USA Without ACA

What the American healthcare situation would be without Obama care

The way Republican politicians talk about ACA you'd have thought it was a bill that allowed the federal government to loot churches. It is both an attack on America's freedom and a robbery of their hard earned cash in the eyes of the GOP.

Republican congressman Steve King stated “American freedom and liberty have taken a hard blow today.”

Paul LePage said "You must buy health insurance or pay the new Gestapo"

The false outrage over a minor regulation on a completely broken healthcare market was summed up by Jonathan Gruber, an expert in healthcare from MIT "They're the same fucking bill, Romney can't have his cake and eat it to". Referring to the differences between Obamacare and Romneycare. Showing how Conservative a bill ACA is.

Whilst I don't support ACA, it's the metaphorical equivalent of putting some duck tape on a leaking nuclear reactor, it is interesting to look at what the American healthcare market would look like if it had never passed into law. To truly learn if repealing ACA is a wise idea.

Uninsured population

Here’s a graph of the percentage of Americans without any form of health insurance. We can see the drop due to ACA very clearly in the later years.

Despite the slight lag in those getting insurance since it being signed into law we can see that ACA has helped to reduce the percentage of those without access to health insurance by approximately 5%. The law has allowed 16 million Americans to get health insurance. An America without ACA has more uninsured Americans, and more deaths caused by that.

Healthcare costs

The main complaint from Republicans about ACA is it made prices rocket. A bald lie that somehow the American people decided to believe. Here's the data for Health expenditure per capita.

And We can see that healthcare expenditure has been rising for a long long time. ACA has made no significance difference to that rise. If anything it has slowed the rise in healthcare costs. It’s simply been a scapegoat to blame for the failing healthcare market.

With this data we can deduce that the average healthcare costs without ACA would be the same as they are now.

We can clearly see that ACA has not dramatically increased prices, and the GOP have been lying to the American population. The worst part is the American people swallowed it hook line and sinker.

To conclude if ACA had never been implemented healthcare costs would remain the same as they are today but the uninsured rate would go up by 16 million. A fact that Republicans need reminding of.

Its not perfect, it’s not even any good but despite this ACA still dramatically improved the healthcare system in America.

Additionally if you want to understand the true outrage over ACA you only need to look at another graph. This one.

This is a graph of Private healthcare spending as a proportion of America's GDP. This line would have a very strong correlation to a graph labelled, Big Pharma profits. That flat line that ACA has caused needs to rise again in their opinion. So they bought the GOP to make their profits rise again.

Pure simple corruption.

#Healthcare #AmericanPolitics