kind of weird to see the “ACA is useless” bs pop up again in 2024. it’s not great but like. y’all remember how much birth control pills cost pre-ACA???????????
I am reminded of the dystopian past when I read through pet insurance policies and go “is that even legal???” pets aren’t human which means they get treated like people did prior to obamacare
anyways just in case you were too young or have no friends with uteruses:
I was paying FORTY DOLLARS A MONTH for THE CHEAPEST FORM OF GENERIC HORMONAL BC while covered by GOOD university healthcare.
After ACA this dropped to 10 / under 10 depending on coverage.
actually now that I think about it, I was definitely paying 0 under my school plan?? like really wild to go from a fixed cost of nearly 500 a year for a basic necessity to 0.
Good friend was a Libertarian whined about this regularly in particular bcs HIS previous disaster plan didn't force him to pay for pregnancy. Had a stroke at 35. Good thing he had ACA and was able to upgrade his plan when the new year came around.
JFC. I'd forgotten about how people whined about having to pay for other people's pregnancies, as if the entire insurance market isn't about paying for other people's medical care.
and if they're at college they could still get catastrophic plans that are real cheap - also all the subsidies - also Obamacare means they can stay on their parents' plans till they're 26!
dummies
and for individual plans /some group plans, it wasn’t covered for 6-12 months after enrollment, although iirc the newborn was covered at birth even in that window (they could not easily be excluded for preexisting conditions.)
The ACA is an annoying kludge of half measures but it is a million times better than the current alternative, which is probably forced donation of your kidney to the Musk family now that insurance companies have realized that no one will punish them for evil.
This is where I remind everyone that large swathes of the GOP want to outright ban contraception in general, and hormonal birth control specifically, because they falsely call them "abortifacents".
Trump is on board with this.
I'm surprised, because it was ~$10/mo or less at Walmart/Walgreens/CVS back during the Trump Administration when Hobby Lobby was whining that they didn't want to have to pay for birth control.
The pre-existing conditions thing in and of itself is such a moral outrage that I often encounter people who were not yet politically conscious who simply don’t believe it was real
The ACA saved my life. My company changed insurance provider partway through my cancer therapy, when my cancer had become refractory and the next phase was CAR T-cell therapy or autologous stem cell transplant. Pre-existing condition + hugely expensive therapy. Instead, I got CAR T-cell therapy.
This is part of what’s so hard about policy change - the things conservative interests want to perpetuate or enact are often so heinous that people don’t believe they could possibly be real
You'd mention some minor medical annoyance to a friend and they'd say "Woah don't talk to a doctor about that, you don't want to get diagnosed with a pre-existing condition"
My friend Mark had his coverage rescinded after he was diagnosed with ocular cancer and billed for a million dollars because he failed to note on his insurance application that he had broken his arm when he was 13. He died. They came after his family for the money. Go fund me wasn’t a thing yet.
Oh yeah. I had a major insurance company fight payment on a stomach ulcer for more than a year because they were trying to link it to an ankle I sprained five years earlier.
As someone who's been a freelancer long enough to remember trying to get individual health insurance in the 1990s, those people can absolutely fuck off.
When I was pregnant maternity riders were still a thing
You know, where you have to pay premiums for a full year *before* they will cover pregnancy and delivery
The way my concern over whether men can get laid or have functioning dicks decreases year by year to the point it's negative? I remember a poll in which the majority of hetcismen said they didn't benefit from their partners having access to birth control.
Yuuuup. Welcome to Tennessee, where we're closing all our rural hospitals because our Republican legislature refuses to accept federal money over a decade later. Oh, and no abortions. We even wrote in the law that even suicidality isnt a good enough reason.
