Politicians talked for years about getting universal healthcare to become a reality in the United States before Obamacare was eventually passed.
It’s not perfect and many people are seeing health insurance premiums rise sharply, but these are also people who are insured for the first time in their adult lives.
Now you have an administration that acknowledges that the current healthcare system is broken, but they don’t really have any good ideas on how to fix or replace it.
All they know is that graduates of doctor or nurse practitioner programs should be prepared to deal with all of the changes expected to come swiftly.
The long and short if it is that medical professionals are sick and tired of the sharp changes that have been made to healthcare insurance and they no longer know what to tell their patients.
Why Isn’t Healthcare in the US Really Affordable?
In order to buy healthcare, you either need to purchase one of the policies offered by your employer or you can find an open insurance marketplace that provides you with quotes based on what you need.
Most people in the U.S. who are gainfully employed either purchase their employer-sponsored healthcare plans or go without and pay a tax penalty.
So, either way, they pay whether they are insured or not. Then you have small business owners and independent contractors who only have the insurance marketplaces available to them, often the plans with the lowest quotes.
Why Are Premiums Rising When Incomes Are Flat?
Historically, income levels in the US are flat and not sufficient for most people to pay for housing and food without issue, let alone afford healthcare costs.
Strangely enough, you can still expect your health insurance policy to rise annually, sometimes by hundreds of dollars.
The reason that healthcare insurance costs are going up is that policyholders don’t really have any other ways to get better quotes.
Students going to school for a BSN to DNP online may have access to student health insurance or even Medicare, at least until graduation. However, working families either pay a higher rate or risk living without medical insurance.
How Is Repealing Obamacare Expected to Pan Out?
President Trump really wants to repeal Obamacare, but his plan would just make things more complicated and expensive than they already are.
People who have never wanted for anything don’t understand the plight of the generationally poor. Giving low-income families vouchers that will essentially be worthless by the time they want to cash them in will make it so that health insurance companies can preclude people with pre-existing conditions from getting coverage again.
Repealing Obamacare under this administration would truly be a disaster.
Either make healthcare free for the poor, sick, and indigent or be honest that a single-payer system isn’t going to work in the US. Right now, the government wants to have it both ways.
In the meantime, people are still going into debt because they have to pay for necessary medicines and medical procedures.
