What are the main pros of Obamacare?

The main pro is that more people will have access to affordable healthcare coverage and thus will get covered, thereby reducing the charity care and other burdens created by under- or uninsured persons.

The Affordable Care Act is not going to fix all the problems in our healthcare system. I don’t think anyone ever claimed that it would… but we have to start somewhere.

Of the little good points I’ve heard about it the main or only one is that everyone will now receive healthcare. I’ve also heard people who work forty hours per week will be told those hours will be cut in half. We’ll see.

Not having your insurance cancelled because you got seriously ill after years of paying for it and never drawing a cent. Not being excluded for having a preexisting condition. No lifetime caps. No cost penalty for being a female. Young people being able to stay on their parents policies till they are 26 and have had a chance to establish themselves in the workplace. Cost controls. Tax credits to small businesses that elect to ensure their employees. Exchanges where lots of people pool together to buy insurance at rates that were once only available to large corporations and organizations insuring hundreds of thousands of people.

It’s far from perfect. We as a nation are insane to not go single payer. But compared to what we did have, with exponentially spiraling costs and massive abuses by insurers because they could, and it was more profitable to cheat than play fair; the Affordable Care Act is a dream.

That’s what has Republicans so terrified. This was originally their idea. But when a black guy named Obama adopted it, it became a sky-is-falling worst-thing-in-the-world hobgoblin. They went into high gear lying about it, making up crap like death panels, etc. And if it goes into effect, everybody is going to see that all the Republican propaganda about it was a pack of lies. They will see the little greedy man behind the curtain instead of the Great and Powerful Oz.

Not being denied insurance for a preexisting condition. Seems the price will be right also. Less stress on emergency rooms.

I am automatically covered for care and medication as I am enrolled with the VA, but some people I know have had to choose between medical care and life’s other essentials because of the high cost of said care.

I’m reserving my opinion until November when the details are covered by my employer.

I’m a Republican and if the thing works, I’m satisfied.

Everybody (except Congress, of course) has to buy in. Everybody has skin in the game.

Anyone with their own business is pretty exciting about ObamaCare. It’s hell trying to get decent coverage on your own. Even the people I know with money cannot find decent coverage. They are paying the same premiums they used to pay when in corporate America, but getting nothing for their money. If you have pre-existing condition, then forget it. My husband is self-employed and has a pre-existing condition. When I got laid-off and was considering independent contracting, part of my plan was getting a part-time job at Starbucks so that we could get healthcare. How messed up is that?

The big shortcoming for US healthcare, as I see it, is the Medicaid expansion that the government has offered the states. The government has offered to pay 100% of the costs for 10 years. Texas, along with several other states, has refused this offer and has decided to go it alone with state funds. Texas has the largest number of uninsured folks in the United States. Texas taxpayers will be paying for these patients’s emergency care. No preventative care will be available. Very little prenatal care is allowed by the Texas legislature. It all seems rather grim.

@josie, congress is in the same boat as every other person who gets insurance from their employer. You just have to have insurance. You don’t have to buy it from the exchange if you get it elsewhere.
@Gabby101, we have a very small group policy and provide insurance for our employees. It looks like we are going to save $400 a month on my policy (husband and I) alone, not to mention the employees. That’s if we pay under the individual marketplace. I haven’t seen the prices on the small business exchange yet.

@hsrch 16 Republican run states have refused to accept Federal funds to cover their uninsured poor. Kind of tells you where the GOP’s heart is.

It is a first step toward a single-payer system; hopefully one similar to the one the advanced Canadian race to the north of us have.

The bottom line is the system we have now is not viable for the long term, especially once the boomers start really needing health care. This is the first step in a successive aproximation towards better health care system in this country.
@Neodarwinian there’s some buzz in the emergency medicine community that more people may use the ER because they are insured but we haven’t scaled up the availability of primary care doctors, so they will come to us once they cannot get timely appointments for their problems.

@drhat77 I can see that as a legitimate concern AND it is something directly related to health care that can and should be addressed. This has been my biggest complaint with the so-called health reform, it provides a giant welfare check to heath INSURANCE companies, under the assumption that if everyone has insurance then there will be no more problems, and does very little to take care of problems like the one you just pointed out.

That preexisting conditions will go completely away supposedly in Jan 2014.

Now if only major medical wasn’t conditionally approved. But it is a start.

People not ending up in a graveyard prematurely.

Advantage No 2: people who used to think highly of themselves due to expendable income will become humble when they find out how high the premiums will be as they apply for foodstamps.
Humility is a good thing!

@Aster That’s nonsense. We’ve had Romneycare here in Massachusetts now for 7 years. If that was what it caused, we would have noticed by now. It brought insurance costs way down and let us cover the largest percentage of our citizens of any state. Predictably, the states with the most uninsured are all Red states fighting to make sure things get even worse.

Almost nobody is signing up. They showed three Washinton speakers being badgered by reporters about how many people have signed up and none of the three would answer. They wouldn’t say it was going well, or that it is popular or even give a ballpark figure. You, @ETpro , will eventually find out that the premiums are unaffordable by the middle and lower classes. Then, as in a socialist society, the fines for not signing up will begin. It will be a horrible mess and things will get worse. Yes; things are tense in Obamaville .

@Aster That’s a Charles Krauthammer outrageous lie. The exchanges went online on October 1. On the 8th, 7 days later, paid Republican propagandist Krauthammer announced that according to a secret source, only 100 people has signed up in 2 weeks. The exchanges has been open only 1 week. That ought to be a clue he was pulling this crap out of his clogged butt.

The websites have occasionally crashed because the demand has been so great. The idea that in a nation with 330 million people, only 100 would sign up in 2 weeks for ANYTHING NEW should be a clue you’re reading propaganda. But when confirmation bias is strong, lies are better than common sense facts because they say what you want to believe. Have fun with your ridiculous worldview. I do enjoy reading your ravings.

The website is clogged up because people assume Obamacare will be either free or affordable plus it also has glitches. The glitches should be fixed but the premiums won’t be. Thus , the middle class will find themselves working part time instead of full time, and physicians are quitting their jobs. In fact, my daughter is very close friends with a , what are they called? Heart surgeon. HIs wife told my daughter that he is or will be making so much less money only because of Obamacare that they’ve divorced very recently. I think the cut in his pay was only part of the reason for the divorce but I don’t know any more details.

@Aster In this article investigative journalist Ezra Klein explains how measuring actual completed enrollments is tricky, because it is a multi-step process and you have to wait for one to be finished before taking the next. But 175,000 people have created accounts on the state marketplaces in the past week. And coverage doesn’t go into effect till January 2014. The premiums are lower. You need to step out of that right-wing echo chamber, because what you hear there will almost always be false and intended to fleece you.