Everyone knows by now, how much the US healthcare system sucks and tries to funnel money from people’s pockets at every chance.
How do you think this will play out in the upcoming years? Is there anything the common person can do to end this ridiculous system? Do we even have the power to change anything by asking for it in numbers?
If Trump wins, expect it to be much, much worse. The ACA/Obamacare guarantees that certain things must be covered, that you can’t be denied covered based on pre-existing conditions, and that you can’t be charged more due to age, gender, etc. It also gives subsidies to people that are buying their own covered on the marketplace, which was set up by the federal gov’t.
Under Trump, expect all of that to be tossed out. If Trump wins, it’s highly likely that Republicans with flip the Senate, and retain control of the House, which means Republicans will have all three branches of the federal government captured, and there will be no brakes to repealing the ACA and going back to the old, much shittier system.
If Harris wins, don’t expect to see many changes. If she wins, it’s unlikely that Democrats would also have control of both the House and Senate. While it’s true that she was in favor of a single-payer system five years ago, it’s unlikely that she would be able to get that through the House and Senate unless they were both controlled by a Democratic majority. (In the case of the Senate, they would need to nuke the filibuster, which–IMO–is not a good idea in the long run).
There is some room for hope. The GOP gained exactly that position in 2016 after the entire party ran on promises of repealing the ACA. They promptly became gridlocked by infighting and accomplished nothing for more than a year. They eventually gave up and instead passed a big tax cut to try and save face with their base. As much as Republicans love to rail against the ACA, many parts of it are very popular with their base and the party has never had a coherent plan for what to put in its place.
Let’s take politics out of the discussion since it is clear that even after years neither party did anything remarkable about fixing the broken healthcare system. I believe the people need to take these matters in their hands, otherwise nothing will change. So what do you as a person living in the US think that we can do to fix/improve the situtation?
How exactly would people take these matters into their own hands?
That is the question I’m asking. Sure we can blame person X, but nobody who can be put in the place of X cares about the problem. So what can we do to at least get this boat going? I want to brainstorm so that we can actually get shit done instead of waiting for the “leaders” to do it for us.
Since the ACA was passed, Democrats have not held all three branches of the gov’t. (In fact, Mitch McConnell refused to take up Obama’s nomination of a SCOTUS justice because he thought that eight months was too close to the election. Or, that was his claim.) They haven’t had any opportunities to make significant reforms to the ACA–or pass something better–because they haven’t had the power to do so. Republicans came close to overturning it, but blew their chances in 2018. So, to be more accurate, the party that wants to fix healthcare has not had the political ability to do so.
Short of a political change, there is no way to change the system.
As a regular person living in the US, I think you’d be delusional to think that you can do anything about it.
We HAVE to bring politics into it, because IT IS politics.