Not sure where you're getting that I'm mad at you or that the ACA was "designed to protect you and me", but whatevs.
I see I'm gonna have to spend some time educating you a bit on insurance, insurance companies, and why hospital costs are so high in the first place. Let's start with what insurance in the market is and is not.
Insurance is when a group of people pool resources together (i.e. money) to cover expenses for catastrophic events. The fact that most people are so greedy that they can't trust one another to do this is not the fault of anyone but themselves. What insurance is not is a middleman that everyone must have in order pay their medical bills. Having been poor all my life myself, my family and our friends, who were also poor, created our own insurance pools to help each other and ourselves. On more than one occasion, people in the pool tried to run away with the money.
It took this lesson for us to realize the importance of insurance companies because they are legal entities that can't run away with your money. But they don't cover everything, which makes sense. We learned this lesson also when more than 3 people in our original pool had to go to the hospital. Insurance companies will only cover a limit range of problems because it is mathematically impossible to stay financially viable while paying out money for every sickness under the sun. They don't just slap a random rate and say pay it because that's how much money we want. The rates are determined by what percentage of people get certain injuries on what jobs of which gender at what age etc., basically a cross indexed table of multiple variables that determine on average what percentage of people get what health problems aka the risk pool. Then that's factored in with how much it costs to be treated for what problems via how much hospitals charge on average for services by state, then you include fees/costs associated with running a company, see how big the pool is, look at what a specific customer wants in their plan and the fees/costs associated with it, and voila you have your rate. That is a far, far better way of calculating how to pay out the money because in my original pool there were multiple people who were injured more frequently for whatever reason (usually doing stupid crap like getting drunk) and ended up using over 500% of the money they put in, and it was very unfair that the rest of us who didn't get injured by living boring lives and staying safe to use less than 5% of the money we had put in. Our options were to grow the pool and introduce more risk of people trying to run with the money, or make an LLC insurance company, or just give back the money to buy an existing insurance plan from an existing company. We tried to make an LLC but gave up pretty quick on discovering the associated legal fees and documents. But we couldn't afford it because the rates were so high. Why were they so high? Because hospitals charge huge sums of money for services.
Why are hospitals so expensive? Basically 4 factors: doctors and staff, drugs, frivolous lawsuits, and, as you said, the ER. There're a lot more factors but I listed those because they were immediately identifiable. I won't get into the first 2 because that would take too long. Suffice to say there's a shortage of doctors for some obvious reasons (education) and some not so obvious reasons (American Medical Association) and big pharma and frivolous lawsuits are entire threads of their own. Here's the lowdown on the ER bankrupting hospitals. That only happens in densely populated areas. And the ACA isn't going to fix having to pay $50 for an Advil in the hospital. All it'll do is have the tax payer pay for it instead of you yourself. Here's the kicker: you're the tax payer. And if you're okay with hospitals charging $50 for Advil then not sure why you're complaining. On the other hand, if you really wanted this problem addressed then let's address it instead of believing this bullock that the ACA somehow fixed this god awful situation. Also, to reduce the hospital costs you would have to fix at least the other 3 problems I listed, so the short and long of it is the ACA isn't helping with hospital costs and instead of paying the bill directly, you are now paying it through taxes minus whatever the bureaucracy is taking for themselves.
Everyone wanted health care reform, and one way of doing that was to have reform that would incentive more people to become doctors. That way hospitals could lower costs and be more localized at the same time. And obviously you haven't read the legislation because it won't be affordable within the next 10 years with the projected costs. Here's how you lower personal health costs: live healthy i.e. eat right, exercise, sleep well, have a healthy mind and healthy heart. If more people did that, less people go to the hospital and ER costs would go down. There's a lot more I could say about this but I get the feeling it wouldn't do any good and I'd probably get more nods in agreement than seriously change anyone's mind. I would simply encourage you to stop following talking points, think for yourself, and actually do your own research. And no, reading news articles and press releases is not research. You're talking about the intersection of health and economics and I seriously doubt you have a grasp of the ladder.
sources: I used to sell health and life insurance
