5. We gave an ongoing river of cash to private health
insurance companies. Millions more are now forced to buy their crappy
product, with the premiums funded by billion annually in public
subsidies.
Health insurance executives got massive salary increases since the
passage of the Affordable Care Act. Existing insurance company
shareholders saw profits and stock prices spike, first with the passage
of the ACA, then with the onset of open enrollment. Anticipated
ballooning profits have led health insurance companies to buy back as
much of their own stock as possible. What else would you expect? Health
insurance company lobbyists wrote the ACA.
While the ACA pads the pockets of insurance company executives and
keeps employed an army of advertisers, marketers and bureaucrats,
single payer would have created a quarter million new good paying jobs
delivering actual health care to people, according to the National
Nurses Union.
6. The ACA gives us little or no cost control over medical
care and even bans most measures that would lower the cost of
prescription drugs.
With the substandard policies the most families will be able to
afford, skimpy coverage, high co-pays and deductibles will continue to
threaten hundreds of thousands annually with bankruptcy due to unpayable
medical bills.
The US is one of the few places in the developed world in which a
family can lose its home, and its children their college educations
because of unpayable medical bills. We could have changed that. But we
didn't.
-- Bruce Dixon, "Obamacare VS Single Payer – Top 10 Things the ACA Gave Us VS the Top 10 We Gave Up" (Black Agenda Report).