waits at the doctor’s office that most experts believe have little or nothing to do with the law itself.

Maybe the single best example of this is the reaction to rising costs that polls have detected, especially among those largely unaffected by the changes to insurance mandated by the ACA. In the March Kaiser tracking survey, just over a third of Americans with employer-sponsored insurance reported that the new law had “directly hurt” (24 percent) their families. Why? On a follow-up question, most respondents — including 30 percent of all Republicans, 15 percent of independents and 6 percent of Democrats — said it was because the law “increased your health care or health insurance costs.”

But insurance premiums go up every year. That was true before the ACA became law and it remains true after. And since the law’s enactment they’ve actually risen more slowly than before. The historically low inflation is actually one of the most remarkable developments in health care today. And while economists debate over what role, if any, the health care law has played in this progress, there’s no compelling evidence that the law has made employer insurance premiums — the premiums most people see — rise more quickly.

Similarly, out-of-pocket costs really are rising and they are rising more quickly than wages, which is a big reason why people feel their impact. The law’s critics frequently complain about rising deductibles, as if the law were responsible for them — citing, among other things, a recent Commonwealth Fund report on the increases in out-of-pocket costs for consumers.

But as Sara Collins, a vice-president of the Fund and co-author of that study, told HuffPost, “the trend in higher deductibles began well before the Affordable Care Act... the trend is entirely separate from the Affordable Care Act.” In fact, for people buying coverage on their own, the law sets limits on out-of-pocket expenses that insurers can charge — something that many plans lacked before.

In retrospect, it’s not surprising that so many people assume the Affordable Care Act is to blame (or, in some cases, to thank) for the changes they are seeing. By enacting such sweeping legislation, Obama and his allies tied their law to everything that happens in health care — good and bad and in between. And by largely avoiding changes that affect most Americans, they gave most people little reason to doubt the cues they get from the news and their partisan leaders.

Most people don’t have the time to think through historical counterfactuals — to imagine what life would be like if the law had never passed, its protections did not exist and health care costs were rising as quickly as they did previously. In much the same way, few people stop to think what might happen if they got really sick and needed insurance to cover potentially catastrophic bills. Even people who care about security tend to undervalue it, until crisis actually strikes.

Obama and his supporters like to say the law is working — that it is helping way more people than it is hurting and that the benefits justify the costs. They have plenty of evidence to cite in their defense. That doesn’t mean the public will believe them.

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