'A full-blown crisis': Americans brace for a surge in healthcare costs • Hacker News Board

Re: 'A full-blown crisis': Americans brace for a surge in healthcare costs

#41

Post by ponooqjoqo » Mon, Dec 01, 2025, 5:31 AM UTC

p0w3n3d wrote: post #37

duxup wrote: post #3

>Allen is herself a casualty. While she used to pay $487.50 a month, her new healthcare plan, with reduced coverage, has monthly premiums of $1,967.50. Brutal. Meanwhile the White House calls it all "fake news".

Guy from Poland here. What happened to ObamaCare? I thought you got finally a primary healthcare for all?

ObamaCare (actually the Affordable Care Act: ACA) is a band-aid solution. It's a way to at least ensure that everyone has a pathway to insurance if they have enough money. Basically, the government negotiates some plans with private insurers and makes them available to the general population.

It's subsidized, but the new budget has drastically decreased these subsidies and so the cost to enroll in the ACA is about to go up for people who want to get insurance through their marketplace.

Re: 'A full-blown crisis': Americans brace for a surge in healthcare costs

#42

Post by runako » Mon, Dec 01, 2025, 5:31 AM UTC

p0w3n3d wrote: post #37

duxup wrote: post #3

>Allen is herself a casualty. While she used to pay $487.50 a month, her new healthcare plan, with reduced coverage, has monthly premiums of $1,967.50. Brutal. Meanwhile the White House calls it all "fake news".

Guy from Poland here. What happened to ObamaCare? I thought you got finally a primary healthcare for all?

Quick summary: the US does not have anything approaching a modern healthcare system. (And likely will not for quite some time due to a set of structural factors.)

Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act or ACA) was an attempt to expand coverage and slow the rate of increase of costs. It did the former but less well with the latter.

One other thing the ACA did is stop the scourge of scam insurers. This is a thing where people would pay for "insurance" and then find out later that their "insurance" did not actually afford them any meaningful coverage. The ACA tried to close a set of loopholes and overall regulate the insurance market more closely.

Anybody reading this from outside the US probably lives in a place where low-cost healthcare is more accessible than it is in the US.

Re: 'A full-blown crisis': Americans brace for a surge in healthcare costs

#43

Post by dogemaster2028 » Mon, Dec 01, 2025, 5:32 AM UTC

p0w3n3d wrote: post #37

duxup wrote: post #3

>Allen is herself a casualty. While she used to pay $487.50 a month, her new healthcare plan, with reduced coverage, has monthly premiums of $1,967.50. Brutal. Meanwhile the White House calls it all "fake news".

Guy from Poland here. What happened to ObamaCare? I thought you got finally a primary healthcare for all?

Obamacare failed at reducing costs. It mostly focused on insurance expansion and in consumer protections, not on dealing with hospital, drug, and provider pricing structures that actually drive the spending in the US healthcare system.

Re: 'A full-blown crisis': Americans brace for a surge in healthcare costs

#44

Post by ChicagoDave » Mon, Dec 01, 2025, 5:32 AM UTC

almosthere wrote: post #18

pxmpxm wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always cost ~$2k a month, the only difference is the previous administration thought everyone else should be "temporarily" paying for her plan. I feel like we need a perpetual PSA here that moving money from person A to person B obviously doesn't make anything cheaper.

when the gov foots the bill, there's no reason to have competition.

Before 1985, there was no for-profit healthcare. Worked pretty good.

Re: 'A full-blown crisis': Americans brace for a surge in healthcare costs

#45

Post by teaearlgraycold » Mon, Dec 01, 2025, 5:32 AM UTC

p0w3n3d wrote: post #37

duxup wrote: post #3

>Allen is herself a casualty. While she used to pay $487.50 a month, her new healthcare plan, with reduced coverage, has monthly premiums of $1,967.50. Brutal. Meanwhile the White House calls it all "fake news".

Guy from Poland here. What happened to ObamaCare? I thought you got finally a primary healthcare for all?

They stripped it of most meaningful changes to get it passed. What it ended up being was kind of the worst of both worlds. A federally related marketplace for private healthcare insurance. They did however ban coverage limits on “pre-existing conditions”. Before Obamacare an insurer could whine that you had cancer before signing up and refuse to cover your cancer care.

Re: 'A full-blown crisis': Americans brace for a surge in healthcare costs

#46

Post by pxmpxm » Mon, Dec 01, 2025, 5:32 AM UTC

mbrubeck wrote: post #32

pxmpxm wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bronze plans with $5-6k deductibles have always ran more than what people paid for rent. Healthcare is the one thing that's outpaced inflation in higher education.

So first you say it has always cost this much, but in the next breath you say that its cost has outpaced a high rate of inflation. Mathematically, these can't both be true.

A) Inflation in healthcare costs is well documented and unrivaled

B) Biden papered over A) with "temporary" covid subsidies in 2021 and those are going away, revealing A) again

Re: 'A full-blown crisis': Americans brace for a surge in healthcare costs

#47

Post by choeger » Mon, Dec 01, 2025, 5:33 AM UTC

Where does all that money go to, though?

Is there a rich caste of doctors or pharmaceutical shareholders that don't need to work and live off these dividends? Or is the system so inefficient that most people in it aren't contributing to actual health care?

Re: 'A full-blown crisis': Americans brace for a surge in healthcare costs

#48

Post by zdragnar » Mon, Dec 01, 2025, 5:33 AM UTC

Avicebron wrote: post #9

geerlingguy wrote: post #5

I was paying around $1200/month last year (a little under that with subsidy). This year I'm paying $2100/month for a family of five, on a roughly equivalent plan. Except, none of the options in my state allow me to visit the PCP I switched to this year (since none of the plans last year covered my PCP from the year before). So I guess I'm on a primary care physician merry go round :D I am at least able to have my mai…

Excuse me, but how in the world were you able to afford 1200/month, you know that's like cheap rent right?

If you're getting health insurance through your employer, that's a pretty standard price (counting both your contribution and your employer's together).

I'm probably going to be self employed for 2026 and a cheap-ish (not the cheapest, but probably below the average) plan for my family is going to be a little under $1500 / month.

It's pre-tax money, which helps a wee bit, but it is definitely expensive. If I made less money, I'd qualify for subsidies, but I don't, so that's just something that needs to be paid in full unfortunately.

Re: 'A full-blown crisis': Americans brace for a surge in healthcare costs

#49

Post by czhu12 » Mon, Dec 01, 2025, 5:33 AM UTC

One thing that I’ve been trying to understand about this discourse:

Is the sum of the increase in costs some people are now paying greater than the subsidies that previously existed?

In other words: was there always a massive bill to be paid here, but it was just previously socialized and hidden in the form of taxes/ public debt? Or does the act of subsidizing it actually decrease the total?

Re: 'A full-blown crisis': Americans brace for a surge in healthcare costs

#50

Post by dogemaster2028 » Mon, Dec 01, 2025, 5:33 AM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #15

pxmpxm wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always cost ~$2k a month, the only difference is the previous administration thought everyone else should be "temporarily" paying for her plan. I feel like we need a perpetual PSA here that moving money from person A to person B obviously doesn't make anything cheaper.

> the previous administration thought everyone should be "temporarily" paying for her plan. Moving money from person A to person B obviously doesn't make anything cheaper No, but it means I can't pay for a first-class ticket while someone else survives. I'll take that deal.

Why is buying first class tickets bad?